The top emergency official in the fastest-growing part of Alaska has resigned, accusing borough employees and assembly members of undermining his actions. Otto Feather served as director of the Matanuska-Susitna Borough emergency services department for just under two years before tendering his resignation Jan. 2. The borough manager accepted Feather’s resignation on Tuesday.
Mat-Su, the state’s second-largest municipality with more than 100,000 residents, still relies on a corps of paid on-call rather than full-time emergency responders.
Feather, a retired U.S. Air Force colonel, presided over the department during the Nov. 30 magnitude 7.0 earthquake and took the blame following criticism of a lack of public information about the situation in Mat-Su that day and for several days after.
His sharply critical resignation letter references internal “institutional parochialisms, selfishness and duplicity” and “unchecked sabotage” by borough employees and assembly members.