Kalispell Mayor Tammi Fisher is leaving office at the end of the year with a sense of satisfaction about how things have turned out for city government over the last four years.

And she’s looking forward to a possible future in politics with a run for the state Senate.

Fisher was at City Hall last week cleaning out her office and preparing for a holiday vacation in Mexico.

“It’s been a great experience,” Fisher said of her four-year tenure. “It’s gone by really fast.”

Fisher said she wanted to bring about more transparency, accountability and accessibility in city government as well as put the city on a path toward improved financial stability. She said she believes those things have been accomplished.

She cites the council’s regular work sessions where discussions but not votes on city business are open to public scrutiny, as well as the practice of allowing the public to speak prior to every agenda item at council meetings. 

All of the above, she says, have allowed people to speak freely about the “biggest elephants in the room.”

Fisher came into office campaigning in opposition to transportation impact fees that were assessed on new developments based on the amount of public traffic they would generate. 

“That didn’t make any sense,” Fisher says, pointing out how a business could be charged a fee but the revenue could be used for road improvements on the other side of town. In other words, the revenue might not alleviate any actual impacts caused by the paying business.

She also said that many small businesses fail, but those ventures would have paid fees when they aren’t responsible for infrastructure impacts.

“That’s a barrier to business development,” Fisher said. The impact fees “were about as anti-employer as you can get at a time when we had a 10 percent unemployment rate.”

With new members taking seats on the council in 2012, the transportation impact fees were repealed and businesses were refunded about $240,000 that had been collected.

When asked about the biggest controversy during her tenure, Fisher without hesitation cites the labor standoff between the city and firefighters in 2011.

The firefighters union won an arbitration case and the city was in a weak position to do anything about it. The only avenue available, Fisher says, was to lay off firefighters, and at one point as many as eight positions were on the line.

But the union came back to the table for negotiations that lasted about a month. Concessions were made and no positions were lost.

“That was an incredibly difficult time but the result was amicable and we saved jobs and we came up with a really positive resolution for the city as a whole,” she said.

Fisher initially supported expansion of Kalispell City Airport, but after looking closely into the proposition, she became an opponent, concluding that the city would bear costs even though there was promise of getting federal funding reimbursement. 

“It didn’t make sense from a fiscally conservative standpoint,” she said.

The City Council vote to expand the airport was repealed in the November election.

Fisher, an attorney, said she is proud of being involved with the resolution of some litigation that potentially presented large liabilities to the city. In one case, the city was sued by a business at the airport and at one point there was a $950,000 settlement on the table. In the end, that settlement fell through and the city ended up with no liability, Fisher said.

The city also tightened down financially over the last four years, a period during which 24 full-time positions were eliminated.

“All of our employees have done more with less and they really deserve the credit,” Fisher said.

When she came into office, the city had reserves of $244,000, or about 2 percent of its total budget. 

“That meant we were dangerously close to going in the hole,” she said. A goal was set to gradually increase reserves that are now approaching $1.9 million, or about 18 percent of the budget.

A cap has been set on discretionary spending until the city reserves reach the 20 percent threshold, Fisher noted.

After leaving office, Fisher said she will continue to work part-time as an attorney for the clients she can best serve, and she will continue with her job as the risk and contract manager for the medical practices division at Kalispell Regional Medical Center.

As a candidate for Senate District 4, Fisher said she would like to reduce the state’s influence over municipal governance. 

“I just think they should stay out of our business,” she said, citing as an example a state law that requires cities to conduct formal reviews of their impact fees every two years.

Fisher says that requirement costs Kalispell about $20,000 to produce a report that is typically disregarded by the City Council. She regards the mandate as unnecessary — the reviews are something that city officials can and will do when the need is there. 

The state interference that irritates her the most, however, involves restrictions on the ability of cities to propose local option sales taxes to voters.

The so-called “resort tax” is only available to towns of a limited population size, such as Whitefish, and Fisher said she thinks the threshold  is arbitrarily exclusive. 

“I’m not saying a sales tax is right for Kalispell, but they won’t even let us vote on a sales tax,” she said.

Fisher said Kalispell sits at the center of all kinds of tourism attractions, and that makes it very different from other parts of the state. Typically, resistance to changing the restrictions on local option sales taxes comes from legislators who may live elsewhere in Montana but do not want to pay a sales tax while visiting the Flathead Valley.

“I don’t think the 10,000 taxpayers should be paying to maintain our roads to be used by 2 million” people who visit the area every year, she said.

Fisher said Whitefish’s sales tax has greatly helped offset infrastructure impacts that visitors bring to that town, and she would like Kalispell to at least have the option to do the same.

In the end, Fisher says she hopes Kalispell residents can have confidence not to worry about how their city government is working, and she thinks improvements made over the last few years make that more likely.

Reporter Jim Mann may be reached at 758-4407 or by email at jmann@dailyinterlake.com.