Former Kalispell mayor Pam Carbonari wraps up decades of public service

When a young Pam Kennedy came to the Flathead Valley from Minnetonka, Minnesota, she fell in love with Montana’s outdoor activities like cross-country skiing and hiking. She also saw the hardships endured by a rural community, and she wanted to help out. 

“I found that I wanted to be involved with family crisis matters,” she recalls. That was 1978.  

Now, after 29 years of serving Kalispell — her first eight years as a city council member, then eight years as mayor, followed by 13 years leading the city’s business improvement organizations — she has retired but still plans to stay involved in the community. 

Pam Carbonari, as she became through marriage to Joe Carbonari, recounts her many offices, affiliations and political battles with clarity, as if the causes were still on the forefront of her mind. And her four step-children, seven grandchildren and 13 great-grandchildren further highlight her zest for family and community.  

Carbonari’s first volunteer work in Montana was with the Kalispell Rape Crisis Line which eventually became the Violence Free Crisis Line that provides a way survivors of domestic violence and abuse to seek support. 

In 1990 Carbonari began serving on the Kalispell City Council. 

“I heard my mother’s voice, ‘Pamela, you can’t complain if you don’t make change,’” she says of her decision to seek public office.  

While serving on City Council, her first long-term goal was to overlay every road in Kalispell within five years. Her proudest moment came when the Central School, the city’s oldest public building, was saved from being torn down and instead became what’s now known as the Northwest Montana History Museum. 

“Instead of tearing it down we had the museum ask the city to invest and make it a historical place for artifacts that can teach people about life in the Flathead Valley,” she said.

After nine years with City Council, Carbonari left in 1998, but missed having a role in governance. She recalls rancor in City Hall at the time, which demonstrated a hostile form of leadership to the city’s young people.

“I believed wholeheartedly that we needed to have civic dialogue that was respectful of our employees at the city of Kalispell and the general public,” she said. 

So she ran for mayor, and won: and served for eight years, from 2002 to 2009. 

As mayor, she tried to restore respectful discourse by developing what she calls “rules of civic dialogue” which appear in the agenda of every City Council meeting to this day.

She also worked on the Planning Board, Police Advisory Council, Transportation Advisory Council, and many not for profit boards; the Flathead County Peer Court that is now the Center for Restorative Youth Justice; the Federal Advisory Council on Juvenile Justice; Kalispell Rotary Club, Flathead Food Bank — in her words, “to name a few.”

Carbonari’s administration made strides for young people, establishing a youth court that allowed underage offenders to be tried by a court of their peers. At the time there was a national interest in prison reform, and many states were exploring restorative justice, a concept that continues to challenge the traditional prison system and strives to lower recidivism, increase a sense of community, and allows offenders to repair harm. 

“At the time they didn’t treat young people in a way that let them change and come to respect the system,” she said. 

Carbonari ultimately worked with groups in Washington, D.C. to try and change laws that have an outsized impact on young people, such as life sentences without parole. 

After serving two terms as mayor, she moved on working with the downtown. Following Carbonari’s retirement Jamie Keller, CEO of Innovative Nonprofit Solutions Group, has taken over as the new executive director of both the Kalispell Downtown Association and the Kalispell Business Improvement District.

The business improvement district is a board composed of property owners that works on economic development downtown, making sure downtown thrives and remains an asset to the whole city. The downtown association is a membership-driven organization of mainly business owners that works on events and tries to bring people downtown. It is responsible for events like the Chocolate Affair, the Holiday Stroll, averaging about 10 events each year. 

“Downtown is about discovery, what people see as they walk the streets, surprising them,” she said. “That’s why we have our events in that downtown core.”

She helped downtown flourish. During the pandemic, she thought of ways to keep the shops from shuttering for good, of how to keep restaurants afloat, and how to get the money back that would bring people downtown. 

“It was difficult on all the businesses, especially downtown, the mom and pops,” she said. “When people are staying at home, they aren’t shopping, and the shops struggled. Restaurants were doing to-go orders, events were canceled that we needed because they affected how much money we had to advertise what options people had for what was available downtown.”

Carbonari’s career took big steps toward realizing the U.S. 93 alternate route that planners have dreamed of to solidify her goal of making downtown Kalispell a place for strolling, biking, and easy parking. The bypass opened in 2016, and Carbonari knew it would be an attraction for the downtown core.

Work is still panned for sections of the bypass, but with its completion, Carbonari predicts a clear path for Kalispell’s ongoing efforts after it received federal Safe Streets For All grant funding to go toward making Main Street safer and more pedestrian-friendly.

“I want tourists to appreciate not only our historic past but our future, to recognize what small business really, truly is. And have a great experience. In order to do that it has to be safe, and an environment that is inviting.”

And what is Pam Carbonari’s first order of business after retiring? Aside from taking some time for herself and family, she and her husband plan to visit an island off the coast of Panama that they have often enjoyed in years past. Its size is 1 mile by 2: another community the size of downtown Kalispell.  

Reporter Carl Foster can be reached at 758-4407 or cfoster@dailyinterlake.com.