MOUNT VERNON — A few years ago, Mayor Jill Boudreau watched people’s faces during a meeting of Mount Vernon and Skagit County leaders as they heard the cost estimate for a new city library and community center.
“I think at the time it was around $48 million,” Boudreau said during a late November interview in her office, a month before the end of her third and final term.
“So many people looked defeated,” Boudreau said. “They were just like, ‘We could never do that.’”
But when it came to the Library Commons, which should be completed this spring at a final cost of $53 million, Boudreau wouldn’t take “never” for an answer.
“When I hear that, to me, that’s a challenge,” she said. “I’m going to dig my heels in because we’re going to do this. And the reason why is because our community deserves it.”
Assertive. Driven. A strong leader. These words have been used — in their most positive sense, but sometimes with a hint of exasperation — to describe Boudreau, 56.
She did more than reshape Mount Vernon’s downtown with an impressive new public building. Those who worked with her said she also reformed city hall culture.
As for the Library Commons, at least one early skeptic has been won over since.
“I was a little apprehensive,” Mount Vernon City Council member Melissa Beaton said. Some on the council worried the city’s taxpayers would need to foot the bill for such a big project, and voters at the time had just rejected a bond for a new fire station.
So Boudreau, nearly single-handedly, made sure the city could get the money for the Commons without raising taxes. Instead of spending money on a grant writer, she wrote 38 separate grant applications herself, to federal, state and private funding sources.
“At one point in time, I said, ‘Just get out of her way. She’s going to get the job done,’” Beaton said. “And she has done that.”
Boudreau, citing her own weariness and growing cynicism, decided after three terms that her time as mayor was up.
She ‘broke a mold’
Boudreau was considered a long shot when she first ran for mayor, in 2011, in a bid to replace Bud Norris. Her opponent was longtime city Parks Director Larry Otos, who had the incumbent mayor’s support.
Norris, however, had angered some Mount Vernon residents with his overt right-wing politics. He gave conservative talk-show host Glenn Beck the key to the city in 2009, and removed Spanish-language options from the library’s telephone system.
Otos raked in twice as much in campaign contributions as Boudreau in 2011. But she knocked on 4,000 doors and had already built a public profile for herself as the Mount Vernon Police Department’s community resource officer.
Boudreau won the contest by 277 votes, or nearly four percentage points.
“I think that my election broke a mold of what people saw in elected officials in the city,” Boudreau said. “It was seven white men and a white-man mayor, and there hadn’t been a lot of diverse voices at all.”
Unlike her predecessor, Boudreau believed politics didn’t belong in the mayor’s office.
“She can’t stand when elected officials make decisions in their own political self interest,” said Peter Donovan, who served as Boudreau’s special projects manager — essentially a deputy mayor — for the past eight years. Donovan ran unopposed to replace Boudreau and became Mount Vernon’s mayor on Jan. 1.
“She doesn’t want to see politicians leading. We just need practical leaders,” Donovan said.
Weekly coffee talks with community
Focusing on governance rather than politics, Boudreau went out of her way to learn what her constituents wanted and to get it done, if she could. To that end, she hosted more than 350 weekly coffee talks during her time in office.
“That was just a venue where people could show up and ask literally anything, from what’s going on on my street, with the potholes, to crime, to homelessness — whatever it is — and they got a direct answer,” Donovan said.
Boudreau made a point of bringing Mount Vernon’s Latino community into the conversation. Even though the city is one-third Hispanic, according to the 2020 census, candidates and office holders often overlooked that population.
“Before her, I never had anybody come and knock on the door, asking for support or asking for my vote,” said Iris Carias, a native of Honduras who joined the council in 2018. “I’ve been able to vote since 2000.”
Carias said she was the first person of Latino descent ever elected to the council. Boudreau accepts some of the credit for making room on the council for people who weren’t white men.
“Now we have the most diverse council I think we’ve ever had in our history,” she said, “and I believe that I had a little bit to do with that, where people felt comfortable wanting to come in and participate in their government.”
Carias, the migrant program educator at Mount Vernon schools, didn’t know Boudreau when she ran for city council in 2017. She said she was more motivated by the previous year’s election of President Donald Trump and the threat he posed to immigrant communities. But she quickly came to discover Boudreau as an ally.
