Both elected to serve Spokane, two city and county leaders from opposite ends of the political spectrum put their differences aside to model the benefits of cooperative governing.

By Ted Katauskas | Photos by Rajah Bose

For two years now Spokane City Councilmember Betsy Wilkerson and Spokane County Commissioner Mary Kuney have had a standing date—at least quarterly but preferably monthly—to meet on an afternoon at the Maryhill Winery Tasting Room in Spokane’s trendy Kendall Yards neighborhood. If it’s particularly glorious outside during the summer and fall, they’ll secure a patio table overlooking the Spokane River. They meet to sip chardonnay (Wilkerson prefers whites) and merlot (Kuney favors reds), maybe share an appetizer, and catch up on the goings on in their personal and professional lives. There’s also lots of laughing and networking with leaders from local businesses, nonprofits, and government who inevitably wander over to say hello and linger as their meeting stretches ever outward, sun sinking toward the horizon.

Spokane County Commissioner Mary Kuney (above left) and City of Spokane Councilmember Betsy Wilkerson chat at one of their ongoing get-togethers at the Maryhill Winery tasting room.

The Spokane Pavilion outdoor concert venue.

“We call it our wine and whine meetup,” says Wilkerson, who was appointed to fill a vacancy on Spokane’s council in 2020. She was elected to the position two years later and is only the second Black woman ever to serve on the city’s white, male-dominated council, as well as the first Black councilmember in nearly 20 years. “When I got elected and people from my community found out that Mary was my friend, I said, ‘Listen, I’ve known Mary for years. I don’t care what her political allegiance is. I was friends with Mary before I got into this political office, and I’ll be friends with Mary after I leave this political office.' That’s important to me. We are elected to our seats for four-year terms. But friendships are for a lifetime. And both require work to maintain.”

Wilkerson and Kuney share a laugh on the tasting room's outdoor patio.

The work of maintaining this relationship also helps cement Spokane’s long-standing tradition of city and county cooperative governing.

“The winery is a lovely venue where you have a glass of wine and an appetizer and just sit and relax for a little bit,” says Kuney, who was appointed to fill a vacancy on the Spokane County Commission in 2017 and in 2022 was re-elected to serve a four-year term. “It’s also a nice way to catch up personally, but also to talk about what’s going on with the city, and what’s going on with the county. We both give each other perspectives that help us make better decisions individually.”

While networking with community leaders, including Spokane City Councilmember Roberta Greene, who inevitably wander over to say hello.

To casual onlookers, Wilkerson and Kuney have little in common. In business attire, Wilkerson’s palette verges from bright pink to lime green (and she has been known to pair a patterned dashiki with black leather pants) while Kuney sticks to conventional suits in shades of navy and gray. Professionally, Wilkerson is a small business owner who runs Moore’s Assisted Living, a residential care facility for mentally disabled adults, while Kuney is a CPA and an entrepreneur who co-founded Summit Tea, a mail-order retail business specializing in imported Japanese and Chinese teas. As a local elected official, Wilkerson’s a Democrat who describes herself as a progressive, while Kuney’s a Republican serving the conservative Spokane Valley and southeast county. Yet the two friends have never been closer or leaned on each other more, especially as their careers in local government have assumed parallel upward trajectories.

“I’ve known Mary for years. I don’t care what her political allegiance is. I was friends with Mary before I got into this political office, and I’ll be friends with Mary after I leave this political office. That’s important to me. We are elected to our seats for four-year terms. But friendships are for a lifetime. And both require work to maintain.”
– Betsy Wilkerson

In January 2023, two months after Kuney was named president of the Washington State Association of Counties (WSAC), the Spokane County Commission selected her as its chair. In June, three months after Wilkerson announced her candidacy for Spokane City Council president, the Association of Washington Cities elected her as its president.

“I was thrilled to learn that my friend Betsy Wilkerson was elected president of the Association of Washington Cities,” Kuney said in AWC’s June press release, which noted that with Kuney at the helm of WSAC and Wilkerson’s election as president of AWC, both nonpartisan statewide leadership organizations were now headed by local elected women from Spokane, perhaps for the first time ever. “WSAC and AWC have a long history of partnership and working together to get things done. I am confident that this partnership will only strengthen under President Wilkerson’s leadership.”

While some deem this convergence to be nothing less than historic, Wilkerson views it as a unique leadership opportunity for a region known as being on the sunny side of the state to emerge from the long shadow of western Washington influence and finally have its time to shine.

