Ed Mayne has announced his intention to seek the mayor’s chair once again in Parksville.
Mayne served as Parksville mayor from 2008 to 2010, when he resigned to run for leadership of the provincial Liberal Party.
The 2018 municipal elections take place on Oct. 20.
Mayne said he primarily decided to run due to his concern about divisiveness within the city. He believes there has been ineffective leadership and a lack of willingness to listen to the citizens.
He said it’s time to get council and staff back to focusing on municipal responsibilities and to listening to those the council have been elected to represent.
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“I want to run because I see that our community has been divided severely and it’s changed into something that I’m not happy with,” Mayne said.
“I figure that I can help to bring it back to what it was—something to be proud of again.”
Mayne said that during his previous term as mayor of Parksville, council produced three consecutive budgets with the lowest tax increases on Vancouver Island.
“I think the big issue that I was most proud of was creating a transparency in city hall, where I started the Coffee with the Mayor,” Mayne said.
“We also started moving council meetings around to various locations to be more accessible to the citizens. We just opened up city hall much greater than what it had been in the past.”
Mayne added that he’s also proud of fiscal responsibilities he took on as mayor.
“We were rated number two by the CFIB (Canadian Federation of Independent Business) at the time as the best financially managed town in B.C.,” he said.
Mayne also established a mayor’s roundtable in order to obtain community input into the future of the city and also implemented a study on homelessness in 2009.
He noted during tenure as mayor the Emergency Care Clinic was approved and started to move forward.
Mayne’s promise during this election is to make Parksville a safe and welcoming place to live, work and play again.
“Really what I want to do is take the town back to focusing on what our municipal responsibilities are and quit getting side tracked on provincial jurisdictions,” he said.
“Let’s just focus on keeping taxes as low as they possibly can be, keep our spending at a level that it should be kept at, keep our infrastructure up to date and working and most importantly public safety, that’s the one that everybody’s talking to me about.”
