‘Invested in Whitefish’: Longtime Whitefish Chamber of Commerce Executive Director Retires

The first 15 years of Kevin Gartland’s career may have been spent in newsrooms across the West, but he was never too far removed from a chamber of commerce.

“When I was in Jackson Hole, one of my beats was covering the chamber of commerce, and I always got a load of leads from business people because they know all the stuff that nobody’s talking about in town,” Gartland said.

“My wife and I also did concerts and festivals as our own business, so we did concerts in partnership with a couple different chambers of commerce over the years,” he added. “Then when we were in Mammoth, when I was managing editor there, they didn’t have a chamber of commerce, so I and about five others started one.”

When he and his wife made the move to Florida to be closer to family in 1996, Gartland also made the move from covering a chamber of commerce to helping run one. Just over a decade later, Gartland and his wife moved to the town they fell in love with early in their marriage: Whitefish, Montana.

“I’ve always been a mountain guy,” Gartland said. “When I was growing up, we were camping and fishing in Yosemite and all the parks out in the West Coast, and as I grew up, I became a skier, backpacker; all that good stuff. Before I knew what I wanted to be, I knew where I wanted to live.”

Since taking the lead at the chamber in 2009, Gartland has played a pivotal role in guiding the Whitefish Chamber of Commerce through a period of significant growth and change, especially as the city has seen rapid growth in development and in visitation over the past decade.

“We’ve grown the chamber from about 400 members to almost 600 in the last, probably most of that in the last 10 years or so,” Gartland said. “We’ve kind of matured as an organization as the town has.” 

“We were a one full-time employee organization when I got here … plus a part-time receptionist, and that was pretty much it,” he added. “We’ve grown. In addition to myself, we now have three other employees.”

It’s the people that Gartland and the chamber have grown alongside over his nearly 17-year tenure that he will remember most, he said.

“The neat thing here, having been here for as long as we have, is we’re all friends,” Gartland said. “We see them, we know them, we support each other, we do weddings and funerals and things like that together. It’s just, it just becomes family.”

“What makes me happiest after 17 years is seeing people that I met when I first got here in 2009 who were pouring me a beer at the brewery or serving me pizza over at Mackenzie [River Pizza], and seeing those people now holding bank executive positions and upper management positions for Glacier Restaurant Group, and running their own businesses successfully,” he added. “They were in their mid 20s, they’re now in their early 40s, and in addition to making those gradual steps up, they’re also leaders in the community.”

For Gartland, prioritizing and supporting the Whitefish community has always been at the heart of the work at the chamber of commerce. 

“What I have found is that the larger the chamber is, the more focus, and more exclusive focus, they have on business, as opposed to community,” Gartland said. “Our chamber of commerce, our mission statement is to support the local economy while also preserving our quality of life, and it’s that second part there that has really driven me, and I think it’s what drives all of our staff members here, because they all feel like they’re invested in Whitefish. They’re working on behalf of the community, and they’re doing what they can to do that, and we try to inspire that in others as well.”

This focus on community has been especially critical for the chamber’s creation and expansion of special events like the Christmas Stroll in downtown Whitefish and the Fourth of July fireworks at Whitefish Lake. Gartland said special events have been key to helping stimulate the local economy during shoulder seasons, with the Great Northwest Oktoberfest — which began early in Gartland’s tenure — being a prime example. 

“What we’ve tried to do with our events is to create events for our locals, because that’s the type of event that visitors want to go to,” Gartland said. “They want to come to an event that reflects the local community.”

Workforce housing was another community initiative the chamber began tackling head on with Gartland at the helm — a topic especially poignant for Gartland, who had worked in ski lift operator and wait staff roles at ski resorts when he was younger. 

“We’d done some surveying, as we do on an annual basis, and asking people what the biggest problem they had; biggest problem they had was getting people getting workforce, and the biggest problem with getting a workforce was the cost of housing, because they could not afford to live here,” Gartland said reflecting on housing in the city in 2014. “It was starting to get bad then. By 2020 it was, it was crazy.”

Over the last decade, the chamber has hosted housing summits, funded the first housing assessment survey and worked closely with the city on its housing needs assessment, helping put together the first strategic plan for its affordable housing workforce housing initiative, Gartland said.

While Gartland and his wife have no plans to leave the community they love, Gartland said it’s time for him to step aside so someone else can energize the “young and dynamic” and “wildly talented” business community in Whitefish. The newly hired executive director, Katherine Archibald, is just the person to do so, he said.

“I really think they need some new leadership; not that my leadership sucked, but I think they need leadership that’s geared for the next 20 years and not the last 20 years,” Gartland said. “Katherine is certainly about 5,000 times more tech savvy than I am. I have limped through the last 15 years and learned just enough to be dangerous, but she understands the world that we’re living in these days, and she’s not hesitant to jump into that.”

“She’s got all that background,” he added. “I think the chamber is in a good position to continue serving the city and being responsive to what the needs of the people are.”

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