After the report that James Baisden announced his intention to step down and retire on June 1st as Kenai Peninsula Borough Mayor Charlie Pierce’s Chief of Staff, a search was conducted to find his replacement.
Pierce announced Aaron Rhoades as his new chief of staff:
“Aaron Rhoades has joined the Borough and Aaron and I have previously worked in our both prior careers with Enstar Natural Gas and Aaron was the former HR Director at one time in the history of Enstar and I was a division manager on the Peninsula. He and I conducted a considerable amount of work together. We always got along and seemed to work real well professionally. You don’t know how things like this are going to happen. It wasn’t like we both sought out each other. It just kind of happened. I told folks that I was going to be careful and methodical about working on a replacement for James. James was a great guy. James has got the personality that can solve problems on anything he tries to do and I have the utmost respect for him. I was sorry to see him choose to retire but, nevertheless, folks do that. I wanted to be careful. I wanted to make sure that we had somebody in here that was going to be mindful of the most important asks that the borough has and that’s the employees that work here. I think Aaron is going to fit that role real well.”
When asked what Pierce is currently working on, he said he’s hoping to create a Chief of the Chiefs position:
“You know, we’ve got a large borough. We’ve got emergency services and service areas spread amongst a very, very large geographical area and we tend to work independent of each other. Although, we do that very, very well, I think we can do better if we work more in line with each other, collaboratively. I’m not trying to sever the priorities or the responsibilities of the service area, but I think in the emergency services area, there’s a lot of dynamics with that, there’s a lot of moving parts. What I would say is what you spend to run those facilities is consistently going up, I want to add an additional individual there to take on that role. Of course, that’s a decision that I have to get funded through the assembly.”
Pierce plans on introducing his new chief of staff to the Kenai Peninsula Borough at the regularly scheduled Tuesday evening Assembly meeting.