Contributed by Ruth Wood, Talkeetna
Talkeetna loves Tam! For many, Talkeetna is a destination for a beautiful Saturday or Sunday drive. For those of us who live here, it is a community, and a community that gets a lot of visitors - Alaskans, people from the Lower 48 and international travelers. The kind of visitation we get provides economic opportunity, but also creates problems for a 900+-person unincorporated town that must deal with several thousand visitors a day in summer and on some shoulder season weekends.
We depend on the Borough to help us find solutions and keep this town a great place to live as well as visit. And, who from the Borough do we call on the most? If you guessed our Assembly representative, Tam Boeve, you guessed right. Tam listens and helps us find solutions or find the right person at the Borough to contact. She has been right there when we’ve needed her for the past three years.
We call Tam on the phone. We text her. We email her. We ask her to attend Community Council meetings, Road Service Board meetings, Sewer & Water Board meetings and countless other meetings. You’d think she’d be “meetinged” out, but she keeps at it. She responds to issues as they arise, and it makes a big difference.
And, I know she does this in all of our communities. That’s the way she is. After three years on the job, Tam still attends almost every District 7 Community Council meeting. Our last council meeting had a particularly full and thorny agenda, and she stayed on the zoom call with the community until nearly midnight. Sure, we’ve had other hardworking assembly representatives before, but Tam is a stand-out in terms of both engaging with the community and putting in the hard work and long hours.
Let’s return Tam Boeve to the Assembly for another term… District 7 needs her!