Mark Bartkoski, the soon to be former President of Conuma Coal still occupies the corner office at Conuma Coal. He will be sharing presidential duties with John Schadan for the next few weeks to ensure a smooth transition for the company.
Bartkoski has mixed feelings about leaving. “I’m going to miss you guys big time,” he says, referring to not just the people he has worked with at Conuma but to the town that has been his home for nearly three years. “This has been an awesome build.”
He says that this was always the plan. “I’m a builder, not a maintainer. I don‘t want to say that in an insensitive way, and Tumbler was real special. This experience will be one that I’ll never forget. We had a chance to do things in unique way, and I feel that we‘ve had a positive impact on the community with the values we brought to project.”
But the mine is up and running and, while there‘s always things that could be tweaked, it’s time for him to move on. “I don‘t want to call this a past tense project. We came in with a plan to build something special. Sometimes you’re up against battles that are far bigger than you can see, and that’s what this was. These coal fields have been here for 37 years. For 25 years they made a lot of money. For ten or 12 years, the commodities market has been to a point where they couldn’t succeed financially, and the international market gave up on them. When we came and looked at these mines three years ago, the ruling was it has been up and down too many times, and it would be down for the long term. I said ‘I see an opportunity.’ Some people saw a pile of rocks, but I saw a pile of gold. The community got behind it. The government was supportive, the First Nations were supportive. Conuma has been a collaborative win story for a lot of people.”
Now that he’s leaving the plan is to go spend time with his family. “My wife and I have spent more time away from the kids and the grandkids than we‘d like. We are going to spend three weeks in India doing missions, then focus the next four months on writing the next book.”
He laughs at the idea of retirement. “I’m a builder,” he says. “I’ll claim I’ll look at retirement, but it‘s just not who I am. I would expect to get involved in another rebuild or start-up.”
He says the relationships he‘s made in Tumbler have been fantastic. “We’ve been able to build a team united under a vision that‘s more than just yourself. Not every company I’ve been a part of has been able to grasp that. I don‘t know if it was a mix of the vision or the timing or the Lord‘s blessing, but I think it was a little of all three. It wasn’t about hurting another company, but about joining together to building security.”
What he wont miss, though, is the regulatory systems. “There’s some inconsistencies around regulations in the province. I consider us environmentalists, but there are other agendas around.”
He is most proud, though, of the relationships that have developed over the last few years, not just at the mine, but within the community. “An example is our relationship with school. We did some projects with the school that were really well received, and gave us that pay-it-forward concept. I was down helping with the go-kart project and a little grade four kid came up to me and said ‘Mr Bartkoski, I can’t wait to grow up so I can be in ninth grade and be a part of the go-kart project,’ and he was so excited, and he said ‘were going to do pay-it-forward projects,’ and I asked him what a pay it forward project was and he said ‘that’s when you do something special for someone else.’ I found out later that his class put together a lemon aid stand in town, and they gave that money to a charity. So when you see your actions and values carried forward into the next generation, that’s a legacy, and to me that’s pretty awesome.”
He says that, while he won’t be in town as much anymore, a part of him remains with the mine. “I’m still an owner of the company. I have a vested interest not to see our values change. I’ve got my heart here. It’ll always be close to me. Tonight, we’re doing a leadership workshop at the high school. Last night we did the same thing in Chetwynd. Tonight I get to go and invest in the kids.
“We’re not gone, we’ll never be gone.”
