What do Arlington locals make of longtime mayor’s resounding defeat?

ARLINGTON — Andrew Albert worries about what lies ahead for Arlington.

A fourth-generation farmer whose business sits just outside city limits on Highway 530, he feels the surge of growth that has become a recurring theme across Snohomish County over the past two decades. The biggest worry, for many residents, is that Arlington will lose its small-town charm. Albert also has to worry about urbanization encroaching on his hay farm.

That’s part of the reason why he’s a big supporter of Don Vanney Jr., who will soon be sworn in as Arlington’s new mayor. Vanney stands for single-family housing and fewer apartments. Barbara Tolbert, the outgoing mayor, welcomed big businesses and more multi-family housing.

About 21,000 people live in Arlington, a city sitting at the confluence of the north and south forks of the Stillaguamish River. The population in 2000? A little under 12,000.

Four years ago, Vanney lost the mayoral election to Tolbert by a razor-thin margin of 32 votes. The next year, he was appointed to the City Council.

This time around, he dominated, taking 63.9% of the vote to 36.0% for Tolbert, who had served as mayor since 2011.

In an interview at his home last month, Vanney described his political leanings as “neither party.” He noted the mayoral position in Arlington is nonpartisan. Vanney did not receive campaign money from either party.

“You have too many diehard Republican versus diehard Democrat that are buried in the sand,” he said. “Come together, you’ve got to talk. You’re not going to solve anything being bullheaded and sitting in the corner.”

For voters like Albert, 40, that message landed — as did many other things Vanney said.

“I like his ideals,” Albert said. “There’s obviously going to be expansion and development, but to appreciate what we have here and what makes Arlington unique — and maybe that’s more important than building high rises on Main Street and putting in more gas stations at Island Crossing. And maybe it would be better to just leave it as farm ground so we have that majestic entrance into town.”

Albert is hardly the only person who wonders about Arlington’s future. Jac Cash, one of the owners of FauxyFurr on Olympic Avenue, has seen the town change over the past decade. She supports more multi-family housing around the downtown core, within reason.

For her, it means more foot traffic at FauxyFurr. She lives nearby and loves being able to walk around downtown. She too is a big supporter of Vanney.

“Barb was out of touch,” Cash said. “Barb lacks charisma. The ability to actually know constituents. Having been a business owner on this road for 10 years, she didn’t shake my hand until I had a grand opening here. Right there that says something about missed opportunities to actually know the community. And it hurt my feelings, I didn’t feel like I mattered.”

To many, Tolbert represented the type of change that tends to polarize smaller cities — rapid growth.

As her time in office dwindled, she said she was proud of her tenure.

“We accomplished a lot over the last 12 years,” Tolbert wrote in an email to The Daily Herald. “Resetting the City’s financial structure and overcoming our deficit. I am proud of the team of dedicated public employees I worked with. My focus on local jobs and elevating human services is some of my proudest accomplishments when ⅓ of Arlington’s residents struggle financially.”

She wished Vanney well.

‘Different people’

Olympic Avenue in downtown Arlington bustles during the holiday season.

Big businesses — Amazon, Tesla, Eviation — have come to the town, joining downtown mainstays like the ever-busy Stilly Diner. The city’s past lies in agriculture and logging, the latter having almost fully dried up, locals will tell you.

Growth encroaches from the south, spurred on by investment in the Cascade Industrial Center, 4,000 acres of manufacturing and industrial zoned land shared with Marysville.

Amazon recently opened a cavernous, $355 million facility in the nearby Cascade Industrial Complex. Tesla could be the next large company to arrive. The Amazon facility is 2.8 million square feet. The company said it created more than 1,000 jobs when it opened.

In the Stilly Coffee House, blocks from downtown, patrons yearn for the days of Arlington as a humble, blue-collar town.

“Little ole Arlington is gone,” former Arlington school board member Tim McDonald said, as he sipped coffee and waited for his laundry.

McDonald, 78, has a few gripes. He feels there’s more homelessness, the traffic is worse and the jobs at Amazon’s sprawling new warehouse are not the well-paying positions residents were promised.

Talk with businesses owners throughout Arlington’s core and it becomes more clear why many pushed for Vanney.

“When we opened here, he said, ‘I hunt, I’ve got all these turkey feathers I would love to gift you,’” Cash said. “So he brought this big bag of feathers that I use to make all these things. And it’s like, he didn’t have to do that, it’s just in him. So what I felt when I’m in Don’s presence is someone who’s generally interested in my wellbeing.”

There are about 850,000 people in Snohomish County, with projections the county will hit a million people by the 2040s.

All that growth has to happen somewhere. Arlington will inevitably be one of those places. But how? And how much?

New apartments have brought increased traffic. About 75% of housing in Arlington is single-family. Including both apartments and houses, 71% of renters in the city are considered low-income.

