Moses Lake’s city manager has a vision for the town’s future rooted in her past

MOSES LAKE — The youngest of seven kids and separated from her oldest sibling by 22 years, Moses Lake City Manager Allison Williams was born and raised in Walla Walla.

With four sisters and two brothers, Williams suspects her father had been hoping for a boy — but what he got was a young athlete who’d go on to oversee multi-million dollar organizations and today is the first female chief executive of Moses Lake, a city incorporated almost a century ago.

Williams graduated from DeSales Catholic High School, where she had played volleyball and basketball and run track, and where her mother was an art teacher.

Both teachers themselves--Williams' father was a vocational agriculture teacher at Walla Walla High School--higher education was important to Williams’ parents, though they didn’t have the money to pay for her schooling. Still, with the help of some financial aid and a summer job — back when it was possible to afford tuition with a summer job, she added — Williams was able to complete an undergraduate degree at Gonzaga University, where she met her future husband.

Fresh out of college, Williams worked at The Coeur d’Alene Resort, having already had hospitality experience from summer jobs working the front desk at a hotel. Eventually she and her husband relocated to Seattle, where she continued to work in the hospitality industry until 1991.

Revitalizing Wenatchee

The young couple moved to Wenatchee in 1992, where Williams was hired on as the executive director of the Wenatchee Downtown Association, promoting business development in town.

She worked there for six years, getting quarterly training in community revitalization through the Washington State Main Street Program, part of a nationwide organization teaching communities how to breathe life back into their towns. During that time, Williams noted, she got to work with Moses Lake’s Sally Goodwin, who managed the local branch of the Main Street Program.

But in 1998, Williams decided to make her big move into local government, taking a job as Wenatchee’s community planner, focusing on long-term economic and development work. It was largely in the same vein as the work she had done before, but from the other side of the table.

When she had first arrived in the city, Wenatchee was on the cusp of a massive change to its industrial waterfront, adding a system of parks and a paved path for pedestrians. In her position with the city, Williams led those efforts, in charge of putting a plan in place and communicating the city’s vision for the space to private developers and businesses.

That waterfront redevelopment project attracted millions of dollars in investments from the Town Toyota Center, the outdoor Pybus Public Market and other businesses now considered linchpins of the town.

A fixture in the mayor’s office

Seven years later, Williams moved up into the mayor’s office as the executive services director. Wenatchee has a “strong mayor” system where the mayor holds most of the powers that in Moses Lake are held by the city manager, making the executive services director the top unelected role at the city.

“I’m always one who has seen possibilities and opportunity, and that has led me to move from one position to the next,” Williams said. “And I love these jobs with cities, because you aren’t always dealing with the same thing from one day to the next.”

By the time Williams decided to make another big career move, first applying for and then accepting a job offer as Moses Lake’s city manager, the city of Wenatchee had been shaped by her leadership for the better part of three decades.

As noted by KOHO Morning Show host Chris Hansen during a February interview with Laura Merrill, Williams’ replacement as executive services director, the city had come to see her as a fixture.

“Allison was there for so long, and obviously those are big shoes to fill just because everybody’s so used to her being in that position,” Hansen said.

Visions for Moses Lake

While it may be too soon to reveal any grand plans for Moses Lake, Williams said she looks at the Broadway corridor between Interstate 90 and state Route 17 and sees an opportunity to do there what she helped lead in Wenatchee. With the possibility of the Columbia River Railroad being converted for a rails-to-trails project, she said she also sees opportunities for more housing, restaurants and retail in that area — though she noted that development shouldn’t come at the expense of the town’s historic buildings.

Williams also pointed to the city’s museum and now-defunct art on the street program, saying there’s an opportunity for Moses Lake to reinvest and redouble in the arts and possibly develop a creative district.

“I think I am coming into Moses Lake in a time when there are a whole bunch of new processes being put into place,” Williams said. “I see the city growing, the city organization growing from one that has supported a smaller community and growing into the (recognition) that we run a multi-million dollar business, and we’re a sophisticated business.”

All of these ideas are no small thing to execute, and Williams started her job shortly before a global pandemic struck the region, taking the reins of a city government that has lost several top-level staff in the last year and which was shaken by a major sexual harassment scandal under her predecessor.

Williams said she’s already made major changes to the way that city staff interact with the city manager’s office, making herself approachable and building upon work to improve internal relations that started under Interim City Manager Kevin Fuhr. She also said she tries to lead from example.

“I do pride myself on being a responsible hard worker,” Williams said. “We are supported by the taxpayers, and we owe it to them to give them a product.”

“What I have found is, often when these things happen, all you hear is the bad news, but we have a great group of employees who want to be good workers, and were just looking for the leadership to do so,” Williams added.

And while the coronavirus has made it difficult to get introduced to the city she now calls home, she said it’s given her the chance to step back and assess what needs to change at the city to ensure it can continue to grow.

“I think that Moses Lake will come out of this stronger as a result,” Williams said. “The community organizations are so strong here, the downtown association, the port, et cetera, and I am proud to be a partner with them.”

‘Stand strong and be proud’

It’s hard to know, only a handful of months into the job, whether Williams will work in Moses Lake for the three decades she spent with Wenatchee. But Williams already knows how she wants her tenure to be remembered.

“I would like to say when I leave here, that we, and I say we because it takes a team to put a strong organization in place, that we will have built the capacity of the city of Moses Lake as an organization,” Williams said. “I will be able to step away and our community will be able to stand strong and be proud of what it’s become.”

Editors note: In an earlier version of this story, it was incorrectly stated that Williams graduated from Walla Walla High School. While that is the school where her father was a vocational agriculture teacher, Williams graduated from DeSales Catholic High School, also in Walla Walla.

Emry Dinman can be reached via email at edinman@columbiabasinherald.com.