Michelle Stone
Street Maintenance Division
By Shannon Kuhn
Rain, shine, or blizzard, Anchorage residents will find Michelle Stone behind the wheel improving our roads year round.
As a Heavy Equipment Operator with the Municipality’s Maintenance and Operations Department, Michelle’s days are packed. This year marks her 20th anniversary of working on street maintenance crews. With a broad range of public safety duties including sealing cracks in the roads and re-paving with fresh asphalt, Michelle and her team are some of the most visible city workers. Their efforts affect our daily lives: from fixing potholes and helping keep the road dust down, to plowing after a snowfall, they are the backbone of our operations. Michelle knows it’s a big task and that the public is watching. “I always plow like I live there,” she says.
Michelle grew up in the Mat-Su Valley and is a 3rd-generation operator. Her dad was a Teamster, and all of her uncles and cousins are operating engineers. Influenced by her strong family values, Michelle decided to enroll at the Alaska Operating Engineers Apprenticeship and started working in the construction field in 1991. In the Street Maintenance Division, she has at times been the only female Heavy Equipment Operator, although today is one of three women.
She met her husband at work (he is also a Heavy Equipment Operator!) and they are proud parents to Tomi Carolann, Blaze, and Cascade. In her free time, Michelle enjoys fishing, hunting, gardening, and knitting. Recently, she made raspberry jam from her backyard berries and brought it in to share.
Twenty years have gone by fast, she says, filled with “huge opportunities for growth.” Her favorite part of her job? Running the equipment and being able to look back and see what has been accomplished at the end of the day.
“I love this place. Good people.”
