The Sitka Assembly interviewed two more candidates for the municipal attorney job on Thursday (8-22-24), and advanced one of them, along with a previous interviewee, to a second round of interviews.

Cheryl McKay is a deputy municipal attorney in Anchorage, but she’s led her own private practice, and worked as legal counsel for the Alaska Native Village Corporation Association. She was also a partner at Landye Bennett Blumstein in Anchorage for several years. In 1998, she clerked for the Native American Rights Fund, and drafted materials for the US Supreme Court in the landmark Venetie case. She’s also served as president of the Anchorage Bar Association. She earned her legal degree from the University of Colorado.

McKay told the assembly that after her 30-year career as a lawyer, she isn’t finished with the legal world, but she’s finished with Anchorage. 

“Although I love my job as a municipal attorney at the city of Anchorage, if you read the news or watch TV, I’m sure you can see the problems we’re having every single day,” McKay said. “And at this point my career, I’ve got a good 10 years left, 15 years left, and I don’t want to spend it defending police officers shooting people. I want to spend it helping a community thrive.”

The assembly spent a little over half-an-hour interviewing McKay, and afterwards discussed her application. Assembly member JJ Carlson said McKay’s emphasis on mediation, and her perspectives on employee discipline and counseling aligned with Sitka’s community values.

“A lot of what I see as the conflict and challenges within Sitka, amongst Sitkans, is often just not feeling heard, and not feeling more more than the ‘thinking of the facts.’ So I think she aligns well with that perspective and could fit the challenges that this community has,” Carlson said.

Carlson said she wanted to offer her a second interview, and other assembly members including Mayor Steven Eisenbeisz agreed. 

“There’s a lot of strengths in the applications, and there’s some stuff for me that needs a very deep dive. And that’s what this round two can can do for us, is get us a much deeper dive, a much more direct dive,” Eisenbeisz said. “Now that we’ve met the candidate, we can figure out their views on some real issues.”

The assembly agreed to move McKay to a second round of interviews, along with candidate Rachel Jones, a former Sitka magistrate who did her first interview for the position earlier this month. 

The assembly also interviewed John Wolfe, a retired Alaska district court judge, but decided against advancing him to another round of interviews.