Juneau City Clerk Beth McEwen announced Monday night she is retiring after a nearly 30-year career with the city, winning statewide awards as Municipal Employee of the Year in 2015 and Municipal Clerk of the Year in 2023 during that time.
“I have formally given my letter of retirement to the city manager as of last week, and I will be ending my employment with CBJ and public service in this capacity as of June 30 of 2025,” McEwen told Assembly members and other city leaders at the end of a Committee of the Whole meeting. She said she also wanted to “make it officially known to the Assembly that I have thoroughly enjoyed being clerk here, but there will amazing clerks coming up behind me to take up elections in my place.”
“Well, we’re happy for you, but sad for everyone else,” said Deputy Mayor Greg Smith, who chaired Monday’s meeting.
McEwen has been the municipal clerk for the City and Borough of Juneau since 2018 and served as deputy clerk for 18 years before that as part of her 28 years working for CBJ. She said she decided during the past months it was finally time to retire.
“I was eligible in 2023, but I felt like I had a lot more projects and things to accomplish before I retired,” she said in a brief interview after Monday’s meeting. “Now is the time. None of us are getting any younger and I have some personal family matters that I want to attend to while I’m still young enough to do it.”
“My next goals are to do some world traveling,” McEwen added.
Beth McEwen with the Municipal Employee of the Year Award she won in 2015 as the deputy municipal clerk for the City and Borough of Juneau. (Juneau Empire file photo)
McEwen first gained statewide recognition when she was selected among 35,000 local government workers for the Municipal Employee of the Year Award during the 2015 Alaska Municipal League Conference. An Empire article at the time noted that as deputy clerk she was responsible for scheduling meetings for volunteers on more than 35 public boards, as well as handling election and public information duties.
“It’s actually exciting for me to be able to share information with people,” she said at the time. “I don’t know everything, but I know where to look.”
McEwen would herself win an election of sorts when the Alaska Association of Municipal Clerks in 2021 voted her education director, a post that meant leading efforts to guide other clerks around the state through the intricacies of the 2022 elections.
The most recent statewide honor came in 2023 when McEwen was filming the awards ceremony hosted by the Alaska Association of Municipal Clerks, only to find herself at center stage.
“I was filming this totally expecting someone else to receive this year’s AAMC Municipal Clerk of the Year award and was absolutely gobsmacked when Melissa said my name,” McEwen wrote in a Facebook post after the ceremony.
In an interview about a week later after the award was announced during an Assembly meeting, McEwen said she didn’t have any plans yet to slow down.
“It is a great honor to be the face of democracy for our local citizens, to be that conduit, to conduct elections, to help people know where the resources are to pay their utility bills,” she said.
On Monday night, before announcing her impending departure, she guided Assembly members through the details of a rewrite of CBJ’s municipal election code she’s been working on since last year. The Committee of the Whole voted unanimously to send the ordinance to the full Assembly for a public hearing and vote on adoption.
In a memo to Assembly members, McEwen noted difficulties residents experienced with “petitions from citizens trying to engage in direct democracy” prompted the efforts at changes intended to provide “greater public access to election procedures,” “greater ability for election officials to adapt to changing technologies,” and “election code that is more easily understood by the public.”
• Contact Mark Sabbatini at mark.sabbatini@juneauempire.com or (907) 957-2306.
