POLSON – Heather Knutson doesn’t remember the exact moment she decided to run for mayor of Polson. She just knows that her late father would have thought she was crazy for jumping into the race.
Knutson, 38, is a Polson native and the general manager of Country Foods, a business her family started two decades ago. Knutson was elected earlier this month with 51 percent of the vote in a tight three-way race. In January, she will replace Pat DeVries, who has served as mayor since 2009.
Knutson’s election comes at the same time Polson welcomes a new city manager and two new members on its city commission. She said the next few years will be critical for the small town on the south end of Flathead Lake.
“I feel like Polson is a sleepy little town that’s just about to wake up,” she said.
Knutson’s parents formed Country Foods in 1990. Today the company has about two dozen employees and produces 2.5 million pounds of pasta annually that is distributed across the country. In high school, Knutson’s first job at the family business was putting the labels on pasta packages.
After high school, she headed for Montana State University and graduated in 1998 with a business degree. Her first job out of college was doing advertising and marketing in Billings for the local visitors and convention bureau. A few years later, she left her job in Billings and was about to move to Boise, but ended up spending the summer in Polson. She said she only planned to relax for a few weeks before moving on, but before she knew it she was helping coach the high school girl’s volleyball team. “What’s another few months,” she recalled thinking. But after volleyball season there was an offer to coach the basketball team, too. Before she knew it, the move to Boise ended up on the backburner.
In 2006, her father was diagnoised with cancer and Knutson started helping run the family business. In 2008, Knutson’s father died and she took on a more active role at Country Foods. Later, Fred and Amy Kellogg purchased the company and kept Knutson as general manager.
“I love working in the food industry,” she said. “This product runs in my veins and it’s part of who I am.”
Anyone who has met Knutson knows she is not someone who sits idle. Her job resume proves that. Besides being involved in various community groups, she’s been a member of the Polson Chamber of Commerce for five years and served as its president in 2012.
Last February, Fred Kellogg mentioned that a few people around Polson thought Knutson should run for mayor. She said at first she brushed off the idea, but then she started thinking about Polson and its needs. Over the next few months she thought more about running and by May she decided to throw her hat in the ring against Michael Brandt, a website developer, and Bob Fulton, a retired civil engineer. Knutson said her background in business is what convinced her it would be the right move.
“A lot of what I do at this business is get together with people and talk about issues, find the pros and cons and then make the best decision moving forward,” she said. “Good decisions don’t get made in a vacuum and I buy into that theory. I want to have a lot of different opinions.”
Communication between the mayor, the city commission and citizens will be important, Knutson said. In the past, some have said a “good old boys club” ran Polson and Knutson said she hopes to move past that.
“I think people have felt that they weren’t being heard (by the commission),” she said. “But it’s important that they are heard.”
New City Manager Mark Shrives echoed the importance of having open lines of communication. Shrives started on Oct. 15 and before coming to Polson was the city manager in Creswell, Ore. for nine years. Before that he was the city administrator and director of operations in Hamilton for six years.
The city manager form of government is relatively new to Polson and Knutson said the transition period has been very rocky. The town has had three fulltime managers in just seven years.
“It’s not so much about working together, but communicating,” Shrives said of the relationship between the mayor and manager. “Communicating so that we’re on the same road.”
Knutson said there are a wide variety of issues facing the community in the next few years, from how the town will deal with development to the much less glamorous job of replacing the sewer system. Knutson said the recent opening of the new Walmart shows that businesses are interested in moving to Polson and she believes the town will grow faster in the coming years. She said beyond running the city commission meetings and talking to citizens, the mayor should be an ambassador for the city to help bring new business, visitors and ideas to the area.
Knutson said she is excited about ushering in a new beginning for Polson and its city government. She also knows that her father, who probably would have thought she was crazy to run in the first place, would be just as excited.
“I think he would have been one of my biggest supporters,” she said.