Stafford Glashan Introduction
Contributed by Stafford Glashan
I’m grateful for this opportunity to introduce myself. My name is Stafford Glashan, and although I am usually a reserved and private person, I have decided to enter the race for District 6 Assembly to help guide the future of the incredible Mat-Su Valley that I have come to love. I first came to Alaska in the summer of 1994. My girlfriend, Francy, and I were in engineering school at Montana Tech, where we met the sister of one of the owners of the Swiss-Alaska Lodge in Talkeetna. She was going to Alaska for the summer and invited us to come along. We spent that summer exploring, fishing, hiking, and falling in love with Alaska. I worked at K2 Aviation and bartended at the TeePee Lodge. Talkeetna was a different place then; we lived in a green tent down by the river, Princess Lodge did not exist yet, and you could still drive your vehicle down Main Street in the summer.
Francy and I were married in the Don Sheldon Amphitheater on Mount Denali later that summer of 1994. At the end of that summer, we decided to return to Montana to finish our education even though our hearts were still in Alaska. A year and a half later we returned to Alaska with our degrees, our nine-month-old daughter, a broken-down suburban, and only dreams in our bank account. My cousin in Anchorage took us into his home as we searched for jobs and a place to live. I knocked on 27 doors before I got my first job interview, which has turned into a great engineering career with Shannon & Wilson.
It didn’t take long for us to decide that Anchorage was not for us. We wanted more of an outdoor lifestyle for our family, so we scrimped and saved for a year so that we could afford our first house off Wasilla Fishhook. As the years went on, and we experienced development around us, we decided to build a new house a bit further up the road in an attempt to regain some of the privacy and solitude that we had when we first moved to Wasilla. Our house on Grouse Ridge was great, less traffic, good access to Fishhook, trails to ride, and we enjoyed easy access to the shooting range. However, a few years later we couldn’t ride our snowmachines from our house to the Moose Range without riding alongside roads as all the old section line trails had been developed into roads for new housing.
Through this whole process, we raised our daughter in the MSB School District and saw firsthand the many growing pains that they were experiencing due to rapid growth in the Valley. The school system as a whole was great and one of the main reasons we wanted to raise our family in the MSB. We spent countless hours volunteering and fundraising to develop and maintain the great programs that our daughter participated in. During this period, I made the commute to Anchorage to maintain and grow my engineering career. As my career progressed, I was responsible for projects with multi-million-dollar budgets and eventually was in charge of the Anchorage office of Shannon & Wilson. I got to work on a lot of great projects across Alaska. My engineering experience included many projects in the MSB including several schools, multiple roads, water supply projects, wastewater projects, and many others including dozens of projects repairing the damage caused by the November 2018 earthquake.
Our daughter grew up to graduate from Colony high school and then from college at University of Alaska in Anchorage. In 2016, I stepped down from the management of the Anchorage office and have continued to work for Shannon & Wilson from an office in Palmer.
My experiences living in the Valley for more than 25 years and the changes I have seen motivated me to run for District 6 Assembly. For the past six years, I have been a member of the Planning Commission. During my service on the Planning Commission, I have heard from the residents of District 6, and the entire MSB, that while things were good, they could be better. I believe that I listened, helped shape code, and made decisions on conditional use permits that improved our quality of life in the Valley. The Valley has given my family so much that I felt that it was my duty to stand up and repay that debt. I am a good listener, a problem solver, and my only agenda is to make the Mat-Su the best it can be for all of us. Together, we can guide the future of the Mat-Su Valley, preserving this incredible place so that our children and generations to come will want to make it their home.