Midvale • There were 15 minutes to the filing deadline to run for Midvale City Council, and JoAnn Seghini had already resolved not to run. But then, her phone rang.
“Go down to City Hall and sign up,” then-Mayor Trent Jepson implored. “Tomorrow you can take your name off; tomorrow you can’t put your name on.”
So with just five minutes to 5 p.m., Seghini made her way to city offices and signed her name. She was the first woman to run for municipal office in Midvale, and that November, she chalked up another first by winning election to the City Council.
“And then I had it,” she said of the political bug.
That split-second decision launched Seghini’s 31-year career in elected city office. After three terms on the City Council, she ran against an incumbent to become the city’s first female mayor. Overall, she has run seven campaigns and has never failed to win with much less than 60 percent of the vote.
Though she technically works part time, Seghini says she’s always treated her role as mayor as a full-time position — working on at least 33 boards, councils and committees throughout the years.
Now 80, Seghini is finishing up her last few days as mayor, noting that she “couldn’t guarantee” the people of Midvale four more years of good health.
After her successor, Robert Hale, is inaugurated this month, Seghini joked that she’ll find out “whether there are programs on television.” But, in reality, she has no intention of leaving public service, with plans to sit on various boards and committees, and to lobby the Legislature when needed.
“I’ll still be part of some solutions,” she said. “That’s my goal: to be part of solutions that make life better for people.”
But City Manager Kane Loader, who has worked with Seghini for more than 15 years, said she’ll be missed as a daily fixture at City Hall.
“After 20 years of her leadership, there’s going to be a hole,” Loader said. “Midvale is a city with a heart. She’s always said that. And she has the biggest heart of anyone, so I believe that Mayor Seghini is Midvale.”
Foray into politics
(Rick Egan | Tribune file photo) Midvale's Vincent Drug, the Main Street Midvale shop shown in 2015, was used in the movie "The Sandlot."
Seghini’s ties to Midvale go back to 1938, after her family moved to the city when she was a year old. Her first job was at Vincent Drug on 21 N. Main, where she made milkshakes, malts and sundaes for customers.
Her father blazed his own trails in Midvale — serving for 35 years as the first city attorney there — but Seghini initially had no plans to pursue politics.
She graduated from Jordan High School a year early and headed to the University of Utah at age 16 on an early admission scholarship sponsored by the Ford Foundation. She planned to go into medicine, but she changed course after her first year of college, when she helped run a summer camp with the Salt Lake County Parks & Recreation office.
“It was so fun to work with those kids day after day, and with their parents, and just make summer a wonderful time,” she remembered. “I thought, ‘I’ve got to be a teacher.’”
So that’s what she did, earning her bachelor’s in elementary education, then her master’s in curriculum development and eventually her doctorate in educational psychology.
She spent 12 of her 26 years as an educator teaching in elementary school classrooms. Afterward, she transitioned into administrative positions, where she wrote curriculum and trained teachers, among other tasks.
On the side, she became involved with city government through the Planning Commission at the impetus of then-Mayor Jepson.
“My first meeting, I made a motion and it didn’t get a second and I thought, ‘Well, this is no fun,’” she recalled. “And the chairman of the Planning Commission said, ‘Now, sometimes you’ll make a motion and sometimes others won’t agree with you because they need more information. Don’t get discouraged. Come back.’ So I did.”
After three years there, she increased her role in the city — becoming a councilwoman, then mayor — and retired from education. Through it all, colleagues say, her background as a teacher shaped her leadership.
“I have literally seen her in a room full of very powerful people — including the lieutenant governor, the governor — and they were talking out of turn,” recalled Councilman Paul Hunt, grinning. “And just like a schoolteacher, she goes, ‘We need to quiet down now.’ And you know, when you see the governor go, ‘Oh, sorry,’ you know that she was just the schoolteacher that we all knew and remembered from elementary school. We just followed her lead.”
“If you can quiet fourth-graders,” Seghini joked later, “you can quiet anybody.”
During her time in office, the city doubled in size and population after annexing an area known as Union in 1998, which was the biggest annexation in Utah history at the time.
