Sechelt councillor Darnelda Siegers declared in late 2016 that she’d be running for mayor this year, and with the election less than three months away she’s started to talk more about her campaign.
In an interview for Coast Reporter Radio, Siegers said she declared early because after mounting an effort to get nominated as the BC Liberal candidate for the 2017 provincial election, she started hearing from potential supporters that they’d rather see her run as mayor and she wanted to make her intentions clear.
“The piece that really hit home for me was when they said if you go provincially, yes you have access to resources and programs that would support our community, but if there’s no will locally to take advantage of those, it’s not actually going to make a difference in the community on the ground,” she said.
Siegers said nothing has changed in the past two years when it comes to what made her think it was time to run for the mayoralty instead of a third term on council,
“I’m actually a conversation leader – that’s what I do. I have conversations with people. Our community has a wealth of experience, knowledge and expertise in all kinds of areas and we’re not taking advantage of that,” Siegers said. “What I’d like to do as a mayor is create a space for the community to come together, have those conversations, and create in reality the vision that we all have for Sechelt.”
Siegers said Sechelt is facing a complex set of issues, such as affordable housing, water, solid waste, and economic development.
“They’re all interrelated,” she said. “If we look just at affordable housing, we don’t have enough housing here for, not just young people and seniors, but in conversations with people at the hospital, they need housing for nurses [and] doctors… There are some people in the trades who are living in their vehicles because they can’t find a place to live. So there’s a shortage of labour… That ties into economic development… If we put the development in that impacts water. It’s not going to be a simple solution.”
Siegers has been in the minority on some key development votes this term, including the controversial SSC project in East Porpoise Bay, which she supported on first reading in March.
According to Siegers, it was a mistake to deny the developers the opportunity to connect to the municipal sewer system. “By doing that we actually created the risk for the municipality.”
She said the planning department offered a way to set the project up for success, which was ultimately rejected by the majority of council.
“We have not had in this municipality, to my knowledge, an area come forward [for development] like that where the whole thing is designed with multiple zones, multiple focuses – affordable housing, seniors housing… When that came forward we didn’t have the staff capacity to deal with all the various pieces of that to bring it forward in a way that would be a win for the community and a win for the developer. I think that’s a missed opportunity for us.”
Siegers also acknowledged that during the campaign opponents might try to paint her as a holdover from the Henderson mayoralty.
“Under John Henderson we moved forward very quickly and we didn’t engage the community as much as we should have to ensure that we actually had their support, and while we accomplished a lot of things it was to the detriment of the relationship with the community,” said Siegers.
“With this council, I don’t believe we’ve moved a lot of tangible things forward that the community can point to and say, ‘Yes, we’re seeing the vision show up.’ I wouldn’t do either. I wouldn’t do what I saw under the first council or under the second council… We need to balance the development with public engagement, but we need to move forward.”
The full interview with Darnelda Siegers will be available at www.coastreporter.net/audio on July 27.
