Duvall’s mayor steps down after 18 years of service

Published 10:13 am Thursday, January 22, 2026

Amy Ockerlander’s second term as Duvall mayor has ended, marking the end as well of her 18 years of public service to the city.

But she never expected to end up here.

Ockerlander received her undergraduate degree in music — though she did serve in Eastern Washington University’s student government, a role she says was “really just a fun thing to do.”

Then, in 2003, she decided she “really did not like the direction that the county was going.” She had a close friend with a connection to a presidential campaign and was drawn to begin volunteering.

When the campaign staff went to Iowa for the primary, they entrusted Ockerlander and a few other volunteers to manage things here while they were gone.

“That was the night that John Kerry won the caucuses in Iowa,” she said. “I had a conversation with my husband that night, and I went into the office the next day and quit my job.”

The more she learned about the state of politics, the more Ockerlander wanted to be involved and make a difference.

“And frankly, I really enjoyed the volunteering aspect,” she said. “I enjoyed talking policy with people and learning.”

Ockerlander next worked for Larry Springer, then a Kirkland City Council member who had decided to run for Washington State Legislature (he’s now represented the 45th District for 21 years).

“After quitting my job, I got a job as a campaign manager that really set things off,” she said. “I worked in the Legislature after I won that campaign, and have never looked back. But I never planned to run for office.”

Ockerlander continued working with Springer until she was recruited to work for the Snohomish County Executive. Around the same time, Ockerlander — who had moved to Duvall with her husband in 2001 — was urged to apply for the Duvall Planning Commission.

“And then the 2009 election was rolling around, and I was getting calls from the mayor and council members, people coming over to my house, begging me to run for council,” she said. “And the rest is basically history.”

After some time on council, Ockerlander began receiving similar encouragement to run for mayor.

“Having run two really stressful races before, it wasn’t that big of a leap to be able to jump into that,” she said. “And I also felt that between my experience in the Legislature and in Snohomish County that I developed a lot of the skills necessary to run the city effectively.”

Ockerlander was elected mayor in 2017. Throughout her years of public service, she said she has run on transparency and efficiency. In Duvall, she prioritized “bringing us into the 21st Century.”

“Even just eight years ago, we had people on council that thought we should run as a small-town city, and that we didn’t have the same roles and responsibilities as larger cities, which couldn’t be further from the truth,” she said.

When she ran for mayor, Ockerlander said there were many gaps in city policy, whether pertaining to council ethics and procedures, social media rules, public records or personnel.

“My desire was to get a lot of those things right-sided and get them to where they needed to be and set the city off for the future,” she said.

Ockerlander also prioritized emergency management — a key component, she believes, to the city of Duvall’s plans and something she worked on for Snohomish County.

“I felt really strongly that the city being where we’re on a fault line, we are at the base of the foothills where you get snowstorms, we are in a river valley and we get cut off, that we needed a full-time emergency manager, and we needed to continuously update our plans,” she said.

Ockerlander began this work as a councilmember and finalized it when she became mayor. Having a full-time emergency manager, she said, made a “huge difference” in the outcome of December’s flooding event.

As Ockerlander leaves office, “the overwhelming majority” of her goals have been achieved.

All of the city’s reserves and contingency funds are full. She carried the city through multiple weather emergencies, as well as the Covid-19 pandemic.

“That’s in no small part due to being able to bring on Cynthia [McNabb] as a city administrator … and just a whole host of other amazing employees, and then being able to retain the best of the best that we had previously,” she said. “So making those changes incrementally really helped get us to where we needed to be.”

Ockerlander won the best council member or mayor category in the Best of the Snoqualmie Valley 2025 reader poll, the result of a write-in campaign led by community members who surprised her.

City Administrator Cynthia McNabb said Ockerlander was a caring mayor who will be missed.

“Her compassion for staff was really one of the hallmarks of her tenure,” she said. “Not only did she deeply care about staff as individual people, she cared a lot about staff experience. … She trusted their expertise in a way that I think was really supportive. … They believed that she would listen.”

Ockerlander will now continue her work as the government relations manager for the Solid Waste Division at King County’s Department of Natural Resources and Parks, a job she began in November 2023.

She said continuing her work as a public servant through roles in government agencies is important to her.

“I really want to help people in the community understand how the government really works, without bias,” she said.

Ockerlander also wants to provide mentorship and support to individuals who are considering running for local office, and expects her future to include some consulting work.

“Fewer and fewer people are choosing to make that decision, especially as, frankly, elected officials have been executed in our country in the last year, and so many death threats have occurred, even with local races,” she said. “And I think that that’s a real danger for our democracy, not just at the national level, but at the local level as well.”

Ockerlander said there is a balance to be found between knowing why residents may not want to get involved, encouraging them to do so anyway, and ensuring they are doing so for the right reasons.

“I’d really like to help a new generation of leaders understand that it’s not about what you want to do, it’s about what your community needs,” she said. “That goes to the legal side of it first and foremost, and everything else is extra … You will fail if you’re not taking care of your house first. And helping people understand that … the loudest voices are rarely the majority voices.”