City manager resigns, effective September 1

Nome’s City Manager Glenn Steckman announced his decision to resign from the job to the public today, July 24. The resignation is effective September 1. Steckman said in an interview with the Nome Nugget that he took a position with the city of Cambridge, Maryland, starting Sept. 4.

Steckman notified Mayor John Handeland about his resignation on Monday morning, told department heads on Monday evening and informed the Nome Common Council in executive session on Monday night. The council, he said, accepted his resignation.

Steckman’s contract would have expired in November of this year.

While the resignation comes sudden, no controversies have led up to it.

Steckman said in the interview that he was going back and forth whether he was seeking renewal of his contract with Nome. “It’s been a long five years up here, dealing with a variety of challenges that Nome faces and many times dealing with a tremendous amount of misinformation out in the community,” he said.

“This is a hard job, and I’m very passionate about Nome and about the problems that are facing Nome and wanting to get them addressed. I see holes in the safety net here and it just gets mentally and physically exhausting,” Steckman said.

Misinformation eroding the community’s trust in the Nome Police Department is one point Steckman identified as a source of frustration, exhaustion and ultimately one of the reasons for his resignation. The still unsolved disappearance of Florence Okpealuk in August 2020 has been a topic of speculation, outrage and a podcast feeding into the narrative that the city-run police department has not adequately investigated the case, which in turn created a lack of trust, Steckman said.  

“I don’t think folks understand how devastating that was to the leadership of administration and the police department leadership when Florence wasn’t able to be located. Some vocal members of the community are talking about how the police department didn’t care about missing people, especially Alaska Natives, but that is so far from the truth,” he said.

During his almost five-year tenure at the helm of the city, Steckman has tackled several shortcomings of the police department his administration had inherited. When he arrived in the fall of 2019, the police department had a backlog of hundreds of sexual assault cases. “When I first got here, the previous police administration hadn’t taken seriously proper management of sexual assault cases,” he said. “We tried to fix that.” He pointed to effort that the Nome Police Department is nearing completion of becoming an accredited organization, which is expected to be finalized in two months.

Steckman also said that previous city administrations didn’t address the decline of city facilities, which could have been fixed at the time for less money than it costs no to fix and upgrade. The Rec Center saw significant upgrades, and this year the police will get a new communications system, which has been identified since 2010 as inadequate and in need of replacement.

While the grind of playing catch up and fighting a futile fight of misinformation in itself proved exhausting, the COVID-19 pandemic created a whole other level of measures that needed to be taken for the city to adequately respond to the deadly virus and prevent its spread. Steckman led the city to curb the spread with the result that this region saw significantly fewer COVID deaths over the span of the pandemic than other rural hub regions.

“After a while I reached a point where I was tired and I felt that I wasn’t performing at the level I needed to,” Steckman reflected. “I needed a fresh start.”

He said he has been committed to Nome and serving its people. “This was my home, this is where I went to church,” he said.

NOTE: This story reflects a correction made. The state of Mr. Steckman's new employment is Maryland, not Massachusetts.