Rich Coleman has decided against running for mayor of Surrey.
“It was a personal thing,” Coleman told The Times Tuesday.
“It came down to this. I don’t think I want to do it.”
Coleman, a grandfather of four, said he made his decision following a family get-together on Sunday.
“It’s nice to be wanted, but sometimes you have to listen to your feelings.”
He believes he would have been able to do a good job as mayor, but he didn’t think his heart would be in it.
“The problem was, was I going to bring my own passion to the table? Coleman said, “and I found that I wasn’t.”
Part of it was a preference for working in his own community rather than Surrey, Coleman said.
“I’m a Langley guy.”
Coleman said a poll conducted by the people urging him to run showed he would have been leading the race for Surrey mayor if he ran.
“I said (to the pollster), ask the toughest questions you can ask about Rich Coleman,” the Langley East Liberal MLA said.
For now, he said, he plans to focus on his job as provincial representative of his home town.
“I’ve got an MLA’s job to complete, and we’ll see,” Coleman said.
Last month, the MLA confirmed he’d been approached about running for mayor of Surrey and said he would give the idea “fair consideration.”
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Some people spoke to him before he left for a three-week vacation.
“At that time, I didn’t really give it a lot of consideration. When I got back from holidays, a number of people came and sat down with me and wanted to talk about various things and this was one of them.”
Speculation that Coleman might run for the mayor’s job in Surrey began shortly after Surrey Mayor Linda Hepner announced in April that she would not be seeking re-election, ending three decades on council.
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