BY ANN HEDREEN
When Mountlake Terrace Mayor Kyoko Matsumoto-Wright and I were children, the voters of our region rejected light rail. Twice. Federal funds earmarked for mass transit, as we called it then, were redirected to Atlanta. For the rest of our lives, the impact of those votes cast in the car-loving 1960s and 1970s has weighed ever more heavily on Seattle and its burgeoning suburbs.
Matsumoto-Wright, who is 74, was born in Japan. Her father, who served 20 years in the Army, was born in Hawaii. The family went back and forth between Japan and Hawaii until Matsumoto-Wright was 12, when they moved to Bothell, Wash. She is a graduate of Inglemoor High School and the University of Washington School of Drama. Her theatrical training has served her well during her long dual career in real estate and local government. She dyes her hair purple. She is not shy about speaking up, especially on the issues that matter most to her and her constituents—transportation and growth. When Link light rail was in its infancy, she made the case for a Mountlake Terrace station and for the building of apartments, townhomes, stores, and restaurants near where the future station would be.
For 41 years, Matsumoto-Wright has been a real estate broker for Coldwell Banker Bain. “I have history here,” she deadpanned. “I got to sell people their house, then I sold them another house, then I sold their kids a house, and then I sold their grandkids a house. All because I didn’t move around. I stayed right here and they all know where to find me.”
In 2000, she was elected president of the Snohomish County-Camano Association of Realtors. She went on to serve on the state’s Real Estate Commission where, she says, it was once customary for people to “show up, vote, and leave.” She chose to stick around and ask questions.
Mountlake Terrace asked her to serve on its planning commission. After a brutal series of arsons decimated the suburb’s tiny business district, a new town center plan was finally underway. It took five years of cutting through red tape and keeping the peace at meeting after meeting. “I wasn’t doing it for my resume. I was already at the age where I’m going, ‘what resume?’ but I really, really cared.”
People noticed how much Matsumoto-Wright cared. She was appointed to the City Council in 2008, and elected in 2009. When former mayor Jerry Smith died in 2018, she moved up.
Being mayor of Mountlake Terrace means being part of a whole network of city governments in north King and south Snohomish counties. It means attending many, many meetings. And it doesn’t pay much: $1,100 a month. (Matsumoto-Wright has also served on the Snohomish County Housing Authority.)
So why do it? Why should any of us get involved in local government?
Much as Matsumoto-Wright loves solving transportation and planning problems, that is not the #1 reason why she finds meaning in being the mayor. What really drives her, she says, is forming friendships with young people. And thinking about their future.
“We need to start listening to people in their 20s because they’re our future. And we are in the (transportation) pickle we’re in right now because the people before us decided not to do anything. They decided to vote against rail in 1968 and 1976. And the reasons why they did that are because it would not happen in their lifetime and it was too expensive. So now it is too expensive, and it’s not going to happen in (many) of our lifetimes, but we need to do it for the future. And for people in their 20s today. Because we need this.”
Meanwhile, Matsumoto-Wright tells her colleagues in government, “You’re not going to take away cars from the Boomers, so don’t even try. But we’re not going to be around forever.”
Matsumoto-Wright finds that speaking frankly about mortality is a good way to get people’s attention. “Many of my friends don’t even want to talk about the fact that they’re going to die. And many of my friends have already died. And I miss them. Terribly. But again, you’ve got to make new friends. Younger friends.”
Of the seven people on the Mountlake Terrace City Council, two, including the mayor herself, are baby boomers, three are Gen-xers, and two are millennials. “Many local elected officials at the city council level are older because the younger people don’t have the time. They have careers and kids to raise. So we’re lucky we have two millennials on our city council.”
It’s healthy and meaningful, she contends, for council members of all ages to focus on the future that lies beyond their own life spans. But it is also meaningful to learn from the past. “One thing about being on the planning commission and the council and all the other commissions is that I’m learning about history, and I’m learning about how life was lived before. Before cars and so forth, you didn’t have people living in suburbs, and they only had trains. Greenlake was all summer cabins. Alderwood Manor used to be egg farms. They got rid of the streetcar lines just before they decided we were going to need it back for rail.”
One of her pet peeves—how many people in local government never actually ride a bus or a train. “People don’t realize, if you drive a car, you have a choice. You don’t realize how many people have to take public transportation because they don’t have a choice. They don’t have a car.”
As a real estate agent, Matsumoto-Wright spends plenty of time behind the wheel. But she also values her senior Orca card ($1 a ride) and the freedom it gives her. And she is genuinely excited about the opening, at long last, of the Mountlake Terrace Link Light Rail Station, which opened on August 30, 2024, along with two other stations in Shoreline and the northernmost station in Lynnwr and that’s issuing proclamations. One of her most recent ones was honoring Grammy-winning composer and fiddler Mark O’Connor, who grew up in Mountlake Terrace. Her next one, she hopes, will go to Lily Gladstone, just as soon as the actor’s busy schedule permits it. Gladstone, a 2004 graduate of Mountlake Terrace High School, starred in Martin Scorsese’s Killers of the Flower Moon, for which she was the first Native American to win the Golden Globe for best actress and to be nominated for an Academy Award for best actress. Her parents still live in Mountlake Terrace, so Matsumoto-Wright is hopeful that Gladstone will be able to receive the proclamation in person.
It will be a poignant moment for Matsumoto-Wright, who was one ofood.
Just in time, you might say. The current population of Mountlake Terrace is 24,260. In 20 years, it is expected to climb to nearly 36,000.
There’s one more thing Matsumoto-Wright loves about being mayo the first Asian Americans to attend the UW School of Drama. And poignant, too, for her many younger friends in local government, to see one of their hometown peers stepping into a bright future.
Ann Hedreen is an author (Her Beautiful Brain), teacher of memoir writing, and filmmaker. Hedreen` and her husband, Rustin Thompson, own White Noise Productions and have made more than 150 short films and several feature documentaries together, including Quick Brown Fox: An Alzheimer’s Story. She is currently at work on a book of essays and is a regular contributor to 3rd Act Magazine, writing about topics including conscious aging, retirement, mindfulness, and health.