“What’s exciting about Mary and me in these roles is the leadership from eastern Washington,” Wilkerson says. “That two women have never held these seats simultaneously—and I may be the first Black woman—yeah, it matters, but it matters less than the fact that both positions are held by local leaders from this side of the state. So, I think it’s just an exciting time for eastern Washington.”

Wilkerson and Kuney in March at YWCA Spokane’s Women of Achievement Awards luncheon, where Wilkerson was recognized for her work in public and government service

“A lot of advocacy is skewed a little bit to the other side of the state, on the other side of what we call the Cascade Divide. I see this as important because it shows that, even though we are pretty rural here, we are doing good stuff. This region is producing leaders for our state and moving us forward together.”

City leadership

Betsy Wilkerson’s journey as a community leader and local power broker began in the winter of 1963, when Louisiana “Lou” Mitchell, a recently divorced hairdresser with four young children, relocated from the heart of Mississippi to eastern Washington, sight unseen, at the invitation of a friend who wanted to open a hair salon. She was drawn in part by the sound of Spokane’s motto: “The City of Promise.”

“It was the height of the Jim Crow South, and my mom was a Black hairdresser, so she moved us out here looking for a better way of life,” recalls Wilkerson, who was 6 years old at the time. “It was cold when I got here. My hands froze because I knew nothing about wearing gloves, so that was my first experience of Spokane. Culturally, it was different, too.”

Lou Mitchell settled her young family in Spokane’s East Central neighborhood, the heart of a small but vibrant Black community whose growth during the 1930s and ’40s had been driven by large-scale government construction projects like the Grand Coulee Dam and Fairchild Air Force Base. (In 1960, the U.S. Census tallied the city’s “Negro” population at 2,993, roughly 1 percent of the total; 63 percent of this population lived in East Central, which comprised just three of the city’s 40-odd census tracts.)

“In many ways, I grew up in a bubble in Spokane because there was a Black neighborhood,” says Wilkerson. “In the neighborhood and through church circles, I was surrounded by Black people, and they all looked like me.”

Not so in the city’s public schools (98 percent of Spokane’s population then was white, compared to 83 percent today). Wilkerson attended Edison Elementary and graduated from Lewis & Clark High School in 1973, and then enrolled at Jarvis Christian College, a historically Black college in East Texas. There, as a young adult, she sought to recreate the cultural bonds of her East Central childhood but was ostracized as a “white girl” when students there, many from the Deep South, learned she was from Spokane. After two years, Wilkerson dropped out of college, married, and moved with her husband to Detroit. But the marriage soon dissolved, and as a single mother with two little kids in tow, like her mother before her, she decamped for Spokane in search of a better life.

By then, Lou Mitchell had found a more lucrative career as an aide with Spokane Mental Health Treatment Services. She had changed her surname to Moore after marrying a janitor who worked at Sacred Heart Hospital and who, like her, was an ordained minister (together they would later cofound Spokane’s Mt. Zion Holiness Church). In 1976, the couple got a loan from the Small Business Administration and bought a three-story, nine-bedroom house in Spokane’s Browne’s Addition. The building had formerly served as a Salvation Army shelter for unwed mothers. It’s where they opened Moore’s Assisted Living, and settled in an apartment on the third floor.

Home again, without a college degree, Wilkerson cast about for a meaningful career for herself that also might benefit the city’s now-fragmented Black community. She first worked her way up from bank teller to loan officer at Spokane Teachers Credit Union, where she spent a decade doing her part to offset redlining practices that had made home ownership unattainable for many East Central residents. Then she worked as Eastern Washington program manager for the American Heart Association (AHA), flitting about the dry side of the state as a spokesperson for the AHA’s “Wellness in a Box” campaign promoting the benefits of a heart-healthy lifestyle (Black people are 30 percent more likely to die of heart disease than white people). In the early 1990s, as her mother and stepfather announced their retirement, Wilkerson took over as owner and administrator of Moore’s Assisted Living, an established small business with 18 residents and nine full-time employees.

“I thought, ‘I’m going to do the dutiful daughter thing and I’m going to try it,’” Wilkerson recalls. “But I took to it like a duck takes to water, and I never looked back.”

As a small business owner, Wilkerson finally found the clout she needed to start inserting herself in Spokane’s power circles as a leader and advocate representing East Central’s overlooked wants and needs. One after another, she joined or was recruited to join some of the city’s most influential committees, foundations, and boards, including the Junior League of Spokane (where she met Mary Kuney and became that organization’s first Black president), Spokane’s Women Helping Women Fund (a nonprofit serving women and children in need of financial support, where she also served as board president), the Innovia Foundation (Spokane’s community foundation, where she helped direct high-impact grants to her East Central neighborhood), Spokane Housing Ventures (a HUD-funded nonprofit that provides housing assistance to more than 6,000 low-income households, where she served as chair), and the Washington State Commission on Judicial Conduct, where she was appointed by Gov. Gary Locke and would serve for 16 years under three different administrations.

