Small Town, Big Job Mayor Is Busy, Whether Mowing Lawns Or Mediating
Burdened by the trappings of office, the mayor sets forth to face a crisis. Which is to say, Becky Kellom chugs up the East Fork Road on a lawn tractor with a broom, a shovel and a rake across her lap, headed for the public toilets.
The restroom, a $10,000 edifice paid for by federal taxpayers thanks to the Americans with Disabilities Act, dominates the Bovill City Park like a mansion on a hill. It dominates the mayor’s attention because, off to the west, she can see a Poe Asphalt crew resurfacing Idaho Highway 8, and the crew is already at the edge of town.
Kellom cadged a load of asphalt from Poe to pave the new handicap-accessible restroom’s walkway when the highway work is finished. It now appears that’s going to happen before the walkway is graded to specifications. A deadline approaches; a job needs to be done, a job for which she has no special training.
Welcome to the world of a small-town mayor.
“Many mornings my phone rings at 4 a.m.,” she says.
“Somebody wants to know ‘Why aren’t the damn streets plowed?’ Or they let me know that they know where there’s a water leak, which I appreciate,” she says with a withering laugh.
As mayor, Kellom has laid out a grave and closed a bar. This summer she’s mowing the parks, because her maintenance man is helping with the water project.
For this Kellom gets $50 a month. Not in cash - $50 knocked off her water bill.
Bovill, the smallest town in Latah County, had 260 residents at the last census. The population has grown, but probably hasn’t surpassed 300. The city government’s work force consists of one full-time maintenance man and one half-time clerk. Plus a mayor with a tool belt or, a characterization she might be more comfortable with, a mom with a gavel.
Rising from the woods at the county’s eastern edge, Bovill has a grander history than a burgh its size ought to expect. It was founded by Hugh Bovill, the 16th child of an English lord. Too far down the family line to expect to inherit anything, Bovill set out for Idaho, and in 1901, with his wife Charlotte, established the Bovill Hotel, a resort that featured such civilizing touches as fresh cut flowers and linen tablecloths. The Potlatch Corp. came along and brought logging to the woods. Bovill reached its zenith about 1917 when the population swelled to 1,700.
Changing logging practices that favored machines over human labor sent the town on a downward spiral.
There are indications Bovill is rounding back to its roots. Potlatch pulled out its Northern Logging Units headquarters several years ago, and the hotel’s current owner plans to restore it as a hostelry, according to Kellom.
Bovill has two bars and one church. A school that once went through 12th grade has been whittled to K-3, with older students bused 10 miles west to Deary.
There’s a country store and a cable TV company. In the city hall/library, a typewriter sits in one corner, a computer in another. Bovill went on-line in the middle of August. Basically, the town finds itself caught up in the 1990s with many amenities and institutions 50 years old and older. The mayor is working hard to close the gap.
Everyone in Bovill, it seems, has lived here since shortly after Hugh and Charlotte opened the hotel. And everyone has had a shot at running the town.
The mayor has a rival. Lloyd Hall, a lifelong resident - depend on it - is a former Bovill mayor and council member. He owns the store, the cable company, and residential property all over town. He’s also working for Bovill this summer, replacing a municipal water system his father installed in the 1930s.
Hall declined comment on Kellom, except to say “Somebody should step in and run this year. Anybody could win. Except maybe me. The whole problem is I own too much of the town.”
He and Kellom currently are jousting over the new park restroom walkway. Hall sold the town a used backhoe, she says, “that has absolutely no power. It doesn’t have enough power to pick up a scoopful of gravel.” So she had to contract out the walkway project, and, of course, Hall put in the low bid. But he didn’t do the job correctly, she tells the City Council, and suggests the council withhold payment.
While the job still occasionally blindsides her with unanticipated duties and responsibilities, there is an unofficial component to being mayor in which Kellom shines - the mom component, if you will. An interview with a college professor studying women mayors got her thinking about this, she says.
“In this town, it’s like having 300 children, and each one has a separate identity. I have to mediate disputes, listen to complaints, take action and discipline everybody, because I can’t do everything they want. You’ve got to raise each child to fit their identity.”
No empty talk. There is an elderly Bovill resident who might not be able to make it outside an institution in a larger community. Here, though, everyone watches out for him, and when recently he darted behind the bar at Bailey’s Bar, grabbed a pack of matches and took off up the street, Kellom followed. She caught up with him at the Elk Tavern.
Without compromising anybody’s dignity, she got him to acknowledge there was no pressing need to kindle a wood stove blaze for the bartender at the Elk, and it probably would be a good idea to leave the matches with her.
“He started a helluva fire last year,” Kellom confides later.
Before becoming mayor, Kellom’s education peaked with an unfinished business college course. But being mayor forces her to navigate in a sea of federal and state regulatory and funding agencies. She figures the best way to chart a course is to be educated, so she has completed 32 credits at Lewis-Clark State College in Lewiston, and she has taken classes in grant writing and marketing.
No class gave her the verve to apply her learning, though. Kellom comes by that naturally. This year, in addition to the ADA grant, she brought in government grants of $119,000 for the city water project and $59,000 to build an RV park, with an eye toward diversifying Bovill’s economy with tourism.
“I consider us a hub,” she says. “I don’t know a hub to what, but we are a hub.”
Graphic: Map of area