City leader leaves after 16 years of service

Pam Kennedy Carbonari’s folks taught her something years ago during her Midwestern upbringing, and it sticks today.

“You don’t have the right to complain about things,” they told her, “unless you get involved with the change.”

So when she found herself in Kalispell complaining about the potholed streets in the 1980s, she knew what she had to do.

She ran for City Council and devoted the next two decades of her life to public service — eight years beginning in 1990 as a council member, a four-year hiatus, then another eight years as Kalispell mayor.

She hands over the gavel to Mayor-elect Tammi Fisher at the Jan. 4, 2010, council meeting, closing out her council service but certainly not her community involvement.

On Nov. 21, just three weeks after losing the mayoral election, Pam Kennedy married Joe Carbonari and plunged into one of the happiest phases of her life.

Eighteen days later, she lost her 84-year-old father and headed into what could have been one of her most painful Christmases.

But Pam Carbonari, long attuned to the ebb and flow of life as she helped lead Kalispell in the role of Mayor Kennedy, knows that all will cycle back in due time.

“That was the ebb,” she said, looking back on the mid- to late-1990s.

She and her first colleagues on the City Council had just worked through the transition to a city manager form of government in the early 1990s. Kalispell had been growing and the council of the late 1980s had seen the need for professional leadership.

“I felt I could offer help and I wanted to get involved in the community,” Carbonari said, “so I ran for council.”

They took on potholes through a five-year plan to overlay every street in the city, and stayed on top of the problem in following years. They tackled other issues with a cooperative attitude.

“In those first four years we had a tremendous group of individuals extremely dedicated to working together,” she recalled. Those years “were really a time of lessons,” as the council learned the symbiotic functions between its role and the city manager’s.

Bruce Williams, Kalispell’s inaugural city manager, was a great help in that education, she said. It worked beautifully for much of the 1990s.

But eventually he moved on, taking a job in Arizona. The council changed at that time, Carbonari said. A new election brought in different opinions. In general, those new members were not big fans of the city manager government. The honeymoon was over, the ebb was under way.

“Which is a good thing,” she quickly added, “because it helps solidify the community.”

But that community had been growing. It was starting to change.

Council members knew they had something precious in their sense of community, so they brainstormed on ways to hold it tightly. They initiated the Picnic in the Park summer concert series to bring the town together old-style, and parks staff ran with it. They encouraged Glacier Park International Airport to add new air service, particularly bringing in flights to and from Canada for its economic tourism boost.

And they broadened their definition of community.

“During that time what was important is we all learned that Kalispell was a piece of the Flathead Valley,” Carbonari said, “and we’re all a community.”

In speeches to conventions and visitor meetings, she would focus on Kalispell as the heart of the Flathead but sing the praises of Flathead Lake at its southern border, Big Mountain Resort on its north side, the Gateway to Glacier on the northeast.

People are neighborly in a healthy community, they respect and talk with each other.

“When I ran for mayor I felt that was being lost,” she said. Contentiousness was taking over the City Council.

“They were not respectful of each other and the staff,” she recalled. “There were too many wedges being pushed in. We were losing our sense of community, of the whole Flathead Valley — Whitefish, Kalispell, Columbia Falls.”

An immediate challenge she faced in her first years as mayor was the county commissioners’ decision to pull out of the cooperative planning efforts that had linked Kalispell, Columbia Falls and Whitefish for several years. What had been a nearly seamless growth-planning vision across the valley dissolved.

“How do we continue to share information, to make it appear that we all have information on our community even though we’re not sharing planning?” Carbonari said. Developers who may have been better suited to a Flathead city different from the one they initially had in mind suddenly had to restart the process with a new set of rules.

“That was a loss,” Carbonari said. “We lost our ability to keep our communication.”

The result: Flathead on the Move. A group of 100 or more business leaders joined into work groups to hammer out communication, to define what needed to be done to stitch the community back together. They came up with the idea of forming high school curriculum into career clusters that feed into local work-force needs and higher-education goals. They tackled transportation needs.

But mostly, Carbonari said, they re-established respectful communication.

During her eight years as mayor, from 2001 through 2007, the city saw phenomenal business gains and more population growth than it had seen in the previous 30 years prior.

But today, with 10 percent unemployment, the cycle has cranked around another turn.

It’s devastating, she said, and will take time to pull itself up again — but it will.

“I’ve had the distinct honor to see that cycling and to be involved in that process,” she said, “to represent and be involved with the citizens of Kalispell has been one of the greatest honors.”

She trusts that her efforts have helped create a city where her eight grandchildren and seven great-grandchildren someday will want to live, a place that will offer them a great quality of life.

She will continue to work through myriad community projects, such as the youth justice initiative, that she’s been involved with since coming to the Flathead from the Minneapolis area in August 1978.

“I’m a proven strong leader that cares about her community,” she said, “and I will maintain that involvement.”

She sees a couple of challenging years still ahead for the council and expects to see more candidates run for the four open seats that will be on the ballot in November 2011.

“We’ll see changes happen, we’ll see the council trying to recover from the economic downturn,” Carbonari predicted. “It’ll be hard because they will be tough decisions … There’s always going to be somebody who doesn’t like what you do. I think there will be unpopular choices over the next two years.”

Keeping the budget in line with revenue, fostering job creation and sustaining existing jobs will rise to the top of the city’s priority list, she said. Large employers such as TeleTech and Semitool need to “know they are welcome, wanted and desired,” she said.

Although “there are some real edgy times that will come forward,” she said, “building will come back around. So if impact fees are a stalling factor, then we’ve got to revisit them and maybe put them off a couple years. But we’ve got to be sure it’s part of the problem first, because we do have transportation issues” that will need money for solutions.

Department of Environmental Quality regulations, water quality issues on Flathead Lake and water-rights negotiations with surrounding tribes need to stay on the council’s radar, she said.

It all goes back to her protective attitude toward the Kalispell area.

“We are blessed with this community,” she said. “We’ve maintained that small-town atmosphere.” 

The best testimony is “in the face of all the growth we’ve had, we’ve maintained that sense of community,” Carbonari said. “I hope this new council will continue with that, will maintain that respectful communication.”

Reporter Nancy Kimball can be reached at 758-4483 or by e-mail at nkimball@dailyinterlake.com