“When you get people who rent, you get different people,” Celeste Stevens-Graham, 85, said as she sat in the Stilly Coffee House.

Stevens-Graham, too, is a big Vanney supporter.

“We need change,” she said.

That word resonates deeply with many Arlington residents.

Vanney ran on the campaign slogan, “Time for Change.” His campaign website said he represented “the change we need to bring community trust back and to preserve Arlington’s history.”

It also means a lot of different things. It is partially a reference to Tolbert’s lengthy stay in office. It can mean a change in direction or the change her tenure brought, that traffic and homelessness residents attribute partly to her.

“The people of Arlington are tired,” said Shawn Angel, a bartender at Skookum Brewery. “They don’t want change.”

‘What I want to preserve’

About a mile away and just above downtown, Vanney helped his wife, Kathy, set up Christmas decorations outside their house built in the early 1900s.

It’s a festive and nicely kept home, with wood furnishings everywhere. His background is in timber sales and management.

Retired now, he is a coach and mentor for the Washington State Special Olympics. The work is personal for Vanney, whose brother has a physical disability.

Vanney could pass for Hulk Hogan’s long-lost brother: He’s bald, with a horseshoe mustache and a gold chain around his neck. He has a disarming demeanor and a clear passion for his hometown.

Vanney will take office in January. Arlington’s mayor makes $99,000 per year.

Vanney said two complaints were constant while he was on the campaign trail — the city needs more police officers and the traffic is becoming a major issue. He sees the city as a place that can accommodate some growth, but should do so with small homes.

Townhouses would be fine, he said. Large apartments are the kind of urbanization he wants to avoid.

“I still think Arlington has its small-town feel,” Vanney said. “And that’s what I want to preserve.”

Arlington is a small world. Friends run into each other running errands.

Lauren Hammond, the owner of Hammond’s Bakery, chatted with a family friend who came in for a lunchtime sandwich last month. Hammond has lived in Arlington since 2008. The bakery has become a downtown mainstay in the two years since opening.

Hammond loves their little downtown strip, but worries about its future as e-commerce and big box chains encircle the city.

“People love to say it’s like a little Hallmark town, but we can only have that if people actually do their shopping here,” Hammond said. “Sometimes they do, sometimes they don’t.”

During the holidays, downtown is brightly lit and busy with people shopping. Festive decorations sit on the sidewalk or in store windows. Flyers hang, advertising various community events. It feels full of life.

Cash, for one, loves the changes that have come to the main drag since starting a business there.

“Ten years ago, any store that was here was a replica of the store next to it,” Cash said. “And they tended to be antique shops with little kiosks. It was on repeat the whole way down the block. What I see is diversity in the shop concepts.”

‘Then the rent goes up’

Vanney views homeownership as a gateway to stability.

Even putting people of different income levels next to each other can make an impact, he said.

“You give that person on the lower income level, you give him the opportunity to live next to somebody with a middle or higher income level, they’re going to respect their place and they’re going to be more apt to look, ‘Hey here’s this guy making it, I can too,’” Vanney said.

He does have his eye on land near Cascade Valley Hospital called East Hill. Developers have told him there’s potential for 2,000 homes there and that the property owners are ready to sell, he said.

The city is looking at several options for that area, according to its Housing Action Plan. One option would be mixing in small-footprint single-family homes.

“We’re running out of buildable land,” Vanney said. “So if it’s all apartments, when you don’t have an inventory of single-family homes and people want to live here, they go to apartments. So to me, it’s a Catch-22 because people that are wanting to live here are being forced into apartments, and then the rent goes up.”

Vanney is open to development in certain places. Smokey Point, for starters. A long-term project seeks to transform Smokey Point Boulevard into a more walkable, urban district. New roundabouts have forced at least one storied local tavern to close. Concept art shows a sleek, modern downtown.

Smokey Point Boulevard is currently a mix of single-family homes and businesses along the thoroughfare, before it wraps into farmland and trees and eventually spits a traveler out at Island Crossing.

The intersection of 172nd Street NE and Smokey Point Boulevard is a daily gridlock and the corridor is growing rapidly.

Many, including Vanney, feel this area has been ignored. Smokey Point was incorporated into Arlington in 1999.

“Give them their own walkable street and go get the city involved with them,” Vanney said. “Right now, I feel like a lot of them feel like the stepchild. There’s secondhand everything, nothing happens to them. I think we’re going to grow no matter what, but I still think this is the way we manage it and keep the small-town feel and that’s where I think we can do that.”

Vanney wants to bring in a sports facility akin to the ambitious $73 million project planned in Marysville. Part of his campaign pitch was creating more things for Arlington youth to go do.

“I’ve got lots of ideas,” he said. “But it’s where do you get the money and how do you fund it?”