“I tell people my classroom was my community,” Wilkerson says. “I got to serve in many capacities and learn stuff hands-on that I couldn’t have learned in any classroom.”

Such as the power of grassroots organizing.

In 2018, at a backyard barbecue hosted by the late Sandra Williams (a local civil rights activist who served on the Washington State Commission on African American Affairs and founded and published The Black Lens, a monthly newspaper covering Spokane’s Black community), Wilkerson and Williams joined three other community leaders in each pledging $2,000 in seed money for a $375,000 fundraising campaign to create the Carl Maxey Center, a hub for Spokane’s Black community.

“We saw that there was a gap; there were no services for the African American community or a place for them to gather,” says Wilkerson, who volunteered to serve as the nascent nonprofit’s president. “We went out and raised the money to pay for the building, so it’s ours. We own it scot-free. We wrote grants and got money from the state for the first phase of the renovation, which has been completed. We’re now on phase two of the remodel, which is paid for as well.

“We were modeling the Black ownership we wanted to see in our community. We could have rented a building, but we didn’t want to be renters; we wanted to be owners, to control our own destiny.”

Wilkerson helped found Spokane's Carl Maxey Center (left), a local nonprofi t named for a legendary civil rights leader that serves as a gathering place for the city's Black community.

The Carl Maxey Center was named for a legendary local civil rights activist (a boxer with a national title who also was Spokane’s first Black attorney), and in addition to being a gathering place for social events, it has a larger purpose to “empower and uplift” Spokane’s Black community by offering small business loans and financial assistance for those struggling to pay rent and tuition, as well as providing a free legal clinic that would be staffed by lawyers offering their services pro bono.

Late in 2019, with Wilkerson leading the Maxey Center’s rollout, Breean Beggs, a civil rights attorney in the middle of his first full term on Spokane’s council, asked Wilkerson if she might consider filling his seat representing East Central’s District 2 when he vacated it in January 2020 to serve as council president.

“I didn’t tell him no, I told him, ‘Hell no!’” jokes Wilkerson, who was then 64. “I had just gotten my Social Security information and I was getting ready to retire. People think I’m joking, but I had started making plans to cut back on my business and I was getting ready to start transferring it over to my adult children and I was going to get my dream job.”

Which was?

“Being the lunch lady at the middle school my three grandkids were attending,” she deadpans. “There are so many kids of color who have absolutely no family support and I’ve always been a big advocate of the public school system. I just wanted to be there and offer encouragement and be a good role model. I wanted to make my grandkids uneasy too. That was just going to be the fun part!”

But then she started thinking of another role model from the Black community: Roberta Greene, a lifelong friend and fellow member of her church who was the first and only Black woman to serve on Spokane’s City Council when she took office in 1996 and completed her second term in 2004.

“I was a little intrigued because it had been 20 years since a person of color had been elected to this council—20 years!— in the second-largest city in the state of Washington,” she adds. “I was a young person under Roberta Greene. I voted all the time, and I paid attention, but I just never saw myself sitting in an elected position. But when I look back at my volunteer life, unbeknownst to me, every opportunity to volunteer, every leadership position was tracking me to this seat. I wasn’t known in the political world, but I was known in the community as someone who could be counted on.”

After finally saying yes to Beggs, Wilkerson was surprised to learn she had bested 36 other contenders and earned the Spokane City Council’s unanimous vote appointing her to fill his vacated seat. Fittingly, on January 20, 2020, Wilkerson was sworn in at the Martin Luther King Jr. Day celebration at East Central’s Holy Temple Church. When she settled into District 2’s office on the seventh floor of city hall the following morning, her mission was clear.

“One of the things I wanted to achieve was amplifying voices that had not been heard in my community,” recalls Wilkerson. “That was my priority because folks of color had no voice in Spokane city government. Leadership was operating in an echo chamber, because it was the same people sitting on the same committees throughout the city. The name of the committee would change, but you’d see the same folks everywhere you went, which is not unusual in government.”

But one thing surprised her.

“My just being in the room changed the conversation,” she stresses. “People would tell me, ‘Betsy, you got a lot of power!’ And I would say, ‘I don’t know what y’all call power.’ But it was an unrealized power that I’d never even recognized that I had: I could change the conversation, and in some cases the outcome, because I could advocate from a different perspective and a different lived experience.”

