New mayor brings youthful energy to Soap Lake

SOAP LAKE — There’s an energy and excitement that Alex Kovach is bringing to his new job.

You can tell just being with him, talking with him, and noting that even in the midst of winter he walks to work to the trailers that are Soap Lake’s city hall.

“Being out in the cold, gets the blood flowing, getting ready for the day,” he said.

A relatively youthful 37 but looking and sounding much younger, Kovach was handily elected mayor of Soap Lake last November with 59 percent of the vote after roughly 18 months on the city council.

Despite being a native of the West Side, Kovach is no stranger to Soap Lake. His family — which owns the company Kovach Architects — has resided here on and off since 2003, with Kovach buying his own home in Soap Lake in 2007.

“We’ve got flexibility where we can work,” he said. “I work from a laptop.”

He originally intended to just spend vacations here, but Kovach said he quickly fell in love with Soap Lake.

“The quality of life here, the calling of the healing waters, as I like to say, kept pulling me over,” he said. “About 2016, I became a full time resident.”

The fact that his work — that combination of art and math, or structure and creativity, he said has always interested him — can basically be done from anywhere gave Kovach time to become involved in the community. And eventually the ability to pursue an appointment to an open seat on the city council.

“I learned so much of the council side of the city in that year and a half, my term was going to be up, and I would run for the council position again,” Kovach said.

But Kovach said other members of city council, as well as some community leaders, convinced him to run for mayor.

“I thought about it, the responsibilities and difficulties,” he said. “It’s needed, so I’ll do it. I committed to it.”

There’s a lot to commit to. The town is in the midst of a major project to redo most of its sewer system and part of its water system, and the gutting and rehabbing of its mold- and mildew-infested city hall has gotten stuck as the city struggles to find funding.

“The remediation has gotten so far but cost is greater than expected,” he said. “We need to work out funding. We’re watching our debt load, but City Hall staff has to use an unheated porta-potty in winter, so that is definitely one of our priorities.”

The sewer project grew out of a desire for Soap Lake to repair and upgrade the city’s streets — fix potholes and pave some gravel roads, Kovach said. The city’s engineering firm, Grey and Osborn, told Soap Lake there was money from the state for that kind of work, but none of it would get funded without a thorough study of the city’s sewers first.

“The state won’t spend a lot of money for new road that you have to tear up next week because there’s a disaster,” he said.

Repairing and upgrading the city’s sewers is going to cost Soap Lake $8 million, with $2 million coming as a grant and the rest as a loan.

Kovach said that as an architect, one of the things he specialized in was reading city and county building and zoning codes, a skill that has come in handy both on the council and as Soap Lake’s mayor.

“Making sure the building design meets all the local zoning codes, meets the building codes, the accessibility regulations, all those things,” he said. “It’s been useful getting my head wrapped around city code.”

There’s also the matter of the city’s mineral water system, which was built to deliver lake water to residents. It was never maintained properly, Kovach said, and while it would be nice to have up and running, he expects the cost necessary to fix it and maintain it would be “a hard sell.”

All told, Kovach believes he’s got a full agenda for the four years of what he described hopefully as his “first term.”

“A lot of important things are happening in this town right now,” he said.

Charles H. Featherstone can be reached at cfeatherstone@columbiabasinherald.com.