About Me
Family and Community
I grew up in Ladd’s Addition, a Portland neighborhood known back then as Little Italy. I was surrounded by an extended and close family with dogs Yogi and Wally. Here I learned the importance of a good work ethic, volunteering, and camaraderie from my parents. Big Joe, my dad, was a hard-working Teamster that worked at a papermill and my mom was a homemaker and avid volunteer. There were four of us and I was the middle child with an older brother and sister and one younger brother. Aunt Jeannie, my dad’s sister, lived two blocks away and she had five sons who all were about our age. Five blocks away, my grandmother and my Aunt Ann lived as my Aunt owned a small grocery store. Both had immigrated from Lithuania as small children.
Growing up, our lives centered around our Catholic parish, St. Philip Neri (named after an Italian saint known for his keen sense of humor and practical piety). With its church, school and hall, our parish was the community’s hub of activities. Sundays we attended mass. Weekdays the kids attended the parish grade school. My sister and I, as volunteers, routinely washed all the dishes from the monthly men’s dinner prepared by the women at the hall. Aunt Ann owned a small grocery store called Ann’s where all the kids were allowed to work. The store was where my love of accounting and finance began. I took a keen liking to working the cash register and adding to the on-going ledgers that Ann allowed customers to use until payday.
Work Life
I was the first young woman to be accepted into the US Bank of Oregon’s work/study college program (my CV) and spent 10 years at that bank, working through each position while going to Portland State University. I was awarded the full scholastic scholarship because during the interview process, a question asked was, “Do you plan to marry?” My response was “I will be married to my career.” And I kept my word as I did not marry until I was 43. It was an exciting time for me personally and professionally as I spent another 10 years in the Savings and Loan industry first as a credit examiner for American Savings and Loan and then moving on to part of the Federal Home Loan Bank of Seattle and then onto the Treasury. While there are many stories I can tell about working as a regulator in the Savings and Loan Industry during the mid 1980’s – the most exciting one was the nationwide “unbiased” examination of Lincoln Savings and Loan, one of the largest bank failures in history. And my contribution to the nationwide examination report was captured in a NPR interview with Dick Gordon as it helped put Charles Keating and associates in jail.
In 1994, KPMG, one of the five largest Accounting firms in the world, hired me to be a consultant for a contract they had with the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID) to be a consultant/educator/regulator to the Bank of Lithuania (BOL) which was their Treasury Agency. My mission was to help rebuild the regulatory system and teach the Regulatory arm how to regulate and create policy. In 1994, I moved to Vilnius, the capital of Lithuania. Here abacuses were used as cash registers. No one really spoke English and initially I only spoke a few phrases that I learned from a car tape and my colorful language teacher Aunt Ann. For two years, I traveled most of Lithuania examining their banks with my new group of English-speaking inspectors. I trained the inspectors on the old CAMEL method (Capital, Asset Quality, Management, Earnings and Liquidity). I went to part-time consulting in 1996 and starting writing manuals for the examiners while in the U.S.A. I completed working with the Lithuania contract in 2000 and went on to work in Kazakhstan for six months to help them finish their regulatory contract.
One of my important contributions to Lithuania was to help keep it out of the 2007-2008 worldwide financial crisis. Predatory lending targeting low-income homebuyers, excessive risk-taking by global financial institutions, and the bursting of the U.S. housing bubble had caused mortgage-backed securities and derivatives linked to those securities to collapsed in value. Financial institutions worldwide suffered severe damage. The BOL Director of Examinations told me that Lithuania was one of only three countries in the world that did not fall for the mortgage-backed instruments. We were sitting in his office, and he was puffing on a cigarette as he spoke, “Diana, you taught me to never engage in anything I didn’t understand. And I didn’t understand those instruments, so I thought of you!” In 1999, I worked in Kazakhstan after Lithuania and quit consulting in 2000. In 2001, I went to work for a small manufacture company known as Coastal Environmental Systems and was program manager of a large Air Force Contract called OS-21 which was a system for their bases and here is a scientific paper describes the system. In 2005, I retired to ingratiate myself into the Edmonds community.
Civic Work
In 2005, I jumped into civic work and became a Director for the Edmonds Art Festival working in the Bistro. I also started helping two women cleaning the off-leash dog area at Marina Beach and was responsible for incorporating the Off-Leash Area Edmonds www.olae.org. I assisted the Floretum Garden club with obtaining their 501(c)3 non-profit status as heart has always been with growing plants and flowers and making cut flower arrangements. In 2024, I was elected President of the Garden Club.
In 2009, I joined Rotary and was given the Court Appointed Special Advocate (CASA) ad litem Christmas Mittens program. This program dealt with managing hundreds of mittens which were placed on gift giving trees during the holiday time between Thanksgiving and Christmas. “Santa Jim” and I retired in 2024 and it was estimated that over a decade we delivered about 3,000 mittens for infants, youth, and teens in the system. Also, because I had managed the CASA fund and excess had accumulated, by 2021, with excess CASA funding, CASA and Rotary (me) thought up a new project which was to buy books for the kids in the system and now we included the Edmonds Book Store. The books are purchased and left with the children. In 2009, I also became a Director of the Edmonds Senior Center and served three terms and was part of the team that brought the Edmonds Waterfront Center to fruition. In 2024, I retired from being part of the Finance Committee but still work Fridays at the Senior Center Thrift Store.
In 2024, Joe Scordino and I started a non-profit called Edmonds Environmental Council and our mission is to campaign for clean water and a healthy environment for humans and wildlife. Our website is packed full of information about our watersheds (www.edmondsenvironmentalcouncil.org).
Political Life
In 2008, Washington Mutual (WaMu) collapsed as $17 billion of customer deposit (a run) were removed in less than 10 days. WaMu did not receive any government bailout assistance and was sold for pennies on the dollar to J.P. Morgan (Chase) so that the FDIC didn’t have to pay anything relating to the bank closing. My husband had been employed for decades and being a former regulator and seeing the entire regulatory and political debacle at work, I was furious. Former Council Member and neighbor, Jack Bevan, helped me redirect my focus. I had met him at our neighborhood Hutt Park and we had started a yearly clean-up together. Jack insisted that I fill out an application for the Council vacancy left by Deanna Dawson. I won the Primary, but lost the General and in 2010 was appointed after the death of Peggy Prichard-Olson. My record is very public and there’s always a good story if you Google my name. I retired in 2024 as I made an unsuccessful run for Mayor.
With thirteen years of municipal finance, I have worked with four Mayors, three Public Works and Parks and Recreation Directors, Four Finance Directors, Two Community and Economic Development Directors and 19 Council Members. Working with Citizens was the most rewarding as well as the scientist and environmentalists that I have met and these relationships are still very strong today.