.png)
Longtime member retiring from Newport City Council
NEWPORT — As a longtime member of the Newport City Council, Ken Smith was there for some fun as well as not so fun times for the city.
He told Mayor Keith Campbell and his fellow council members as much Monday, Dec. 15, when the council held their last meeting before the end of Smith’s term Wednesday, Dec. 31. After this year, Smith is retiring from the council, with Nathan Weathers to replace him in Position No. 1.
“I’m stepping away when I feel like it’s in good hands,” said Smith, 79, at the meeting. “I think it’s time.”
Smith has served on the council for about 23 years. He ran for council in the early 2000s while the city Planning Commission was working on the growth management plan, a federally and state-required plan for cities to manage growth and development over a period of five to 25 years. Smith said the plan was a proven way for cities to “get things done.”
“It’s like in the military,” Smith said. His father was in the service, and Smith himself was in the Navy during the Vietnam era. “You figure out what you want to do, then you figure out how you’re going to do it, then you tell people what you’re going to do, then you do it, then you remind people what you did.”
Back then, none on the council knew much about the plan or how to use it, Smith said. As a member of the Planning Commission for two-and-a-half years before his election to the council, Smith recognized that running was the best way to advocate for the plan and ensure the city paid attention to it.
“The city is limited to what it can do,” Smith said. “But with the right planning, then you can come up with grant monies to help the process.”
Smith became involved in local government a couple years after moving to Newport from California, where he was born and later earned art degrees from his studies at seven different colleges and junior colleges, in 1996.
After witnessing his Newport neighbor’s landlord resolve a complaint with an illegal pipe installation, Smith said he reported it to the city, feeling it was “not cool and not legitimate.” The city sent staff over to the residence, and they found Smith was right.
“Then a couple weeks later in The Miner Newspaper, there was an ad for an opening on the Planning Commission in the City of Newport,” Smith said. “So I went and applied.”
Throughout his decades on the council, Smith has observed that the state rather than the city governs Newport, with the council amending or adapting legislation according to changes on the federal and state levels.
To Smith, the biggest of these changes was the addition of the comprehensive plan. Like the growth management plan, the comprehensive plan provides cities like Newport the tools to guide land use for upwards of 20 years. Through the comprehensive plan, “the future is planned, not just allowed to happen,” Smith said.
“Every time the plan is updated, then it goes to the state for review by 13 different agencies, and they all have to sign off that that’s, from their perspective, a usable plan,” Smith said. “Then it becomes codified, and it is actually the legal way that the city operates.”
In the last 23 years, the council has become more involved in the annual Easter Egg Hunt and other community events, which Smith considered both fun and civically engaging. What he did not consider fun was dealing with city controversy, such as a former police chief purchasing automatic weapons without authorization in his insistence for a tactical assault squad. At a council meeting, Smith said to the police chief, “Absolutely no. No way, no how.”
Refusing to “govern his opinion,” Smith added, upset some people.
“A lot of that is on purpose,” Smith said. “It’ll put us in a position where we have to talk about something, or we can put it away.”
Even so, many people are grateful for Smith’s time on the council.
At his last meeting before the end of his term, Smith received thanks from the mayor, council members and even Pend Oreille County Commissioner Robert Rosencrantz, who praised Smith for not just his civic contributions, but his art. Smith has displayed at Spokane International Airport and Vessel Gallery and Clay Studio, and was a set designer for Create Arts Center, Northwoods Performing Arts and several theatre groups across Spokane and Coeur d’Alene.
“If I had to frame who is this person, I’d say he’s not a city council member who also happens to be an artist — he’s an artist who also just happens to be a city council member,” Rosencrantz said at the meeting. “So, you’ve had a long and distinguished period of serving the people of Newport.”
That period is not over yet. Smith is not leaving Newport, and he plans to stay involved in the Planning Management Council for Aging and Long-Term Care of Eastern Washington and some projects organized by local service groups.
He retires from the council with advice for those who served alongside him.
“Follow the plan, do what’s right and don’t get hung up on the things that don’t happen,” Smith said.