Only weeks after taking office, she confronted seemingly insurmountable challenges, starting with the pandemic’s arrival in March followed by the Black Lives Matter unrest that erupted after the killing of George Floyd in May. After urging her fellow councilmembers to listen to and respond to the demands of protesters, some labeled her a radical.

In addition to being a gathering place for social events, the Carl Maxey Center has a larger purpose to “empower and uplift” Spokane’s black community by offering small business loans and financial assistance for those struggling to pay rent and tuition.

“How can I be a radical Black woman?,” she asks. “I live in Spokane. I don’t have the privilege to be radical. I was very clear that I did not support defunding the police, but I did support reimagining how things could be done differently—not only for the community, but for the police officers as well—but they continue to want to put that label on me because of the color of my skin.” This brings up another cold reality of only being the second Black woman ever to serve on the council.

“I bear the responsibility of not doing anything that would bring any type of criticism or create barriers for my community,” she explains. “I think that’s not really understood in the dominant culture, but when you’re one of one, that’s another weight-slash-responsibility that you carry. So that was that. I’m a radical.”

Actually, she’s one of two, because a person who does understand is her council predecessor, Roberta Greene.

Now a professor of economics at Eastern Washington University, Greene notes: “There’s this saying that ‘Yes, you’re here, but there won’t be any others after you because of what you did or didn’t do.’ You won’t hear anybody say that about Betsy.

“I love who she is. She’s a strong, strong female. She does her homework. Before she comes to a decision, she will interact with those who don’t quite agree, but she will have in her mind what she wants to do. I like her humanity and her empathy. She works well with people. If they don’t look like her, if they don’t love like her, if they don’t talk like her, it’s still that level of humanity and respect for the individual that I see in her interactions with people. That’s what I love.”

At the end of her tumultuous first year in office, Wilkerson realized her first major accomplishment when Spokane’s council voted to change the name of Fort George Wright Drive to Whistalks Way, honoring a Spokane woman warrior who fought in the Indian Wars during the mid-19th century, instead of the U.S. Army colonel who led a violent campaign to suppress Native American resistance to white settlement and had ordered Whistalks’ husband hanged.

“We have one of the largest urban Native American populations in the country here, and they had been trying for 20 years to get this street name changed,” Wilkerson says. “It was painful to them, but they just never had a true champion. So I threw my weight behind that and shepherded it through council. That brought them more into city government and made a place for them, and they felt like they were heard.”

In November 2021, after District 2 elected her to a first full term, Wilkerson scored her second major win when the council voted to enshrine equity and inclusion into Spokane municipal code, establishing a committee helmed by 13 representatives from the city’s communities of color to advise members of the council and the administration on how to factor equity and inclusion into decisions about the city’s budget and policies.

She’ll remember 2022 as the year The Spokesman-Review honored her, along with U.S. Sen. Maria Cantwell, Rep. Cathy McMorris Rodgers, and astronaut Anne McClain, as Spokane’s Women of the Year. Also, it was the year she openly clashed with Spokane Mayor Nadine Woodward, challenging her decision to convert an East Central library into a police precinct.

And 2023? That’s when Breean Beggs, who recruited Wilkerson to the council in 2019, announced that he would not be seeking another term as council president (two months later, the governor would appoint Beggs to serve as a judge in Spokane County Superior Court) and endorsed Wilkerson as his replacement.

“Betsy has an amazing skill of navigating the corridors of power and the status quo without alienating them,” he told The Spokesman-Review. “She navigates them, asks penetrating questions, and stands up for values and communities that have been marginalized. I just think it’s her time to lead.”

Meets county leadership

This brings us back to that patio at the Maryhill Winery, looking across the table at Mary Kuney, Wilkerson’s county government cohort and longtime friend. Upon closer examination, Kuney’s biography mirrors more than it deflects Wilkerson’s.

When she was in middle school, Kuney’s father relocated the family from Iowa to open an insurance agency in Spokane. They settled in Spokane Valley, a sprawling suburb of single-family homes on acreage outside the city center that in 2003 became the third-largest newly incorporated city in U.S. history. After graduating from Central Valley High in 1983, then with an accounting degree from Gonzaga University in 1987, she landed a job in San Francisco, where she lived for three years.

“At that time, everyone left Spokane for the big city,” recalls Kuney, who’s now 58. “Most people went to Seattle, but I went to San Francisco to really see a change. But three years was enough of driving around and trying to find a place to park. Then we had the earthquake of 1989, and I thought, ‘Spokane is pretty nice because it doesn’t have natural disasters.’”

