Gig Harbor’s new mayor sees herself as a peacemaker. Here are her plans for the city

Gig Harbor’s new mayor sees her role as calming and reassuring a city staff shaken by four years of turnover.

“I am a peacemaker at heart,” Tracie Markley said in a recent interview. “I like things to be very respectful, and I would rather have a calm, comfortable conversation than a heated, angry one.”

A first-term City Council member, Markley was elected mayor in November, running unopposed and winning 91 percent of the vote. A write-in candidate, former Councilmember Ken Malich, got about 8 percent.

Markley will follow Kit Kuhn, whose four-year term was marked by conflict with city employees. Almost a third of the city’s 100-odd workforce, including supervisors and department heads, quit or retired during his term.

An employee survey found city hall a “troubled workplace,” and that employees felt belittled and micromanaged. The City Council began discussing whether to ditch the “strong mayor” form of government. Ultimately, they didn’t. Kuhn announced in November that he would not seek a second term.

‘I need to step up’

Markley said she was “shocked, but not surprised” at the results of the December, 2019 employee survey, which the City Council had commissioned over the mayor’s objections.

“I knew that things were not going well — everybody knew that — but I wasn’t expecting those 73 pages of comments,” many negative, that the survey drew from the city’s employees, she told The Gateway.

“That’s when I said, I think I need to step up and try to help make it better,” she said. “I didn’t want to see us lose any more of our employees.”

As mayor, Kuhn involved himself in the daily minutiae at City Hall. Employees complained that he overruled the city engineer about street striping and obsessed about the placement of park benches. In a Gateway op-ed, Kuhn said he was doing what voters expected of him.

Markley said she won’t govern in that mold.

“I’m not a micromanager,” she said. “We have a phenomenal staff, and I’m looking forward to just letting them do what they do, letting them be creative in their jobs and trying new ideas. I’m just excited to see what they can do when they are given the freedom to be the professionals that they are.”

Finding a new administrator

Her first priority on taking office Jan. 1, she said, was to start the process of hiring a new city administrator. The present interim administrator, Tony Piasecki, has made it clear he’s not interested in the permanent job.

Piasecki, who has been a consultant to numerous cities, was city administrator at the beginning of Kuhn’s term in 2018, and returned to his old job to replace the previous administrator, Bob Larson, who retired in July.

“Tony has just been invaluable to the city, and I know he wants to make sure we secure the right person before he retires,” Markley said. “That interview process is going to be my first priority.”

Markley said she will rely on the city administrator and the professional staff for the day-to-day running of the city, while she and the City Council set policy.

“I lead with a servant attitude,” she said. “I’m there to make their job easier any way I can.”

Markley said in October she had been job-shadowing the mayor and city administrator to learn the ropes.

“Ever since I learned I was running unopposed, I have been working really, really hard learning the job, working with the acting city administrator and the mayor,” she said then. “I want to be as prepared as possible for seamless transition.”

Projects in the works

Priorities for the city in the coming year will be completing several infrastructure projects the city has underway, Markley said, including a new downtown roundabout, the paddler’s dock and commercial fishermen’s homeport on the waterfront and the YMCA sports complex.

Also on the wishlist are interchange improvements to solve backup problems at state Route 16 and Wollochet Drive, she said. The city is applying for state and federal grants to add a slip lane and improve the on-ramp.

Philosophically, Markley said she’s in tune with the incoming City Council about managing the city’s residential growth — the issue that elected the previous mayor. Under Kuhn’s urging, the council eliminated PRDs, or planned residential development, increased the minimum lot size and took other steps to slow development.

“I am certainly not anti-growth,” Markley said, “but I am one hundred percent for as much local control over growth as we can retain. There are state regulations that force the city to create density numbers that we wouldn’t have chosen for ourselves, and we have to work within them.”

“I wish we would have put the infrastructure in place before all those large PRDs were built,” she added. “And there are a lot of projects still in the pipeline — at least another 200 to 300 homes on Burnham Drive alone.”

“I realize that growth is inevitable — we can’t just put a ‘closed’ sign on the city and say, ‘you can’t move here,’” she said. But the city needs to manage that growth “to keep Gig Harbor the way people are asking us to — the small-town feel, the historic charm, at least in the downtown waterfront area.”

Markley said she plans also to work with Pierce County government to bring developments outside the city limits more in line with the city’s ideas on density.

“It’s challenging when you have different rules on either side of the same street,” she said. “That’s going to be even more important when we do studies to decide which areas of the county we ought to annex.”

Long history in Gig Harbor

Markley, 45, moved to Gig Harbor in 1982, when she was 6 years old, and graduated from Peninsula High School in 1994. She worked in real estate and as a parks commissioner for two years. She was elected to City Council Position 4 in November 2019, after running unopposed.

Her father, the Rev. Christopher Bayer, founded the Church on the Rock, later called Gig Harbor Four Square Church. “He was a man who knew no strangers,” she said fondly during a 2019 interview.

At age 19, she suffered a tiny stress fracture in one foot that led to a rare neurological condition which has kept her “in and out wheelchairs” for 20 years. It causes her intense pain at times, and she is working on a book about “how to keep joy in the middle of pain.”

Her husband, Joshua Markley, a Naval Reserve commander, works as a civilian project manager at the Keyport naval facility. They have two daughters, Hailey and Sarah.

The family moved away in 2008 for Navy deployments in Virginia and California and came home again in 2017.

“We lived in Virginia Beach and Imperial Beach, outside San Diego,” she said. “I was so homesick for Gig Harbor the whole time, but I got to see how other cities handled their problems.”

Markley got into local politics during a long-running dispute with the developer of her North Gig Harbor neighborhood, McCormick Creek. It’s a long story, she said, but it whetted her appetite for getting things done.

On the park board, she said, she learned “the people love our parks and they really want more.”

But she also learned, she added, to pay attention to the details, like whether playing field lights would shine in people’s windows, or volleyball parking would back up onto residential streets.

Upheld strong-mayor format

Markley was one of the councilmembers who pressed for the employee survey that brought City Hall problems into focus.

“If there is a problem, I don’t bury things in the dark. I drag it into the light and I want to talk about it,” Markley said then. “... We cannot just ignore them and pretend that everything is fine over there when it’s not.”

Kuhn had his supporters. Jeff Katke, a Gig Harbor business owner who was one of the mayor’s campaign contributors, argued in a Gateway op-ed in July 2020 that Kuhn was only trying to “change the culture” of city workers for the better. Letter writers gave Kuhn credit for acquiring Soundview Forest Park, saving it from development.

While Markley was among those who expressed alarm at the survey, when the council voted Jan. 11 on whether to ask voters to abandon the strong-mayor form of government, Markley joined the majority in rejecting the idea, 4-3, saying it was too soon.

“I have thought long and hard about this subject,” Markley said then. “My gut feeling is this is not a good time to do this. I think we are going through quite enough as a city, quite enough as a nation. I think we need some stability.”

Now, with a new mayor and a new council, “everyone has a clean slate,” she said.

“I know it’s going to take some time for people to get used to me,” she said. “It will take some time for them to trust that I am who I say I am. But in time, I’m sure they will.”

Markley said she wants Gig Harbor to be the kind of workplace where “people stay for years and years and work their way up internally.”

Also, “I want it to be fun,” she added. “I like to laugh. I hope we can all together take a collective deep breath and have some fun in our jobs.”