Alaska Miners Association’s New Leader Brings Wealth of Experience
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Fred Parady
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Fred Parady is as excited to take on his new role as the executive director of the Alaska Miners Association. Parady is replacing Steve Borell, who is stepping down after 22 years on the job.
Parady, currently the chief operating officer for the North Slope Borough School District, had a 30-year career in the mining business in Wyoming before following his wife, Lisa, to Barrow when she became assistant superintendent in 2007.
He’ll be in Anchorage this week for the annual AMA convention Nov. 7 to Nov. 13, and he’ll spend December learning from Borell before taking over Jan. 1.
“I like to work in a strategic environment and if you step back to 30,000-foot view, Alaska is 20 percent of the landmass in the United States and has some of the most exciting mineral potential and projects to be found anywhere,” Parady said. “The chance to help shape public policy and help participate in the advocacy that gets projects built and moving is really exciting. I am jacked.”
Borell said after 22 years of the nearly all-consuming job, it was time for a break.
“I have literally hundreds of books that I have to read,” Borell said. “I’ve been a student of a lot of topics totally different from mining. There’s so much stuff I want to study. I may take some college classes, you never know. There’s lots of things a guy can do and it just seemed to be the right time.”
Borell said he’s confident he’s leaving the AMA in good hands. Parady applied for the job after seeing it advertised in the newspaper want ads, and Borell was ecstatic that someone with Parady’s background was interested.
“Fred, I’m not sure where he came from — figuratively speaking — because I think he is an absolute perfect fit for this job,” Borell said. “He has good surface mining experience and good underground mining experience. He understands mining issues intimately. He’s worked at managing reclamation efforts at a large, large coal mine.
“That is invaluable experience. That’s not book experience. That’s on the ground, dirty hands, dirty boots, experience.”
Parady has plenty of the book experience, too. His holds a master’s degree from Montana State University in land rehabilitation, and was once president of the American Society of Surface Mining and Reclamation.
His mining career started with Anaconda Copper Co. in Butte, Mont., and from 1981 to 1992 he was a senior executive with Bridger Coal Co. at its Rock Springs, Wyo., coalmine. While at Bridger, Parady won two national reclamation awards from the Office of Surface Mining.
From 1992 to 2007, he was a senior safety and engineering manager, and later the mine manager, of Big Island Mine (which produces trona, the main source of sodium carbonate).
Both Bridger and Big Island mines earned the Sentinels of Safety awards from the Mine Safety and Health Administration as the safest mines in the U.S. in their categories.
Parady also served in the Wyoming House of Representatives, serving as both Majority Leader and finally as Speaker of the House. Parady’s political experience was “frosting on the cake,” Borell said.
“It’s hard to come by a person with that breadth of experience and is willing to live in Alaska,” Borell said, although he wasn’t referring to harsh Alaska weather but to the relative size of the mining industry. Borell compared Alaska’s seven producing mines to 55 in Nevada.
“The mining industry here is very small,” Borell said. “I believe the future of the state is in mining, but nonetheless the industry is very small. To find somebody of his caliber is exciting to me.”
Fortunately for the AMA, Parady was already in Alaska, and he’s kept up with the controversies surrounding mining in the state. At the forefront of the debate over natural resource development is the Pebble prospect located west of Iliamna and situated nearby rivers that feed the world-class salmon return to Bristol Bay.
Parady said the debate over Pebble as framed by its opponents is a “false choice” between fish or jobs.
“The question is how you can do the project with appropriate safeguards,” Parady said. “That’s why there’s such a long lead time in the process. One thing I also know is uncertainty is the enemy of economic development. Having such overlapping regulatory jurisdiction and such long lead times, it really hampers your ability to get off the ground.
“You need to have a proper dialogue and public process, but you need to have them shaped in a way that can be navigated and aren’t endless.”
Parady witnessed such debates in Wyoming in the 1970s regarding development of the state’s massive coal resources in the Powder River basin.
“There was a fear that the Powder River basin would be overdeveloped, the extreme language in the environmental community was that it would be a ‘sacrifice area’ to meet national energy needs,” he said. “Those fears have proven unfounded. There are a dozen-plus coal mines in the Powder River basin, and development of those mining operations with appropriate safeguards has led to an economic boom where Gillette is on its way to becoming the No. 1 city in the state with substantial growth and stability.”
Parady said there are some similarities between Wyoming and Alaska. Both are large, mineral-rich western states where the federal government holds vast amounts of land.
There is also great hunting and fishing in both states — “the opening day of deer season is a school holiday,” in Wyoming, Parady joked — alongside resource development.
“That’s a source of strength for the state,” Parady said. “You have people who work in industry who recreate in the outdoors, and you’re trying to find a path that balances those interests — and they don’t have to be in competition with each other, they can be in harmony.”
Parady finds some of that harmony in the very words “economy” and “ecology.”
“They share the same Latin root ‘eco,’ meaning home,” he said. “A healthy economy and a healthy ecology go hand in hand. I think you can have mineral development and projects that are environmentally successful — that minimize any damage to the environment and maximize production of wealth upon which society depends.
“Mining is a great industry and an honorable profession. Mining jobs are middle class jobs and I think Alaskans want more than a royalty check. We want to build the economy and build middle class jobs, and build Alaska-based jobs. It’s fun to be a part of that.”
— By Andrew Jensen, Alaska Journal of Commerce
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