Community Government
Outgoing councilmember Woock plans to ‘unplug’ from city politics for a while
Outgoing Gig Harbor City Councilmember Jeni Woock has been many things in her professional life, including a glass artist for many years.
Woock’s last day in office is Wednesday, Dec. 31. She told Gig Harbor Now that she already shut down her council Facebook page.
She listed a number of achievements in shaping city policy and community outreach during her tenure, including changing development code, being part of the city’s climate action plan, and holding monthly Jeni Listens meetings, where Gig Harbor residents could talk with her in a more relaxed setting.
“I had those monthly meetings every month for eight years,” Woock said. “What I learned is that we have the most wonderful citizens who love this community and are willing to want to know more about this community. And I think that was really good for me.”
Still, as proud as she is of her professional public service life, Woock has decided to unplug “from as many things as I can unplug from city stuff.” She looks forward to at least six months of doing very little aside from exploring watercolor art.
Gig Harbor City Council member Jeni Woock, right, and colleague Le Rodenberg during a meeting in March. Photo by Julie Warrick Ammann
From the Bible Belt to Tinseltown
Woock’s hometown of Bristol straddled Virginia and Tennessee. She was born on the Virginia side of the town, and remembers “the Bible Belt running down my town … right down the middle of main street. I was probably impacted growing up to give back to the world somehow, in some way.”
After college, she made her way to California, where she sold advertising for two newspapers, the Los Angeles Herald and the Los Angeles Times. Her main account was The Broadway, a department store chain dating back to the early 1800s. Federated Department Stores acquired and subsequently dissolved the chain in the mid-1990s, converting some locations into extant department stores we know today — Macy’s and Bloomingdales — and selling others to Sears.
“At that time they were doing inserts for advertising flyers for different companies, and so I thought, ‘Well, I can do this,’” Woock recalled. “So I left my employment at the L.A. Times, and I became a printer. I printed for the L.A. Times and … for the (Los Angeles) Dodgers, and I did some other printing for other companies around town.”
Changing priorities
Woock said she and her husband, Del, both worked nearly tirelessly at their businesses. They probably would have continued that way, but a “horrible” car accident changed their priorities. Following the accident, Woock said, “we decided to go into the world of art so we could spend all of our days and all of our nights working together.”
Woock eventually gravitated toward glass. She worked for 34 years, selling her work to wholesale galleries, the Tacoma Glass Museum, and other galleries around the U.S.
“I started out making beads probably back in the ’80s,” Woock recalled. “And then, as people were nipping at my heels coming up in the bead world, then I went to perfume bottles and people were coming up there. And then I started going to drinking vessels — martini glasses, wine glasses, champagne glasses, those kinds of things.”
Jeni Woock takes the oath of office for her second term on the Gig Harbor City Council in 2021.
Woock was a lampworker, which meant that some of the glass she worked with started out as tubing. The stems of her goblets, she said, were separate and made of soft glass, a more malleable kind of glass.
“My work was very whimsical, so it wasn’t pretty particularly. I did crazy facial figures. My goblets had crazy people on them,” she continued. “It was very colorful, and it was a different kind of thing.”
Her husband originally started out making jewelry. But after their studio burned down in 2003, and only his woodworking equipment survived, he took it as a sign to concentrate on woodworking.
“He became a wonderful wood artist making abstract wall art — really beautiful pieces,” Woock said of her husband’s craft. “He worked a lot in exotic woods and because his pieces were smaller, he would buy, usually, exotic leftovers from people using large wood for other things that he would get smaller pieces and it worked out well.”
Getting political
Woock first became involved in the Gig Harbor business community as an artist in 2008. Business was slow, she said, so she and a group of artists took to placing little free pieces of art in local businesses — things like baskets, earrings, and painted cards. They hoped to inspire people to then buy something at that business.
By 2015, Woock found herself increasingly involved in local politics, as the council considered downtown zoning changes.
Woock put together a petition to reject the zoning changes. She decided then to run for city council.
She lost that first race to Michael Perrow, but won in her second attempt in 2018.
One of her first objectives was to help stop a high-end, gated condo community in what is now Soundview Forest.
“It would have put about another hundred vehicles on Soundview Drive, and folks didn’t really want that,” Woock said. “When we came on board with the city, we bought that property. And that property, which is Soundview Forest with all the trees, will be trees forever.”
Slowing growth
Woock said the main focus of her tenure was listening to Gig Harbor residents, something she said the city wasn’t doing previously. An issue that came up repeatedly was slower growth within the harbor.
“They wanted us to slow down growth and they wanted us to support infrastructure and have more infrastructure in place, because that infrastructure had not really been keeping up pace with growth that had been happening,” Woock said. “We did a lot of things to slow growth. We had a moratorium on growth for six months while we put some new zoning changes in place. … There was a thing that was called developer agreements, and, in our view, developer agreements were special deals between the city and developers, and they didn’t play by the same rules as all the other developers in town. These were special deals. So we thought, ‘Zoning codes are not correct. Let’s fix the zoning codes, but let’s make sure that all the developers play by the same rules.’”
Woock said that she is concerned those agreements will return because of changes to the city’s Comprehensive Plan. The city made these changes to comply with state law, which mandates municipalities address the state’s housing shortage and affordable housing crisis.
Among her other achievements, Woock said that she was proud to have championed the roundabout at Harborview Drive and Stinson Avenue.
“I think that’s a really well-working roundabout and saves lives and saves injuries,” Woock said. “It was going to be a lot of stoplights.”
She also noted her work for governmental transparency, highlighting the city’s vote tracker and the quarterly budget reviews she advocated for.
“Every project, every dollar we spend is on this quarterly budget review,” Woock said. “And it says, ‘Is it going to meet the budget? Is it going to be over budget? Are we not having it? And then there’s a comment about why it’s not meeting budget or why it’s going over budget.”
‘Happy place’
Of all her work as a city councilmember, Woock is especially proud of her efforts to help the city buy Phase IV of the txʷaalqəł Conservation Area—a four-phase land conservation effort that the city embarked on over the course of two years—and of her work on the city’s climate action plan.
“That’s huge for saving those trees,” she said. “I was really honored to sit on both our climate action plan and the urban forest management plan to create goals to put these things into place to help to really save trees, and to also keep our community resilient during the time of climate change.”
As for the future, Woock said that she doesn’t plan to do much — just unplug and paint in her “wonderful studio painted with crazy people and wonderful colors.”
“It’s just a really happy place,” Woock said. “I’ve been wanting to explore some watercolor and abstract … painting.”
