Duncan Bonine grew up in a ranching family in Miles City, Montana, went to Northwest College for ag studies and wound up spending more than a decade working at the Big Horn Co-op. 

Now, the real estate broker and Park County Planning and Zoning commissioner is running for county commissioner to, above all else, support local agriculture. 

“I've always been a big agriculture guy, that's my background, and so trying to find ways that our ag producers can survive and can keep going and continue that lifestyle, but also, you know, transition to the future generations and finding successful ways to do that,” he said, adding, “Preserving ag doesn't necessarily mean just preserving wide open space or lot sizes, it's about the county kind of getting out of the way of ag producers, so that if they put in a center pivot and need to split off a corner of their pivot as a little subdivision for family or to sell, so that they can cash flow, they need to be able to do that so they can survive.”

Bonine said he initially planned on a career in education, but he said while student teaching it wasn’t quite what he expected, so he left that for the Co-op. 

“I spent almost, almost 14 years with the Co-op, doing everything from running loaders, a fertilizer plant to running the bean mills, and then, you know, got into the agronomy side of stuff, doing crop adviser, that kind of thing, but then also managing different locations.”

That included running the store and fertilizer plant in Powell, on the way to being the assistant GM and working in the Greybull office. 

In the meantime he’d built houses for family as a side gig, and decided it was time to make the leap into self employment, starting DBW Construction in 2011. His wife acquired her real estate license and Bonine followed suit and the couple ran a construction and brokerage business until 2022, when, he said, real estate sales took up so much time that they decided to end the construction to focus on sales. 

Long before that decision, Bonine said he’d been interested in public service as a way to use his leadership skills for the benefit of others. He recalled more than 10 years ago when a former House District 50 representative retired, people suggested he go for the job. He wasn’t ready for that step, but in 2018 he did dive into Park County Planning and Zoning, the board which he will be wrapping up likely his final term on this year. 

“I’ve enjoyed learning and it’s been a huge learning curve,” he said. 

He’s also served on the Northwest Wyoming and state boards of realtors. 

Serving on the commission, he said, would just be another step in his urge to serve the community that has meant so much to him. 

“The Powell community has been really good to me for a lot of years, and so I kind of feel like I have a little bit of a civic duty to pay that back,” he said. “Also I feel like I've got a pretty good skill set to be in that position, and I enjoy it, and so serving as a commissioner just seems like the next right thing to do.”

Beyond his support for the ag industry, he said private property rights are another key issue for him, and having a proper understanding of an issue that can be more complex than it seems. It’s an issue he’s seen a lot of in his time on P&Z. 

“We get people on both sides of an issue, and everybody wants to do whatever you want on your land, but if my neighbor does the same thing, am I happy about that? Does that interfere with my enjoyment of my property?” he said. “And so where those things overlap is where regulation becomes necessary. I'm not a pro-regulation guy, but it's a tool that we need to resolve that tension that can exist between property owners.”

He said having appropriate zoning is key to minimizing those issues. 

He said he’s also big on protecting and preserving the “culture of Park County” and the reasons why so many people have come to live or stuck around for so long. 

A lot of what he’s looking to do is a next step from what he has done on P&Z. He said, even with the regulations process potentially wrapping up by the end of this year, there will be the inevitable tweaks to the rules in the future, as well as the actual enforcement and exceptions to the new rules, and evaluation to see what works and what doesn’t. 

“I feel like it's my time to be involved to help ensure that we don't end up doing what we did before, which was go from 1998 to 2024 without anything being done,” he said, “and trying to find a better way to to evaluate the land use plan in the regulation more regularly, more often, so that that we don't end up needing to do this big of an effort in the future, that it can be done more incrementally.”