Ishihara Outlines Goals for Longview as New Mayor
by Christina Cavazos
When Mayor Kristen Ishihara
thinks about the best assets
of Longview, there’s one
that easily rises to the
top of her list -
the people.
“Longview
is such a loving
town and the
very best asset
that we have
is its people...”
Ishihara, who served on the Longview City Council from 2014 through 2023, plans to focus on increasing engagement and greater investment in the community as she starts her first term as the city’s new mayor. Ishihara’s goals include increasing community engagement and improving the quality of life in town through initiatives such as litter cleanup, continuing to enhance the parks and trails system, and seeing continued revitalization in downtown Longview.
“The more that everybody is nice to each other and works together, the more we accomplish,” she said.
A HISTORY OF
PUBLIC SERVICE
Ishihara is a native of Midland, Michigan. She graduated from Western Michigan University then moved to Texas to attend law school at Baylor University. Her family had moved to the Houston area when her father transferred jobs and Ishihara wanted to be in the same state as her parents.
She moved to Longview after graduating from law school. As an elder law and estate planning attorney, Ishihara has worked at a few different firms throughout the years. In 2022, she and fellow attorney Christopher Parker started their own practice, Ishihara and Parker, where they continue to specialize in estate planning and elder law.
Shortly after moving to Longview, Ishihara participated in Leadership Longview, a Longview Chamber of Commerce program aimed at leadership development and community involvement. Laura Hill, who now serves as the director of grant and human services for the city, gave a presentation one day during which Ishihara asked about bringing a dog park to Longview. Ishihara learned the City
of Longview appreciates public-private partnerships.
With that in mind, Ishihara worked with Jennifer Ware and Kelly Heitkamp to form a nonprofit organization to raise the funds to support a dog park. They worked with Hill and the City of Longview Parks and Recreation Department to create the two dog parks along the Paul G. Boorman Trail. The large and small dog parks were each built with funding raised by the nonprofit organization but utilized city land.
Through the dog park project, Ishihara met other people concerned about animal welfare. She then volunteered to serve on a task force created by former Mayor Jay Dean to explore the possibility of a new animal shelter. At the time, the euthanasia rate was high at the former shelter, which also was small in terms of its size. The task force eventually recommended building a new shelter, and the Longview Animal Care and Adoption Center opened in 2016. The original nonprofit organization that helped support the dog park morphed into what is now the nonprofit known as Longview PAWS (which stands for Pets Are Worth Saving). Longview PAWS works to support the operations of the new animal shelter.
Her work with the dog park and her service on the animal shelter task force led Ishihara to become interested in serving on the Longview City Council. When former District 4 Councilman Wayne Frost reached his nine-year term limit on the City Council, Ishihara stepped forward to help lead. She ran unopposed in 2014.
EMBARKING INTO
CITY LEADERSHIP
When Ishihara stepped into the District 4 council seat, she quickly got involved. She stepped up to be part of the Comprehensive Plan development process. The Comprehensive Plan, which the City Council approved in 2015, is a long-term planning tool for city staff, City Council members, and citizens that helps direct the growth and development of Longview for 10 to 20 years.
The Comprehensive Plan largely helped shape items that taxpayers approved in the 2018 City of Longview bond election. Ishihara chaired the Comprehensive Plan Committee at the time of the bond election. That $104.2 million bond election included building the new police department, renovating and updating several fire stations, enhancements to several streets including Mobberly Avenue, Fairmont Street, and Reel Road, as well as updates to many of the city’s parks.
“The bond election is probably the biggest and most lasting impact that I was able to have on the community during my time on council,” Ishihara recalled, noting the many improvements that have taken place citywide since the bond election passed.
Ishihara helped with the Political Action Committee that was formed to educate the
public about the bond election. She and
then District 1 Councilman Ed Moore gave talks throughout town to share information about the bond election.
Another item Ishihara recalled being proud to be part of was the effort to solve issues related to the firefighter pension fund.
In 2022, taxpayers approved $45.6 million bond election to stabilize the Longview Firemen’s Relief and Retirement Fund.
The fund is a pension that provides benefits to retired firefighters and other Fire Department employees. At the time, the pension’s unfunded liability was a debt already owed by the City of Longview to provide benefits to pension members. The bond election helped reduce the unfunded liability.
Ishihara served on the pension board throughout her nine years on the City Council.
“I built really good relationships with all of them and I’m happy with the progress we made,” she said. “It’s never solved. You always have to keep an eye on it. But for the most part, we’ve reached a resolution on how it will be sustainable.”
Ishihara enjoyed her nine years of service on the City Council, so when Mayor Andy Mack reached term limit, it was an easy decision for Ishihara to seek that position. In Longview, City Council members and the mayor may each serve three, three-year terms for a total of nine years in office.
“I just wanted to keep serving my community in the same sort of capacity,” Ishihara said.
ENGAGING THE
COMMUNITY
As mayor, Ishihara said her top priority is to increase community engagement in the city.
“What I hope to accomplish is greater engagement and investment in the community and people treating each other as neighbors and loving on each other as community,” she said. “I try to be as available as possible and as open to people as I possibly can be.”
Ishihara encourages residents to be more engaged with city staff and City Council members as well as more involved in the many events and opportunities that take place in town.
