Platform

Promises are dangerous but important. I will only make promises that I'm confident I can and will keep. I won't promise to vote a specific way on a specific bylaw or to achieve results that aren't feasible within the District of Sooke's budget. My promises aren't flashy but they're real and specific and I will keep them. I promise that:

• I will seek out community input and perspective
• I will listen to the community
• I will be available and responsive
• I will work to increase government transparency
• I will do my best to balance growth and our small town way of life
• I will prioritize safety for all our community members, including and especially the next generation

Council Productivity

Council does need to invest due diligence and take each decision seriously, but a sense of urgency and timeliness is also necessary. I know many of us are frustrated with long delays. As a regular council meeting attendee I have seen a lot of inefficiency and items unnecessarily bounced from meeting to meeting. Councillors need to take responsibility and fully understand the agenda before the meeting. When councillors show up to a meeting unprepared and uninformed time that could be spent on taking action is instead wasted on bringing those councillors up to speed. 

For example, in a recent council meeting, over 30 minutes were spent clarifying basic facts, such as the number of colours available for council candidates to use in their campaign materials if there were restrictions on the use of the official District of Sooke colour palette (for the record, that restriction left over 16 million colours for candidates to choose from). 

Infrastructure and Long Term Planning

We have a serious infrastructure deficit in Sooke. In order to flourish, our community needs infrastructure that supports our residents working and playing within our community. We need to take action now to improve long term planning to prevent future Councils - and our children - from inheriting the consequences of our failures and delays.

Traffic is one of the most obvious infrastructure issues that impacts us all on a day-to-day basis. While Highway 14 falls under provincial jurisdiction, Sooke Council can take concrete action to improve the current situation. To start, we can:

• Work with Province and School District 62 to return to providing free bus service for students. Just think about traffic in the first week of July versus the last two weeks of June - I think we can all see how much of an impact increased use of school buses, each bus replacing 36-72 individual vehicles, would have on traffic congestion.
• Increase commercial space and professional opportunities within Sooke -  everyone benefits when more of us are able to work closer to home.
• Increase amenities and parks - for example, re-open Fishy (Broomhill) Park water feature. Again, everyone benefits when we all have more reasons to stay closer to home.

Development timeline delays are a critical challenge for Sooke, impacting everything from traffic to taxes, from economic growth to services for both our young and our aging populations. We need to use the tools available to us, including pre-emptive zoning and application processing schedules and accountability, to reduce these delays.

Capital investments for projects like the long delayed Throup road connector require a referendum to be held. For many vital infrastructure projects, this should have been done years ago, preferably at the same time as an election to lower costs. We should be using referendums to get clear community opinions on spending priorities for incoming Councils and Council needs to stop procrastinating on making capital investment decisions.

Local Economy

Our community has grown and we can’t afford to pretend that we are still a small municipality. Now that we have a population over 15,000, we no longer receive Provincial financial support for many service costs and that means that we’re all, as taxpayers, on the hook. Increasing commercial space and density and supporting local businesses will bring in more revenue to our community and offer the best chance of alleviating the tax burden on individual residents.

Currently we lack commercial space - as of July 10th, the only commercial space available in Sooke was listed for a rent of $28/sqft. Compare that to Langford, where on the same date there were almost 30 commercial spaces available in a price range of $16 to $35/sqft. Sooke’s population is about 1/5th of Langford but we only have 1/29th of the commercial spaces for rent that they do. 

Our OCP - and the majority of community members I’ve heard from - say we want density and commercial space in our downtown core. However, the current process for new commercial development in Sooke has left us with a minimum expected wait from application to completion of 7 years. We can do better! Pre-emptive zoning can reduce costs for the district and make it easier and quicker to build commercial spaces where we want them.

We need to prioritize supporting our local businesses and growing our local economy - keeping Sooke dollars in Sooke.