Quest for the Story: Dean Conklin spends a career in news

By DAVID REESE

Lake County Leader

Dean Conklin has always had a penchant for the story.

Whether it’s a story that’s breaking in a newspaper or a story coming out of a corporate boardroom, Conklin has spent a career telling stories to the public. Conklin lives in Rollins in a home overlooking Shelter Bay, where he can view Flathead Lake — a topic of many stories he told during his time at Montana Power Company.

Conklin was communications director for Montana Power during the company’s most tumultuous times, from 1980 to 1999.

Montana Power had been a corporate behemoth for nearly 100 years, managing Kerr Dam on Flathead Lake, as well as owning part of a coal-fired electricity plant at Colstrip and Billings. Then, in the late 1990s, as internet companies were taking off, Montana Power began to divest its energy holdings in order to become a telecommunications company called Touch America. The company was investing heavily in fiber-optic distribution, but came too late to the dance, Conklin said. “They applied the concept of be second in the industry, when they needed to be the first,” Conklin said.

Touch America was building fiber-optics networks, when wireless was “the new hot thing,” Conklin said.

Touch America eventually went bankrupt, taking with it millions of dollars in shareholder value.

Converting Montana Power Company into a telecommunications company came mainly at the direction of MPC’s senior officers, who Conklin said wanted a higher rate of return on their investments. “A 12-percent return on capital was not enough,” Conklin said.

A class-action lawsuit against Montana Power is ongoing. That case involves how Montana Power regulated the level of Flathead Lake and allegedly caused shoreline erosion along the lake. That case goes to trial this October. The lawsuit against Montana Power over the breakup of the energy company and turning it into Touch America has not been settled, either. When the case was started against Goldman Sachs, the investment advisor, in the early 2000s by Whitefish attorney Frank Morrison, it set the record as the largest class action suit in Montana, with over $2 billion at stake. 

The breakup of Montana Power was just one of the tumultuous events in Conklin’s career at the company.

Other events were internal to the company.

Montana Power was looking to sell a dam on the Clark Fork River, so that it could get a market-rate sales price for Kerr Dam. The sale of the Missouri River dam brought up a water-rights issue, and the Montana Environmental Information Center had begun a petition drive to ask voters to approve the state of Montana keeping its water rights.

Montana Power Co. leaders did not want that to happen, so they offered Montana Environmental Information Center about $8 million in energy conservation investments to drop the petition drive, Conklin said. In exchange, Montana Power would begin a push for cleaner energy development, Conklin said.

Conklin questioned the legality of that move by the Montana Power Company board, saying that taking an issue off the ballot may have been illegal. He said he would not issue the press release about the proposed deal. “I told them I would not touch that thing,” Conklin said. “I was not required to do something that I believe would have violated Montana law.”

The issue never made it to the ballot.

Conklin retired from Montana Power in 1999, just before the company transitioned to Touch America. He got out just in time. “The company was turning upside down after I left,” he said.

That ended a long career that started in journalism and finished in corporate communications. When he was 19, Conklin, a Miles City, Mont., graduate, sought work to help support his family. He took his work samples as editor of the Miles City high school newspaper and showed them to the managing editor of the Sioux Falls, S.D., Argus-Leader.

The editor gave him a job starting at $45 a week. Conklin went on to the Des Moines Register so he could attend Drake University during the day and work at night. Conklin went to school for 27 consecutive months to earn his bachelor’s degree.

He also worked as a lay minister for the Assembly of God church.

When the Billings Assembly of God offered him a job, Conklin took it, but it meant flying from Des Moines to Billings on Saturdays, preaching on Sundays and flying home on Mondays. “It was a crazy life,” Conklin said.

Conklin went to work for the Missoulian in 1973, and after seven years went to the Racine, Wisc., newspaper, where he spent three years. He wanted to get back to Montana, so he accepted a job offer from Montana Power in 1980, and he spent nearly 20 years living and working in Butte.

It was his work in newspapers that helped Conklin land the job in corporate communications. “They wanted someone who could understand the media,” he said.

The jobs are fairly similar, but crossing over to the “dark side” generally means abandoning a career in news, he said. “Most of my former news colleagues faulted me for selling out, but I took a pay cut to move to Butte. I did it so I could get back to Montana,” he said.

It still gets down to telling a story.

“The corporate side is about taking difficult situations and analyzing what to do with them for the company,” Conklin said. “It always comes down to ‘what’s the story?’”

Conklin tackled some tough issues as a newspaper editor. In Racine, he faced a community struggling with racism. When a school board member had made racist comments to the media, Conklin published them in an editorial, resulting in the school board member’s resignation.

Conklin took his newspaper experience to the Flathead Valley Community College, where he was an adjunct professor. “That rekindled my passion for journalism,” he said.

It was at FVCC where Conklin, again, faced issues that journalism tackled.

A faculty member had used a derogatory word to describe the college president, and the school newspaper published it.

In retirement, Conklin has tried to remain active, and operated a consulting business with his wife, Carole.

He was involved with Omega Sports Television on a statewide cable network for four seasons and covered about 150 basketball and football games.

He’s also a musician. He sang with

Ken Dutter’s Mountain Heirs and Daystar, a Bitterroot group, before creating Blest, a gospel group, with three others. That group sang for eight years in western Montana.

Conklin also led the Montana Gospel Music Association, producing about eight concerts annually. He also sang two concerts with Driven Quartet of Charlotte, N.C., and on selected songs sang bass with the Booth Brothers, Legacy 5 and the Perrys, all of Nashville.

He remains active in his faith life. He attends the Dirt Bags Bible study group in Bigfork, where he sees people from all walks of life and still learns by studying the Bible with others.

He looks back fondly on his career in communications and journalism, but there seems to be a bit of sadness in his voice when he describes working at Montana Power — a company that held many people’s retirements when it went bankrupt.

He witnessed events in the corporate structure that compare to present-day corporate shenanigans. “I was there through some tough times,” he said. “But the greed of its top people is what took the company down. They all thought that by going to a telecommunications company they were all going to hit the bigs.”

It was not in the corporate boardroom where Conklin had one of his career highlights in communications. It was at the “little rag newspaper at FVCC” that he said journalism fulfilled its role as a public service.

“I had a moment at FVCC as interesting as anything else I’ve done,” he said.