Jay Trost and Patrick Hollinger once again deferred to Brad Alcorn when it came to selecting his replacement on the Curry County Board of Commissioners.

Alcorn abstained from voting, but his colleagues appointed his pick — Gold Beach resident Lynn Coker — to the Board after agreeing with Alcorn that the commissioner position is, for now anyway, a full-time job.

“When you look at the totality of all of the people who have applied, the candidate that rises to the top is clearly Lynn Coker,” Alcorn said Wednesday, “and I would be very comfortable knowing that he stepped into my role and took my place.”

Coker had withdrawn his application for commissioner and endorsed Brookings Mayor Isaac Hodges at the Board’s April 15 meeting. On Wednesday, Coker asked to be reconsidered for the role after Hodges decided he would be unable to fulfill the responsibilities of commissioner due to his personal and professional obligations.

Coker found himself competing against former Curry County corrections deputy and emergency manager Jeremy Dumire; Cecilia Roberts, a two-year resident of Harbor, Oregon and retired manager at AT&T; Gold Beach architect Spirit Meller; Pete Clark, former town administrator for La Pointe, Wisconsin; retired Curry County counsel and Medford city attorney, John Huttl, who was also interim city administrator for Port Orford; and Brookings Planning Commissioner Anthony Bond, a retired Pelican Bay State Prison corrections counselor.

Huttl and Roberts said they were looking to play a part-time role if appointed to the Board of Commissioners.

“If there’s an insistence that a county commissioner has to be full time and you won’t consider him when he’s not full time, you’re maybe losing good candidates,” Huttl told commissioners. “My position is firm. I would not be here every day. I would not want to be here every day. I enjoy retirement. I think I could still do a good job, but if you think it’s a full-time job, I’m probably not the candidate for you.”

The current conflict between the Board of Commissioners and Curry County sheriff also entered into many of the conversations, though Coker didn’t bring it up during his interview.

Coker is currently self-employed and holds a Bachelor’s degree in political science and a Master’s degree in urban affairs from Wichita State University. Previous employment includes being the senior vice president for the Los Angeles real estate agency NAI Capital; vice president for the telecommunications company, MCI Worldcom; and district manager for AT&T.

Coker said he co-founded and led a “boutique marketing consulting firm serving the emerging personal computer industry.” And spent 25 years developing IT systems in the private sector .

Coker said he also spent 25 years as a volunteer life coach and addiction counselor, working in the California State prison system for about 13 years. He said he’s still working as a recovery coach in Brookings and in Gold Beach.

“I am a person in long-term recovery and this has shaped me into someone who so seriously believes in personal accountability that I like to say to people I work with that it just simply runs in my veins,” he told commissioners. “Because of this post-addiction cycle, I have the ability to lead when there is extraordinary confusion and pressure. And I think another gift in my recovery has been that I had the opportunity to set aside my personal concerns and am able to lead a team through adversity.”

Calling himself an advocate for transparency, Coker said Curry County has a problem communicating with the public. There are other voices “that are far more powerful in the public square and articulate” than the county’s voice, he said.

“What I’m suggesting is we consider looking at the deployment of things like podcasts that we grow into,” he said. “We start maybe podcasts within the county on a month-to-month basis, and what would we focus on? We would go with the problem of the day. We would listen to what the community is saying through the many voices and we would encapsulate the barebones issues out of that and we would provide responses to the community relative to how leadership perceives the resolution of those issues on a timely basis. If we get really good at that we could think about other types of podcasts that we would do.”

Coker suggested doing podcasts on a department-by-department basis, building a more user-friendly website and trying to “chorale people behind a common vision.” He also wanted to amplify the notion of regular town-hall meetings, which included making them accessible to those who live in remote corners of Curry County.

Finally, in response to Hollinger, who referred to his involvement with Gold Beach’s planning and rezoning efforts and asked if there was a need in the county as well, Coker referred to logging on a 34-acre county-owned parcel north of Sixes. He suggested the county could recategorize a portion of their land holdings and build multi-family housing. That was what the county was prepared to do in Sixes, Coker said.

“There was a thought that what we could do is put in multi-family housing up there,” he said. “That is still a perfectly great idea. I haven’t heard much of the productivity moving forward, but it’s a classic example of what can be done between landowners, public landowners and private landowners, and a community that’s interested in moving forward with something like that.”

While deliberating their decision, Hollinger referred to his work with Coker as part of Gold Beach Main Street, while Trost said he agreed that communication is a blind spot.

“And one of the greatest opportunities we have is in zoning,” Trost said. “If we have somebody who’s got a lot of experience in those two areas, it will add tremendous value to the process.”