Mount Vernon: America's Best Small City?
When 500 folks assembled for Mount Vernon’s biggest party one spring weekend, the only building big enough was a massive flower warehouse somewhere out in the tulip fields. Dressed in everything from folk-dance costumes to tuxedos and evening gowns, Skagit County's finest parked along a narrow road, promenaded through the din of evening frogs and into the cavernous warehouse, where the scents of perfume and after-shave blended with resident aromas more, well, agricultural.
Inside, they lined up at the bar and traded gossip while Skye Richendrfer, the town mayor, paraded around the hall in his kilt and bagpiper's regalia, serenading constituents.
The community bash kicked off the Tulip Festival, during which up to 1 million visitors from Seattle and beyond converge on this town of 22,000 and its lush river delta now splendidly arrayed in springtime blooms.
To the locals, the festival is good news: Organizers project millions of dollars to be spent by visitors eager to glimpse the tulip fields. And bad news: two weeks of traffic jams to rival Seattle's evening commute. These things cause Skagitonians to worry that their best-kept community secret is getting out.
Recently, the magazine American Demographics, which turns statistics into stories on trends, rated 193 small American cities (between 15,000 and 50,000 and outside major metropolitan areas) based on quality-of-life factors ranging from climate to crime rates. Better-known places such as Bozeman, Mont., Bend, Ore., and Hilton Head, S.C., all rated high. But, when the data was all compiled, Mount Vernon emerged at the top of the list.
Author Kevin Heubusch explained that Mount Vernon rated particularly high in personal income, parks and proximity to urban amenities, while enjoying lower-than-average property taxes and crime rates. Most of all, the town rated high in "community investment;" folks here are willing to spend money on public goods such as schools and farmland preservation.
Of course, people here already knew that Mount Vernon is the best little city in America. "We're at the foot of the Cascades and the doorstep of the San Juans," says Don Wick, director of the local Economic Development Association. "We're halfway between two of the finest cities in the world, but we don't have to live in either of them."
Like many of his neighbors, Wick is a refugee. He grew up in Ballard and took a job 15 years ago as a disc jockey at the local radio station. "I expected to stay two years MAX! And here I am."
The economy, still heavily agricultural, is healthy, he says. While incomes lag slightly behind King County and the state, housing costs lag much further; you can still buy a three-bedroom rambler for $200,000. Unemployment is higher than Seattle's, but it's declining. "We have it all - a small-town atmosphere, good schools, low crime," adds Tom Verge, a native who went away to law school, then came home to raise his family. "I don't see any downsides."
This is Mount Vernon's secret, and folks here aren't sure they're ready to share it with anybody down south. To most Seattleites, Mount Vernon is where you turn left en route to the San Juan Islands. Seen from I-5, two images dominate: the Skagit River Delta and its vast green fields speckled with whitewashed farmhouses and big red barns; and the equally flat expanses of asphalt parking lots surrounding new strip malls and national retail outlets just north of town. Both are important facets of Greater Mount Vernon, and they add up to an inevitable collision between things urban and rural. American Demographics also lists Mount Vernon as one of the nation's fastest-growing small cities. The city grew by a staggering 30 percent in the 1990s -- three times the King County rate over the same period.
Skagit County, which stretches from Anacortes to Sedro-Woolley, grew by 25 percent to 100,000 people. While most of the county remains rural, newcomers are arriving en masse in the hills east of Mount Vernon, where new housing developments bear a striking resemblance to King County's Sammamish Plateau.
Inevitably, such growth brings problems - overloaded sewers, crowded schools, clashes over the state Growth Management Act. Despite the low crime rates, Skagitonians now hear about minimart stickups, even a drive-by shooting earlier this year. They worry about traffic jams and cellular-phone towers. Family farms face ever-increasing pressure to sell some of the world's most fertile land to those growing malls.
At least some locals worry about how to bring the fast-growing Hispanic community - 7,700 strong countywide - into the mainstream. While hundreds of Hispanics work the fields, harvesting the tulips that are the local emblem, virtually none were evident at the festival kickoff event.
Through these other tensions, Mount Vernon clings stubbornly to its small-town atmosphere, especially in that cluster of brick buildings sandwiched between I-5 and the Skagit River - downtown. Like most cities, downtown long ago lost its major retail stores like Sears and JCPenney. But the town has built up its government center and supported the renovation of the elegant, 70-year-old Lincoln Theater, a nonprofit venue for anything from film symposiums to Celtic string bands. Vacated stores have been filled by new ones, or by local-government offices, lawyers, accountants and other professionals who don't want to work in a mall. As a result, the vacancy rate is near zero.
For the die-hard retailers, competition is tough. Less than two years ago, Rich Allen and his wife bought the well-established Collins Office Supply, where everything from staples to office desks and tulip-decorated stationery can be found in one small corner store. Since then two national chains, Office Max and Office Depot, have opened new stores at the nearby mall. "We saw an immediate decline in sales," Allen says. "We cut our prices, started buying directly from vendors, and now our prices are competitive." Customers are coming back, he says. They like the personal service and the familiarity - especially 72-year-old Betty Hauser, who has been selling supplies at Collins for 38 years and knows every customer by name.
