Darcy Long-Curtiss got her first taste of community political involvement as a high schooler in The Dalles, when she participated in a city visioning meeting and it piqued her interest.
She now hopes to further that involvement by gaining a seat on The Dalles City Council. She is one of three candidates seeking to fill council Position 2, which is being vacated by Dan Spatz. Also running are Dana Journey, a police officer for the Columbia River Intertribal Fish Commission, and Clay Johnson, who works at a desalination plant in The Dalles.
Long-Curtiss, a 1989 graduate of The Dalles High School, studied political science and international studies at Willamette University, which included a semester abroad in Japan.
She’s a financial advisor with Northwestern Mutual and has long been involved in a variety of community organizations.
She’s on the board of the Arc of the Mid-Columbia, volunteers with the Original Wasco County Courthouse, and she volunteers with Home Fires Burning, which supports female veterans and the widows of veterans and their families.
She was involved with The Dalles Sister City Association and took a group of students to the sister city in Japan.
She has a son on the high school robotics team, “so I’m really interested in the education system as well.”
“I have a variety of interests and mostly I like to participate,” she said. “I’ve been volunteering in this community since I was a kid so this is nothing new, this is just a lifestyle for me.”
She and her husband, Daniel Curtiss, who she met in high school, moved away for awhile, and returned to The Dalles, where they are raising two sons. A seat on the city council “seemed like a great opportunity to just participate,” Long-Curtiss said. “One of the things that I’ve really been thinking about a lot is it seems like we as a community of The Dalles don’t have a long term-direction. We do things in one-year increments,” she said.
She said she asked the city manager if there was a long-term plan for the city, and learned “there really wasn’t one.”
Part of that is that councils cannot obligate, or tie the hands, of future councils.
But she would like to see the city create a vision for itself. “Hood River has become something unique of its own, what does The Dalles want to be?”
As for her own input on what she’d like the city to be, Long-Curtiss, who also ran for Wasco County commission in 2010, said, “I want a really positive place that is good for people’s health and their well being and I’d like a place where people have access to everything that they need.”
She added that the main thing for her was, “I’m not running because I think there was something wrong and I’m not running against anyone or anything. It’s an open position, I think it’s important to have people with open minds and good discernment. So, people who can ask questions, read through the materials provided and make the best decision possible and I believe I can do that, so that’s the reason I’m running.”
She’s knocked on some 300 doors as she campaigns, and generally, voters have been positive, she said, though she also heard that people have a perception their opinion is not welcome by the council.
She thinks most of the issues she heard about was due to “a lack of understanding on people’s part. I think the issues are complicated and sometimes people want a bumper sticker version or they just want a one- or two-sentence answer and they don’t understand how you might not like how something is but it is the best option available.
“But for the most part, people mostly talk to me about feeling like things are not transparent or feeling there is an agenda on the city council and they talk about specific issues around that. The Granada Block, the water and sewer rates, those are really the two biggest, and Walmart is the other one.”
She said, “The people that I’ve been talking to have been frustrated by how much time and money the city spent trying to work it out [on the Granada Block] and they feel the city suddenly just walked away and they don’t understand what happened and why they didn’t follow through on that when it was getting close.”
As for Walmart, which is proposed to go in along Interstate 84 by the Exit 82 overpass, Long-Curtiss said people “are frustrated talking to me about how long the process is taking and they don’t understand the vernal pools.”
The property has rare vernal pools, which are wetlands that fill in the wet season and dry up in the warm weather.
She said, “I think people are just hungry at this point for positivity. They want people to get along and they want to move forward as a town. They’re tired, we’ve just been through a big recession and they’re still struggling to come out of that and they’re emotionally drained and I think it’s just time for our community to pull together and figure out how to pull ourselves up and move forward and create a great place to live.”
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