At her first council meeting, in 1986, the Environmental Protection Agency revealed that there were two Superfund sites in Midvale — areas contaminated by improperly managed hazardous waste. The agency has since formally delisted the old Sharon Steel tailings site, and development is soon to begin on the second, a mixed-use commercial development called Jordan Bluffs.
In her honor, one road in that area will be called Seghini Drive.
(Taylor Stevens | The Salt Lake Tribune) In honor of Midvale Mayor JoAnn Seghini, a road in the Jordan Bluffs area will be called Seghini Drive. After 32 years in elected office, Seghini will retire from her position as mayor in January.
Reflecting on her years in office, Seghini said she has no regrets.
“We did what we did when we did it, and it was a consensus,” she said. “It was not my opinion — it was the opinion of those people elected to make the decisions.”
A voice for the voiceless
“Politics are not about who wins and loses,” Seghini said at a recent reception at City Hall, celebrating her retirement and service to Midvale. “Politics are about service.”
Co-workers in the city say that’s not just a platitude: Seghini has dedicated her career to working for the underdog and caring for the needy.
“She never thinks about herself,” said Loader, the city manager “She’s always thinking about others. Whether it’s the downtrodden or animals, she’s concerned about them. Sometimes I get so busy and focused on trying to run the big picture of the city that I forget the little details, and she reminds me of that. I think that’s the part that I’ll miss, is not having her as that Christian example on a daily basis.”
Part of Seghini’s desire to give back to vulnerable populations comes from her background raising two kids as a single mother and “knowing how hard it is to get things done when the rest of the world has things that you don’t have and assurances that you don’t have,” she said.
After she leaves office, she plans to serve on the boards of the Boys & Girls Club, the Family Support Center, the Utah Local Governments Trust and the Humane Society of Utah. She also wants to work with the Legislature to ensure that elected officials understand the effect homeless shelters have on communities like Midvale.
“We’ve got to go after the forgotten folks,” she said. “There’s a lot of kids out there that are latchkey kids, and there are a lot of people that don’t have enough food on their table. I would like to see everybody have as much as they can to be secure, and I try to be a voice for everybody.”
It’s that spirit of public service, Loader said, that has largely kept Midvale out of the news over the past few years.
“I’ve seen other cities that have gone through a lot of turmoil,” he said. “I think that the anchor for us is Mayor Seghini. She won’t allow that; she won’t allow council members to not be civil to each other.”
Hunt said he’ll miss Seghini’s “positive nature, her grace [and] her ability to unify.”
“We all knew her and trusted her motives were always for the citizens and what’s best for the city and it was never political,” he said. “Because of Mayor Seghini, we have something very special here.”
A new pair of heels
(Francisco Kjolseth | The Salt Lake Tribune) As Midvale Mayor JoAnn Seghini, center, heads into her retirement the city hosts a reception in her honor at Midvale City Hall on Thursday, Dec. 14, 2017, as she speaks with Mayor elect Robert Hale and his wife Susan.
Mayor-elect Hale jokes that he has “very big” heels to fill, come Tuesday.
“I recognize the tremendous legacy of Mayor JoAnn B. Seghini, and I recognize this wonderful, wonderful city and all of its citizens,” he said at her retirement reception. “I pledge my honor, I pledge my time and all that I know to try and wear those heels with honor and dignity.”
In the weeks leading up to his inauguration, Hale, a former councilman, has been chauffeuring Seghini around to various meetings across the state — a win for her as her vision fails and for him as a way to learn the ins and outs of the position.
Just as she was tapped to join the Planning Commission and then the City Council all those years ago, Seghini said she “handpicked” Hale to run.
“I knew his values and how he worked,” she said. “I knew that he he was somebody that cared about people.”
But, in typical Seghini fashion, she also had a bigger plan in mind.
Even after the annexation of Union, many longtime Midvale residents still see the city as extending from State Street to the Jordan River, and those in the annexed area still have an unincorporated-area mentality, she said. But Hale comes from the Union area, which Seghini hopes will be a uniting factor.
“I want to see those people combining and becoming part of the city,” she said.
And if things don’t go her way, she knows how to say her piece.
“I’ll be around,” she said with a smile at her reception. “And I can sit in the audience now and make public comments.”