Mount Vernon is that kind of place. Locals can't cross the street without meeting a friend. It is a place where folks still think it's important to be active in Rotary or Kiwanis or the Moose Lodge. Stop by Coffee Corner, a clean little eatery across from the courthouse, and you find a classic lunch counter surrounded by a half-dozen Naugahyde booths, the largest of which is reserved for the daily lunchtime card game involving a city councilman, a local judge, the part-time prosecutor and anybody else with a yen for gin rummy or hearts.
Steve Skelton, the judge, appears anything but judicial in his leather bomber jacket, full beard, dark glasses and diamond stud in one ear. "I live here because I chose to," Skelton says, his pals nodding their agreement while studying their cards. "I like practicing law in a place where I know who I'm working with - the lawyers and most of their clients."
Skelton grew up in Seattle, flunked out of the University of Washington and worked three years as a Seattle cop before going back to school. This time he earned his law degree and got out of town, starting up a criminal-defense practice in Skagit County. That was 20 years ago, and he has never looked back.
Next to him, City Councilman John Cheney is a retired architect who remains deeply involved in civic life - be it land-use disputes or weekly "roundtable discussions" over heady stuff such as "prehistory notions of evolution."
Today, downtown's greatest fear may not be abandonment, but too much success. It hasn't happened yet, but locals figure it's a matter of time before the place is "LaConnerized," rendered altogether too cute by gift shops, trendy bars and Starbucks carts. One local businessman warns the jig is up "when the corner pharmacy becomes a Williams-Sonoma."
Mount Vernon's real secret appears to be a local culture that values civic activism and can-do politics - or what Mayor Richendrfer calls "synergy."
"People here still believe they can have an impact on their community, and so they do," he says.
The proof comes with the periodic floods, when bankers and clerks leave the office and work elbow-to-elbow with housewives and field hands, piling up sandbag dikes. Voters are willing to tax themselves for public benefits. Local taxpayers recently approved $10 million in levies for two new schools and $4 million more for a police station. Senior citizens alone donate thousands of hours of volunteer time to 87 agencies. United Way just finished a record year of fund raising. Last year, American Demographics analyzed data on civic involvement in nonurban counties across the nation and Skagit County ranked in the top 20. "That ranking for civic engagement helps explain the No. 1 rating for our quality of life," says Wick.
Local politics are moderate, bipartisan and positive. The county commissioners and auditor are Republican, the sheriff and state legislators Democrats. They all belong to the same civic clubs. They even seem to like each other.
Richendrfer, whose job is nonpartisan, is a Bellingham native who moved to Mount Vernon years ago and started up a business developing accounting software. In 1995, he was the unknown candidate who used computer-assisted tactics to emerge from a field of six candidates for mayor.
He has promoted public-private partnerships and high-tech innovations. The town has a brand-new Web site and is burying fiber-optic cable in the same ditches as new sewers. There is a new brew pub and a French restaurant and plans to redevelop the aging grain elevator that serves as a downtown landmark. The city is starting work on a milelong park along the river where old-timers have gathered for years, fishing for the elusive steelhead, with a thermos of coffee and a box of doughnuts perched on the hood of a pickup truck.
"We need to do a much better job of showing off what we have to offer," Richendrfer says. "We're playing catch-up with the rest of the state. We need parks, salmon fishing, a stern-wheeler on the river."
Public relations aside, Richendrfer and others insist that the town's biggest challenge is to preserve its agricultural roots - a mission supported by an overwhelming majority of voters. While founded in the 1870s as a fur-trading post, the earliest settlers soon discovered the fertile soils deposited here by the Skagit River. By the 1930s, one journalist reported that the town consisted of about 4,000 souls, plus "two pea canneries, two milk condenseries, an egg and poultry plant, and a chicken and turkey hatchery."
Sixty years later, the pea canneries have been replaced by climate-controlled warehouses and freezer plants. While the new neighborhoods sprawl eastward, one can still walk easily from downtown Mount Vernon across the aging iron bridge and into farm country. For this, locals can thank the river, which created the flats and still insists on overflowing its banks now and then - despite 100 years of dike construction. "The floods are a blessing," says Tom Verge, a local lawyer who grew up here. "Nobody wants to build on the flats, because they know it's a matter of time before they get flooded out."
The pressures on farmers are well-known. No matter how rich the tulip crop, any given acre of land is far more valuable to a commercial developer. And folks here are firm believers in a citizen's right to do what he pleases with his property. As a result, the number of cultivated acres is shrinking. Just last week, local officials formally broke ground for a state-of-the-art hardwood mill, their ceremonial shovels turning over a rich, dark soil that most of the world's farmers can only dream about.
Yet 100,000 acres continue to be farmed, mostly by individuals and families. And, thanks in part to the floods, the delta farmlands have escaped the worst of the development pressure, says EDA director Wick. Some leading farmers have organized Skagitonians to Protect Farmland, raising money to buy development rights to threatened farms and looking for ways to buy more. One possibility is a countywide bond issue, an example of the kind of public-private partnership that the mayor and others talk about.
These are the strategies for preserving the town's "Norman Rockwell character," Richendrfer says. The nagging question is how much growth can be sustained without diluting the very quality that draws people here. "I think most of us agree about what we like here," he adds. "Now the challenge is to agree on how to not screw it up."
