Queen Dee

Dee Stuart never planned on a life in politics. But her quick wit and steely resolve made her a natural fit.

Before she was Park City’s mayor, Dee Stuart was in the sales business. For years, she pitched a line of plush toys across the Midwest. She sold insurance and securities and recruited nurses. Since then, she’s switched titles and products, but the gig is the same. Now, Stuart sells the virtues of Park City full-time.

In Park City’s campaign to become an entertainment district, Dee Stuart has been the lead pitch person the past four years. “It’s a 40-hour a week job, if you add it up,” Stuart says, “more than 40.” Perhaps you’ve seen her on the local news championing a casino, boosting a theme park or talking up an arena. During televised council meetings, she’s been known to look into the camera and patter ideas directly to viewers.

Stuart wears a perpetual smile in public. She’s 63, short and wears glasses. Park City has elected eight mayors since it incorporated in 1980. Stuart has been one of the most recognizable.

“I think you should go back inside the clubhouse and say hello to the woman behind the desk,” Stuart’s husband, Darrel Wilcox, suggested to her the other day on the golf course. “She said she just saw you on the news.”

Stuart is not a golfer, but she agreed to play with seniors from the local club on this day and had hopes of brushing up on her game in advance of an upcoming benefit. On the first tee, Stuart swings and misses, then misses again. The third time, she connects, and the ball skitters 20 yards.
The mayor has other things on her mind. There’s a lunch meeting down I-135 in Wichita with the architect of Park City’s planned recreation center, a late-afternoon meeting with a state lobbyist and a budget meeting that night with the city council. The last one promises trouble—Stuart plans to call for a tax increase. Fuel, utilities, even paper prices are up, and Stuart expects they will only continue to rise next year. For the city to keep services at the current level, it will need to adjust to those cost increases, Stuart figures. She fully expects the council to figure differently. “I have some council members who think raising the mill levy is either a mortal sin or a lethal crime,” she says.

Stuart regularly mixes it up with council members, sometimes with evident glee. “When I first decided to run for mayor, I deliberately picked a fight with a council member just because I knew it would get on TV,” she says. It worked, and she has been mixing it up ever since. A tall paddle stands in one corner of her office. “Mayor Stuart’s stir stick” it reads across the business end.

There are other signs: “Where’s Wichita?” one reads. “Six miles south of Park City.” Here is another: “You are only the mayor.”

And just above the mayor’s desk is a photograph of her out on the ice with a couple of Wichita Thunder players (she is a devoted hockey fan). The players appear to be laughing at something. “I had just told them a dirty joke,” she explains.
Stuart has always had a way with words.

“I got my mouth washed out with soap a lot, not for telling lies but for talking back,” she says. “I can remember being a little kid sitting in the bathtub and licking the bar of soap so I could get used to it.”

Raised in Augusta, Stuart is the oldest of four children. She was a precocious child who managed to graduate high school at age 16. Her father, a World War II veteran, entered college at 35 and went on to earn his master’s degree. “His thesis was on Iraq; no one had even heard of it then.”
She credits her ease behind the podium and on camera to her grandfather, Hal O’Halloran, an entertainer and radio host who started the National Barn Dance in the 1940s, an old-timey country music show broadcast out of Chicago.

“We all grew up thinking that we could conquer the world if we wanted to,” she says. “But there was enough rebel in all of us that we never really wanted to.”

Indeed, when she and her husband (her second) moved to Park City in 1987, Stuart had no designs on being mayor. Park City was just a quiet place to settle down. The couple has six children and 15 grandchildren between them. “We wanted to be in the Heights school district,” she says. “It was cheap. We justlived here.”

That changed when she took a seat on the park board in the ‘90s, more to connect with people in the community than out of any sense of civic duty, she says. Her first assignment: new playground equipment for the park. Purchasing it was easy, but getting it installed was not. It languished in a shed for months and Stuart found herself going to the city council to find out why. After a few meetings, she was hooked.

“Council meetings are soap operas, they really are, and I got drawn into them,” she says. When a seat on the council opened in 1997, Stuart, a democrat, ran and won. Her first bid for mayor came four years later. She lost and was devastated.

“I went home to bed, laid awake all night and thought ‘I’m never going to do anything for the city again,’” she says. But she did, including starting a tutoring program and launching a newsletter, The Park City Post, which today is a full-color broadsheet newspaper now owned by Strunk Publishing in nearby Valley Center. Stuart still writes a column. And in 2005, she ran for mayor again. This time, she had an ally in former Wichita mayor Bob Knight. Like Stuart, Knight was keen on seeing a casino in Sedgwick County. Stuart won by 28 votes.

Sedgwick County voters, however, voted down casino gambling in 2007. Stuart, who sees casino crowds and the revenue they bring as a boon to the city, had run on the issue. It would not be the only disappointment of her term. Stuart and the city threw their full support behind Thomas Etheridge’s plan for Wild West World, an ill-fated theme park that closed within three months of opening last year. “When that cowboy comes down,” she said of the sign that still beckons from the highway, “I’ll be standing there applauding.”

There have been accomplishments, including a citywide recycling program, a rarity in Kansas, and a rental housing code, also one of the few in the state. She and the city have also lured a number of businesses to Park City and a 5,000-seat entertainment venue, Hartman Arena. But it was clear that night, after a long day of appointments and a four-hour council meeting (the council wouldn’t budge on the tax increase) that Stuart was growing weary of the battle.

“I’m tired,” she says when asked if she plans to run for a second term. “I’m not sure I want to do this the rest of my life.”

There had been a moment, though, early in the meeting when the mayor seemed happy to be there. A group of clowns had come forward to be recognized for their work in the community. Stuart read the proclamation then joined them on the floor. She offered the leader of the group a microphone so that he might say a few words, and this bit of political advice as she pointed him to toward the gallery: “Make sure you look right into that camera.” ❖