A third candidate has announced his intentions to seek election for Rocky View County’s Division 9 in the October municipal election.
Bruce Kendall, a longtime resident west of Cochrane, said he believes he has the “necessary qualifications to best represent the residents.”
“I strongly believe in council needing change because without it, council gets stale,” he said
While Kendall was a resident of the Municipal District of Bighorn until 1995, he served a term as reeve and deputy reeve.
“My municipal experience will be a great asset providing a very good understanding of the workings of municipal process,” he said, adding that any new position will have a learning curve, “but mine will be considerably shorter compared to someone who’s never been involved with local politics.”
Kendall said he has a first-hand knowledge of the workings in RVC having been a member of the 2010 Reeve’s Task Force on Growth Planning and a six-year member of the county’s Development Appeal Board.
“(This experience) has provided an excellent understanding of the development process in Rocky View,” he said.
“There’s been a lot of controversy surrounding growth and our debt and the best I can do is to ensure that it doesn’t impact the residential tax base,” Kendall said, adding that the county needs to come up with better ways to communicate with residents when developments are proposed and respect the majority of residents’ wishes, which he says are against large-scale developments.
“Ultimately, these big decisions are made by council and I’m hoping to have the opportunity to be there to ask administration some of the important questions before those decisions are made.”
Kendall added that recreational needs is another important issue he hopes to address if he is elected. He was involved with the site acquisition, planning and development of the Spray Lake Sawmills Family Sports Centre in Cochrane, which he said is a type of facility RVC should consider partnering in to reduce the financial impacts on the county to provide recreational amenities.
Kendall added that his involvement as project leader with the South Fish Creek Recreational Associations expansion of its rinks gives him a good understanding of project management and working within budgets.
As the director of the Western Sky Land Trust, a conservation organization dedicated to conserving lands and river valleys throughout Southern Alberta, Kendall said the values of this work would translate into his work with Rocky View.
“Equipped with common sense and a great deal of experience in this field, I know that we can improve on the impacts of change,” said Kendall.