Perhaps, the mayor-elect suggested, the city could be the Puget Sound’s version of Leavenworth, the Bavarian-themed tourist destination on the other side of the Cascades.

“I would love downtown Arlington to almost compete with Leavenworth. People that don’t have the time or luxury to drive over there,” Vanney said. “Come to Arlington, we have a great event. We’ve got great shops. I mean, to me, just promote it all the more.”

‘A very clear picture’

On July 22, organizers with the nonprofit Arlington Pride held their second annual Pride celebration at Legion Park.

Leading up to the event, a heated public debate erupted between the organizers and anti-Pride protesters.

Arlington Pride reached out to human rights watchdog Western States Center when online threats and harassment left them wondering if the event might be targeted. The city initially asked if the Pride group would consider not having drag performers at the event, then asked them to pony up cash for security and insurance.

It led to the event’s postponement and a summer’s worth of impassioned public comments from both sides at City Council meetings.

By the time the event finally came around, attendees were met with at least 75 protesters, many of whom stayed throughout the programming. They held signs calling drag performers “groomers.”

The city paid $8,373.25 in overtime to 13 officers patrolling the event, according to records obtained by The Herald in a public disclosure request.

Vanney said he supports Pride “100 percent,” but that he felt organizers took an unnecessarily hostile approach this year — and still, the city could’ve done a better job communicating with all parties. He also noted a prior vice president left the Pride nonprofit. He believed new leadership “had an agenda.”

“I think they wanted the media attention,” Vanney said.

The group pushed back against those assertions. They also said most of the group’s leadership has been there since its inception.

Tolbert and the police “made up the story about us wanting a bigger event and media attention,” organizer Caera Gramore wrote in an email. “We wanted a smaller event because that’s easier to put together; a bigger event is more work and costs more resources in general.”

Arlington Pride board member Joy Johnson said the group hasn’t met with Vanney.

Having political leaders speak in support of such events can be meaningful, said Kate Bitz, a member of the Western States Center.

“We have seen just how much things can escalate in our region if local government does not show leadership on these issues,” Bitz said.

In multiple interviews, Vanney said he would welcome the return of Arlington Pride. He does not feel like the controversy harmed the town’s reputation.

“After the event, it was business as normal,” Vanney said. “I think there was just bad communication through the whole thing, that’s what it was.”

‘A phenomenal little town’

Vanney feels votes from younger constituents propelled him into office.

Angel, the Skookum bartender, said Vanney came into the bar and talked to him for 20 minutes to try to secure his vote.

“It’s a phenomenal little town,” Angel said, that’s “Proud of who they are and they don’t want to lose it, and I think that’s why Barb (Tolbert) didn’t stand a chance. I liked that Don lives right downtown.”

Vanney quipped he knocked on every door in the town — and twice in some neighborhoods.

Campaign filings showed $15,000 in independent expenditures supporting him from the Master Builders Association of King and Snohomish Counties. The Responsible Economic Growth In Our Neighborhood (REGION) political action committee also paid for over $3,000 in mailings for Vanney.

Independent expenditures are money spent either for a candidate or against their opponent, but not made in coordination with the candidate.

REGION PAC threw money behind several other candidates this cycle, including incumbent Sheriff Adam Fortney, whom Vanney endorsed, and multiple Arlington City Council members. The PAC is funded primarily by construction companies, per campaign finance filings.

Vanney said he didn’t hear anything from the outgoing mayor, Tolbert, until after the county auditor certified the election late last month. In the meantime, he met with city officials to begin working on his agenda for the next four years.

Vanney said city employees were “jumping with joy” about a change in mayoral leadership. He said he spoke to Paul Ellis, the city’s administrator.

“He said he had his first directors’ meeting with directors after the election. He said it was like night and day,” Vanney said. “He said before they were clamped, that he’d have to draw something out of them. Now he says he couldn’t get them to shut up. I think the tension, a lot of them were under tension.”

He added: “I mean they were afraid of their job, if they did something wrong or said something wrong. That’s just, you shouldn’t have to work like that. That’s not a healthy work environment.”

Tolbert did not respond to a request for comment on the work environment at City Hall. Ellis denied speaking to Vanney.

“This is not a quote from me, I do not recall this conversation,” Ellis wrote in an email. “Mayor Tolbert has been in attendance at the directors’ meetings since the election.”

What happens next is that Vanney gets to try to make his vision for the city into a reality.

“I’m just anxious to get started,” Vanney said. “Everyone says, ‘Oh, are you ready for the work?’ No, I’m ready for the excitement.”

Correction: A previous version of this story misstated which candidates the Responsible Economic Growth In Our Neighborhood (REGION) political action committee supported this election cycle.

Jordan Hansen: 425-339-3046; jordan.hansen@heraldnet.com; Twitter: @jordyhansen.