PORT TOWNSEND — Michelle Sandoval and her family were ready for a brand-new life by the time they discovered Port Townsend.
She’d grown up in Ventura County, Calif., and, by age 33, was married, had a son and owned two restaurants. But her home state had changed so much it was unrecognizable. And the recession of the early 1990s had hit the local economy hard.
Sandoval and her husband, Marty Gay, went exploring on the Olympic Peninsula. They’d heard about its beauty. As they drove around, they weren’t sure what they were looking for exactly — but felt they’d know it when they saw it.
Turning back to Seattle, they saw the Port Townsend sign, and decided what the heck, let’s spend the night here.
“We just fell in love,” Sandoval recalled.
“We were here 24 hours,” when it all became clear: This is the place.
Soon after relocating in 1993, Sandoval started working at Aldrich’s, the Uptown grocery store. She got to know her new community, went into the real estate industry and joined the Jefferson County Planning Commission, where she served for six years, working on the county’s Comprehensive Plan.
In 2000, Sandoval ran for the district 1 seat on the Jefferson County Commission, and lost by a narrow margin to Dan Titterness. It was an ugly race, she recalled. But the nastiness didn’t stop her for running for another office: City Council. The first of Sandoval’s five consecutive terms began in 2001; her fellow members elected her mayor three times.
As of Friday, Sandoval, 62, is retired from the council. Monday’s 6:30 p.m. meeting will be the first in two decades without her in one of the seats.
It’s not easy, or even possible, to flip an imaginary switch and not be a city leader any longer. Sandoval awoke at 4 a.m. at least one day last week to hear street maintenance trucks sanding the road, and was reminded of how worried she would get about bad weather’s effects on her town.
All the way up to her final week as mayor, city residents called her about the cold, the homeless shelter, the poor condition of the streets. And Sandoval, an admitted workaholic, didn’t need any prompting to add other things to her list. She recalled one Wooden Boat Festival weekend when the weather was looking lousy, and she expressed her dismay to her husband.
“Marty said: ‘You’re not responsible for the weather,’” she remembered.
The couple celebrated their 40th anniversary in October. They’re contending with a major life change: Gay suffered a stroke nearly two years ago. He has aphasia, so he cannot give words to what’s in his mind. He uses a wheelchair, so Gay and his wife are preparing to move into a more accessible home in Port Townsend.
When asked what she looks forward to in 2022, Sandoval said she has mixed emotions. One is gratitude, “for the learning I did, about how the city functions, and about myself,” she said.
“I’ll really miss it.”
Yet now is the time to concentrate on her husband, who has always been her support person.
For many years he did the cooking and the taxes. Gay and Sandoval were part of the team that opened the Quimper Mercantile in October 2012 after two years of planning and fundraising; he served as chief financial officer. He and Sandoval also own Windermere Real Estate, the company down the street.
The creation of the community department store is one of Sandoval’s happier moments of the past 20 years. Swain’s Outdoor in Port Townsend went out of business, and Sandoval realized downtown needed an anchor.
She, along with Gay, worked with a team of founders, who then launched a public stock offering. That effort raised $691,900 from 812 shareholders, almost all of them local residents.
Sandoval is also proud of her work with LION, the Local Investing Opportunities Network (jeffersonLION.net). The group’s members are local people who choose to invest in local businesses, to promote job growth and the dollar-multiplier effect: money that stays in Jefferson County keeps circulating in the community, nourishing economic health.
LION funders have invested in now-successful businesses from Finnriver Farm & Cidery in Chimacum to HOPE Roofing in Port Townsend, Sandoval noted.
LION and the mercantile weren’t city actions, she said, but her status as mayor helped when it came to starting them.
As for her official City Council work, there have been struggles. Sandoval remembers all too well the recession that began in 2008, and how she fought for an appropriately sized state ferry for Port Townsend — with a reservation system that freed people from waiting long stretches in their cars.
She also remembers another win: state funding for the Peninsula College building at Fort Worden State Park. Until Building 202 was remodeled, Jefferson County was sorely lacking in higher education, Sandoval said.
Through it all, mayor or not, her heart has been with the entrepreneurs, artists and workers who give Port Townsend its character.
“We are a town of small businesses,” Sandoval said.
“If they go away, what kind of town do you have?”
In her final City of Port Townsend newsletter, she wrote about change: the inevitable and exponential kind she believes will come in the next 10 years.
“No one likes to change. And hence one of my sayings about PT — ‘You know how long someone has lived here by how far back their grudges go.’ Let us not have grudges,” Sandoval writes.
“Remain passionate and involved. That means paying attention. Democracy and keeping our town vital demand participation.
“I know I will stay involved. I urge you to do the same.”
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Jefferson County Senior Reporter Diane Urbani de la Paz can be reached at 360-417-3509 or durbanidelapaz@peninsuladailynews.com.
