Frank Kuntz Looks Back At Twelve Years As Mayor of Wenatchee
And discusses what he's achieved during his time in city hall, as well as what challenges lay ahead for the city and region
After twelve years as mayor of Wenatchee, Frank Kuntz is ready for some me time.
In addition to serving as mayor for more than a decade, Kuntz has a full-time job as owner of a local CPA firm.
“The intensity of two jobs is a lot,” he said. “Having two jobs at 48 is a lot easier than having two jobs at 60. It’s time to slow down. Time to get home from work at a reasonable hour.”
During his time in office, Wenatchee has seen big changes. When he became mayor, the footprint of the city was smaller. Increasing Wenatchee’s size, and its tax revenue is what he counts as his biggest achievement.
“Sitting where we sit today I would say it’s the annexation of Olds Station,” he said. “Because that would never happen today. With the county board of adjustment, it would not happen.”
He said they wouldn’t have been able to hire eight new police officers in eight years or put money into Methow Park, or pledge funds to the campaigns to build a new YMCA and a new museum without the annexation of Olds Station.
Other wins were fixing the Town Toyota Center, getting the city “out of the fire business,” and securing funding for the Confluence Parkway project.
What he’s not thrilled about is the fact that the city still doesn’t have a permanent funding source for roads and he would have liked to add more sidewalks, especially in South Wenatchee.
“I wish we would have done many, many, many more streets of sidewalks, but you know every block is a half a million bucks,” he said.
Twelve years ago, homelessness in Wenatchee wasn’t a problem, he said. Now it’s one of the city’s biggest issues, and there’s very little any one city or town can do to address it. The main reasons for that are legal precedents that greatly restrict how city police can deal with the unhoused.
“We’ve got three really bad court cases that just tie our hands whether you like them or don’t like them,” he said. “How the next mayor works their way through that will be very interesting.”
Cases like Martin v. Boise and Washington State Supreme Court’s “Blake decision” create some pretty narrow guardrails on how police can interact with the unhoused on public property and members of the public suspected to be carrying or on drugs.
Without a place for the unhoused to go, the city cannot roust homeless folks from camps or tell those living in motorhomes and campers to get off city streets. If the city, and by extension the Wenatchee Police Department, make bad decisions when it comes to how they treat the unhoused that could make things harder for cities like Wenatchee to deal with the problem.
“We’ve decided our goal is to not create any more bad law,” he said. “Because we could do something that might be the next case that gets overturned and now something else is going to be illegal in our state.”
Kuntz said he’s always at a loss when candidates running for offices like his say they’re going to “fix homelessness” because the issue is so much bigger than Wenatchee. You do the best you can with what you have, but you just don’t have the tools to fix national issues.
A couple of pieces of advice he has for his successor, whomever that may be, is to make communicating with your city council and staff a priority and consider all the information before making decisions. Do not rush to judgment, he said.
“Because the mayor has a ton of authority in a strong mayor form of government,” he said.