Murray named mayor

Enea chosen as mayor pro tem

Crescent City has a new mayor.

Monday night the City Council picked current mayor pro tem Kathryn Murray to take over the job immediately.

Councilman Richard Enea was selected as mayor pro tem by a unanimous decision. Every year, Council members select new leaders from their own ranks.

Murray is the executive director of Alliance CDFI, a non-profit institution that helps Native Americans secure home loans and other financial services. She has served on the council since 2008 and is a former member of the Planning Commission.

Only Councilwoman Donna Westfall voting against the appointment. Westfall nominated Enea for mayor, but he instead nominated Murray, a move seconded by Councilwoman and former two-term mayor Kelly Schellong.

“When you become the mayor of Crescent City, if you don’t have the passion you get it real quick,” Schellong said.

Murray assumed her new leadership role immediately after the votes were cast, even switching chairs with outgoing mayor Charles Slert to conduct the last few minutes of the meeting.

“I will do my best to live up to the title,” she said from her new central seat, “I do love our city and our community and I have passion.”

After the meeting Murray spoke with the Triplicate about some of her goals as mayor.

“I think a strategic plan will be a great tool in guiding us in the future and prioritizing what the city needs to do in order to move forward. Say, for example, in public works you would focus on finding funding for developing Front Street,” she said.

Murray also hopes to secure funding for more projects, like building a new city hall.

“We’ve outgrown our city hall and we need a better facility for our staff,” she said. 

Slert, whose 2011 tenure as mayor was largely defined by the devastation and clean-up from the March tsunami, offered a few parting words at the meeting:

“I would offer that I would prefer that our city will be defined by our potential instead of our difficulties or problems.”