City council candidate Maureen McGoldrick lives in a downtown Vancouver apartment, but you can’t find her name in the electronic directory out front.
She is the only candidate for the Vancouver City Council who didn’t submit a photo for the voters’ pamphlet. She has no website, no social media.
And even though she won enough votes to advance to the general election, some are still wondering: Who is Maureen McGoldrick?
“Quite honestly, she’s a mystery,” said Scott Campbell, McGoldrick’s opponent for the November general election.
Campbell, the government and community affairs liaison with Waste Connections, said he met McGoldrick once during a League of Women Voters of Clark County forum in July. They chatted for a bit, he said, but beyond that, he has not seen her at any other community events.
Campbell said he’s surprised that someone with as little public presence as McGoldrick got so many votes. She received about a third of the votes as Campbell in the race for Vancouver City Council Position 1.
Mayoral candidate and current city councilor Anne McEnerny-Ogle said she also hasn’t seen McGoldrick besides at that one forum in July, but she expected to see people on the ballot more involved in their community.
“I want to see someone who’s local, someone who’s involved in Vancouver,” McEnerny-Ogle said.
McGoldrick said during the forum that she’s lived in Vancouver for about four years, and she commuted to Portland on a bus at first. (She has apparently now retired.)
“I love the small-town feel of (Vancouver). I would like to be able to stay for a very long time,” she said during the forum.
She graduated from St. Michael High School in Los Angeles in 1964. Records show she went to Los Angeles City College from 1964 to 1967. She also went to Valley University in California for her law degree and passed the bar exam in 1977.
She practiced law in Southern California, with a focus on civil, criminal and children’s cases, according to her biography in the voters’ pamphlet.
The pamphlet also stated she is a former computer programmer.
Sharon Casey-Rollins lives next door to McGoldrick in Vancouver. She said McGoldrick is “a very respectful, quiet, beautiful woman.”
Casey-Rollins planned on helping McGoldrick with the campaign but couldn’t because life got in the way, she said, so McGoldrick has been running a “one-person campaign.”
McGoldrick, 70, is recovering from a foot injury, according to Casey-Rollins, and must use a scooter to get around.
The Columbian talked to McGoldrick briefly outside her apartment earlier this week. McGoldrick said she wasn’t surprised by the election results.
McGoldrick has not filed any campaign expenditure reports; those who raise less than $5,000 aren’t required to file.
There isn’t much evidence of her political leanings, but she gave money to the Clark County Democratic Women last month.
She said she hopes to improve public safety by installing security cameras.
“Some people are leaving my area of downtown because of their safety concerns,” she said in the forum.
Traffic is another issue she said she wants to address. One of her ideas is to work with Amtrak to commute people over the train bridge west of the Interstate 5 Bridge.
Another heated issue in Vancouver is parking, and McGoldrick said she wants new buildings in downtown to be required to furnish one parking space per bedroom.
The general election is Nov. 7.
McGoldrick did not respond to The Columbian’s follow-up phone calls and emails for this story.