So she returned to her hometown, found a job at a big accounting firm (Coopers & Lybrand), and got married (to a general contractor who specializes in building bridges).

Interested in community service, in 1991 she joined the Junior League of Spokane, where she met a kindred spirit: Betsy Wilkerson.

“She was a very gracious lady with a great smile and always happy,” Kuney recalls. “We learned about training volunteers, how to put an agenda together, and how to run a meeting. The Junior League was a great start for me to do different things to help youth. I’m very passionate about that, because my mom grew up in an orphanage in Iowa and her perspective was that where you are at today doesn’t drive your future—that you can be anybody and anything you want to be.”

After a few years of intense involvement with the Junior League, the two went their separate ways, and like Wilkerson, Kuney served her community, joining the board of the Boys & Girls Clubs of Spokane County and the Hutton Settlement, an orphanage/children’s home dating from 1919. In 1995, she went to work for the Washington State Auditor’s Office where, as assistant state auditor, she specialized in auditing cities, counties, and school districts. In 2005, she left that job to focus on mothering two little children, and with a friend, launched Summit Tea. She then sold her stake in the business after two years because it was detracting from her family time. Nine years later, with her daughter off to college and her son in high school, she decided to do something with the time she now had on her hands.

“I was volunteering, but I felt like I could do something more for my community,” she says. “As a CPA, I had worked with elected officials, and I liked working with government entities, so I thought government might be the right place for me to put my time and attention.”

In 2014, she ran for Spokane County Treasurer and didn’t make it past the primary. But she caught the attention of Spokane County Auditor Vicky Dalton, who hired Kuney as her chief deputy, a post she held until 2017, when she was appointed to fill a vacant seat on the Spokane County Commission.

She ran and was elected in 2018 and again in 2020—the only woman on Spokane County’s three-member board.

“I felt it was important to continue to have that female voice,” she says. “A lot of people encouraged me to put my name in for the appointment because they felt that a female voice would help the commission make more well-rounded decisions.”

In 2021, as vice president of WSAC, Kuney traveled to a leadership dinner in Tacoma, where she reunited with an old friend: Betsy Wilkerson, who just had been named to AWC’s board as secretary.

“It was so fun to see her and catch up, because we hadn’t seen each other in a while and we didn’t realize we both were on executive committees for these organizations,” Kuney recalls. “We had discussions about how counties and cities have a lot of similar issues, and especially for Betsy and me being in the same city and county, there are a lot of things we can work on together.” Wine and whine meetups were born—and many solutions along with them.

Spokane County Elections Manager Mike McLaughlin swears in Spokane County Commissioner Mary Kuney on December 29, 2022.

Over the past two years, over wine, Wilkerson and Kuney have collaborated on ways the city and county of Spokane can collectively address homelessness (by supporting the creation of a regional homelessness coalition), affordable housing (by repealing a moratorium on condominium development), increasing broadband connectivity in Spokane’s underserved communities (by leveraging up to $40 million in anticipated federal funding from the Biden administration’s Broadband Equity and Development program), and other initiatives.

Kuney and Wilkerson demonstrate how leaders coming together can equalize the scale of representation that feels tipped toward the western side of the state, and also balance partisan perspectives. In the 2022 Spokane County election, after the state Legislature expanded the commission from three members to five to represent the growth and diversity of its population more accurately, voters re-elected the three Republican incumbents (including Kuney), along with two Democrats, ending a Republican lock on the commission that had existed since 2010.

“Within the Republican or the Democratic party, you’re always going to have issues,” reasons Kuney. “Betsy and I, we just look at it like we care about each other. We’re good friends and we honestly want to know the other’s perspective instead of their opinion. Neither of us feels entitled. These days, a lot of people feel like they’re entitled to their opinion and that theirs is the only one that matters. Betsy and I are both very open people who want to be listening and doing the right thing for our community.”

“The community deserves to see a council working together and getting things done, being the cheerleaders for our community when they’re in Olympia. We need to find those commonalities, that common ground. Betsy and Mary’s good relationship can only help us and elevate our region in terms of leadership.”
– Roberta Greene

To that, Roberta Greene adds the perspective of history. “There’s got to be front-facing civility, but truthfulness at the same time,” she stresses. “When I was on the council, we had some obnoxious people there. But the community deserves to see a council working together and getting things done, being the cheerleaders for our community when they’re in Olympia. We need to find those commonalities, that common ground. Betsy and Mary’s good relationship can only help us and elevate our region in terms of leadership.

“I wish everybody could come and visit and see the community that we’re all so proud of. We need to make sure that we keep the citizens in the forefront. It’s about what’s good for the City and County of Spokane.”