City council candidate looks to govern for all citizens
By Tim Kalinowski on July 10, 2021.
LETHBRIDGE HERALDtkalinowski@lethbridgeherald.com City council candidate Davey Wiggers says he would like to put an end to the partisan bickering in the city, and get on with the business of running the government for the best benefit of all its citizens.“Respecting the views of those who don’t agree with you is crucially important,” he says. “The problem that we have on all levels of government today is the amount of partisanship and divisiveness. It toxifies the relationship, and it does not serve the people they are meant to represent well.”
It may seem a strange sentiment coming from Wiggers, who is vice-president of policy with the Lethbridge-West UCP Constituency Association, but he feels there should be a clear demarcation of powers between the province and city.
“Everybody has their political leanings, everybody on council,” he states. “I know some are supporters of my current MLA (Shannon Phillips), some are supporters of the party I volunteer for. I am good friends with representatives of all political affiliations … Council is an administrative thing. It is not a partisan thing.
“However,” he adds, “with my affiliations, and my contacts, networks and relationships I have spent years building up- I do have contacts I think can help the City of Lethbridge when we need our provincial leaders to take action.”
Wiggers was asked what he thought the proper roles of the province and city should be in their relationship to one another?
“When council requires something from the province that should be addressed as a council; it should be requested through the proper chains (at Municipal Affairs),” he says. “Council is an extension of the provincial government; so it gets its legislative power as part of the Municipal Government Act. That is directly an extension of the provincial government. It has no more power than a provincial government gives it.”
Wiggers references the issue of local EMS dispatch as an example.
“We don’t always get what we want,” he says. “We ask. Sometimes the answer is no. We don’t know how that turns out until we look back and see the right answer. Right now, when your are talking about EMS, the government is of the position that centralizing dispatch is what is best for the province as a whole. That has been centralized for most of the province for the most part, including Calgary and Edmonton, with Lethbridge being one of the few communities who were the outliers. Will the province be right? Will council be correct? We won’t know until some time has passed.”
In terms of his local priorities if elected to council, Wiggers says he is a dedicated member of the local Oddfellows lodge downtown, where he sits as the chair of the group’s building advisory board. As a downtown stakeholder, Wiggers would like to see even more attention and greater focus given to revitalizing this important area of the city. He feels this should include finding suitable vacant spaces throughout the city to act as low income housing and transitional housing to address the issue of homelessness.
“There is plenty of un-utilized real estate in the city that could, in my view, be transformed into low income housing or transient housing,” he confirms. “That would address a number of issues.”
He also feels it is important to bring a performing arts centre to Lethbridge to enhance the city’s overall vibrancy.
“We are missing out,” he says. “Yes, the Enmax Centre does play host to that, but it doesn’t have the right acoustics and it wasn’t built for that. That is something I would like to see.”
Wiggers, who also ran for council during the 2017 election, says if elected this time he is also dedicated to the idea of bringing property taxes down for all Lethbridge residents.
“From the outside looking in, what it appears to me is that the City has been looking to spend the budgets that it has,” he says, “and only recently started looking at reducing its expenditures to maintain that tax rate. Whereas no one has even broached the idea of reducing the mill rate, and asking the City administration to do what it does with fewer funds.” Follow @TimKalHerald on Twitter 4
-3