For her part, Ishihara is taking every chance she can to make small gestures to encourage people to continue to be engaged. For example, after the 2024 National Night Out, she sent a thank you note to each host of a neighborhood watch party. After City Council meetings, she’s sent thank you notes to citizens who came to speak during public comment.
The city is also using social media as a tool to educate and inform. After City Council meetings, Ishihara has filmed short update videos for social media to help keep constituents informed about what took place during the council meeting.
Internally, the council is also doing some team building. Due to the city’s term limits, the City Council had two new members in 2024 when Derrick Conley and Shannon Moore were elected to the District 1 and District 2 seats, respectively. Ishihara said she looks forward to building the team and to all the things they will accomplish together.
“We’re trying to be creative about ways to engage with people or thank them for being involved,”she said.
QUALITY OF LIFE
ENHANCEMENTS
Other goals Ishihara has for Longview are more connected to quality-of-life items, including efforts to beautify the city and continued progress at parks and trails.
“I think beautification includes litter pickup, code enforcement and other things that would just help make everybody proud of living in Longview,” she said.
In terms of litter cleanup, Ishihara said she’d like to see dedicated employees who would routinely cleanup litter particularly in medians. In November, the City Council voted to contract with House of Disciples for litter cleanup with men in program wearing vests to increase their visibility in the community when they are picking up litter.
Ishihara said should the city consider adding full-time staff positions for litter cleanup in the future, it would allow them to be more proactive.
“I think if we are going to make things beautiful, we’re going to have more things to maintain. We’re going to need more staff out there picking up litter and maintaining things like medians, grass, roadways, clean bus stops – all those things that make you proud when you drive by,” she said.
“To do that, we will have to be a little more proactive.”
When she was new on the City Council, Ishihara recalled, she attended a monthly “problem properties” meeting where a group would discuss places in Longview that are complaint driven.They realized that some of those properties belong to elderly individuals who just needed assistance, so a program developed called Connect Longview which matches volunteers with homeowners who need assistance with repairs.
The program is organized by the city’s Code Compliance department and pairs volunteers with homeowners who have received property code violations but are unable to correct them due to either physical disability and/or financial hardship. Volunteers can assist with things like mowing, junk removal, repairing or removing damaged fences, and other items.
“Part of that is not just responding to complaints. We should be proactively looking and helping people who need it and making sure that we’re not neglecting certain areas,” she said.
With regard to parks and trails, Ishihara said she’d like to see the city continue to add to the trail system. She’d particularly like to see Lake Lomond, where Echols Park is in the works, and Teague Park each connected to the trail system in the future.
Lake Lomond and Teague Park each are high on her priority list as well. At Lake Lomond, a group called Friends of Lake Lomond is working on renovations to eventually open what will be known as Echols Park at the lake.
Meanwhile, Teague Park is set for a transformation. The U.S. Department of the Interior announced in the fall of 2024 that Longview would receive a $1.318 million grant for Teague Park for a new 
entryway. The project is also supported by local funds and will cost a total of about $2.6 million. The project began during Mack’s tenure as mayor when he sought to create a new entryway from Marshall Avenue into Teague Park to improve the visibility of the park.
As those projects come to fruition, Ishihara said she hopes both parks can be connected to the trail system in the future. She also noted safety concerns she’s heard from constituents related to the trails and said the city may need to consider “some lighting and additional patrols along the trails.”
“On the Comprehensive Plan a long time ago, it had an indoor rec center so that’s always kind of been on my bucket list,” she said. “I’d love to see an indoor rec center that would be for families and individuals for exercise, but that could also serve as a senior center. We need a new senior center, and we don’t really have good facilities available for it now. So, good senior programming and a better senior center is on my list, too. There’s a real need for that.”
Ishihara also noted that she’s been proud of the development in downtown Longview in the past few years.
It’s truly been incredible to see all of the things that Arts!Longview is doing through murals, through engagement downtown and the businesses that have come and the people that have responded from Longview to show how much they appreciate that investment,” she said.
LOOKING TOWARD
THE FUTURE
Outside of civic life, Ishihara enjoys running, reading, and spending time with family She and her husband, Richard, reside in Longview where they are raising their two children, Lucas and Brianna. She’s still active with Longview PAWS as well as with the Greater Longview Estate Planning Council, a professional group that meets for education and networking.
In the future, she’d like to launch a nonprofit foundation for Longview. During a Longview Chamber of Commerce intercity visit, she learned about how community foundations operate in other cities. She used Waco as an example saying that in Waco, they have a large foundation to which people donate and they use the fund to give grants each year.
“Sometimes those grants can be a catalyst for new things, or they just use it in a way that’s really awesome,” she said. “If we’re all putting into the same pot then it can benefit Longview in some way. There’s another component where it serves kind of as a bank with donor advised funds or scholarship funds.”
A couple of years ago, Ishihara, Ware and Kelly Hall organized a nonprofit organization called the Longview Community Foundation, but she noted she hopes to see it get off the ground soon.
As far as her chapter as mayor, Ishihara said she primarily wants residents to know that“they’re heard and valued.” She encourages people to reach out to city staff, to their City Council representative or to reach out to her as mayor.
“I really think the more engaged and active we can be, the better our community will be,” Ishihara said. “It’s really about generating the neighborhood sense of community and pride.”