The mayor helped Carias, a political newcomer, learn how to navigate the business of a city council. And she gave Carias the confidence to believe that her vote mattered just as much as anyone else’s on the council.
“She’s very pro-community, pro-education … pro-empower women,” Carias said. “I want to say she’s such a great leader who represented us in all levels.”
Crisis management: damaged bridge, homelessness
Less than two years into Boudreau’s first term, a truck carrying a load exceeding its height limit struck the support beams on the Interstate 5 bridge between Burlington and Mount Vernon, collapsing a section of the bridge into the Skagit River.
No one was seriously injured, but Mount Vernon and Burlington officials had to figure out how to detour some 70,000 vehicles a day through the city streets until the bridge was repaired.
“It just highlighted right away how interdependent the two cities were, and still are,” said Burlington Mayor Steve Sexton, who is starting his fourth term.
“We took office the same year, and it was very beneficial to me to have someone to bounce ideas off of and to work collaboratively with,” Sexton said. “We didn’t always see eye to eye, but we still have a tremendous level of respect for each other.”
The two cities also worked together on homelessness. Burlington helped to fund Martha’s Place, 70 units of permanent supportive housing in Mount Vernon for homeless people. In turn, Mount Vernon contributed to Skagit First Step, a temporary shelter for people experiencing homelessness in Burlington.
“We’ve worked across jurisdictions, to do what we can,” Boudreau said.
Homelessness, drug addiction and mental illness haven’t been as disruptive in Mount Vernon as they have in Bellingham, where deteriorating conditions downtown brought ample political backlash to the mayor’s office during the past four years.
With a population approaching 36,000 — less than half of Bellingham’s — Mount Vernon faces these problems on a smaller scale. But looking beyond this potential advantage, Mount Vernon leaders managed to come up with some effective solutions.
“You just can’t solve this stuff in a vacuum and overnight, just slowly but surely,” council member Beaton said. “We listened to police and fire about what can we do to help them.”
This included a no-camping ordinance and the establishment of temporary homeless housing at churches.
The city also took a page from some of Washington’s bigger cities and hired a social worker in 2017 to serve within the police department.
Since then, Mount Vernon police has built a five-person integrated outreach services program consisting of a social worker, substance use professionals and, potentially in the near future, a nurse practitioner.
“They really work on case-managing people directly on the street,” Boudreau said. “I think we’re probably one of the smallest jurisdictions in the state to do as much as we’re doing.”
Creeping cynicism after 3 terms
Mount Vernon doesn’t have term limits, but after three terms Boudreau had reached her own limit.
“I am exhausted,” Boudreau said, with a big laugh.
“I just know I cannot continue,” she added. “You feel the cynicism creeping in a little bit. You know you’ve given everything, and it would not serve the community for me to be here longer.”
After giving up the weekly coffee chats, Boudreau felt herself losing connection with her community — at least the healthy sort of connection that comes from face-to-face contact.
Recently, she said, many of her interactions have been through social media platforms such as Nextdoor, which are fertile ground for misinformation and spite.
“Elected leaders expect criticism, but it is not a natural thing to enjoy or appreciate, especially when the criticism is threatening, rude, uninformed or disrespectful,” Boudreau said Dec. 22 at a farewell event for her at McIntyre Hall Performing Arts & Conference Center. “It wears on your soul.”
Boudreau isn’t done with city business yet, however. She will continue as part-time project administrator for the Library Commons until it opens later this year. Boudreau also was appointed to a three-year term on the Federal Emergency Management Administration’s National Advisory Council.
Looking ahead to Donovan’s tenure as mayor, Boudreau had parting words of advice that evening for the people Mount Vernon:
“Trust each other and fight the cynicism,” she said. “Engage with civility. I’m sorry, everybody: Reject Facebook and Nextdoor,” she said, drawing knowing laughter from the audience.
“Talk to each other. Seek to understand each other,” Boudreau added. “Our city team has proven we can do the right things.”
And the weekly coffee talks?
“I am absolutely bringing them back,” Mayor Donovan said.
