Marni Fedeyko announced yesterday morning that she is ready to embrace a career shift and vie for town council.
Marni Fedeyko announced yesterday morning that she is ready to embrace a career shift and vie for town council.
The mother of three, community volunteer and founding member and writer for online news source Cochrane Now, Fedeyko's campaign slogan is “Working Together. ”
Through her self-funded campaign, the 41-year-old will a focus on improving community engagement; improving transportation and roads; long-term planning, including advocating for 24-hour urgent care; and emergency services - ensuring a safety-first approach and adequate staffing levels are met.
“It puts me out there in a very different way than I'm used to, ” Fedeyko said with a laugh. She will take an unpaid leave of absence from Cochrane Now for the duration of the campaign and credits her work as a volunteer - including co-chair of Cochrane Light-Up and co-founder of Women Empowering Women - to her passion for the community she has called home for nearly six years.
She was also Cochrane Citizen of the Year in 2016 through the Cochrane Community Awards.
Focused on running a positive campaign, Fedeyko believes she will provide balance and will work toward fostering community groups and events to coincide and work together to make Cochrane the best place to live, work and play.
The all or nothing approach to hot-button topics such as traffic, transit and growth is not what Fedeyko is after - she realizes that every issue requires a balanced approach and strong management.
While she believes “we are ready for transit ” she would look to a transit feasibility study to inform whether Cochrane should come out of the gate with full-time bus services or consider peak time transit options. She also wonders if a subsidized dial-a-bus ride sharing partnership service would be more viable.
“If we have buses running around with nobody on them, people will freak out, ” she said, adding that she is interested to learn more about the demand.
The notion of ceasing growth is not realistic for this council hopeful - but she does believe communities can be built better, planned better.
She questions the viability of some of the emergency access routes when push comes to shove - and whether or not these routes would be opened quickly enough in a major response situation.
Fedeyko is also not in favour of Cochrane continuing to build communities with “one way in, one way out ” and is concerned about so many half-built communities on the table, as she sees a lot of homes up for resale - including her own community of Sunset Ridge - while recognizing that council's recent green light on some south side developments were necessary to secure the Bow River bridge project.
Advocacy for 24-hour urgent care is key to her campaign, saying, “The more we hold off on it, the more urgent of a problem it will become. ”
She also sees a need for more affordable seniors housing and a hospice facility.
“We've allowed the growth to come in and now we've got to deal with it, ” she said, stressing that she would like to see Cochrane go after small-city amenities and services and is hopeful that independence would help maintain the “small-town feel everyone loves. ”
The Open Spaces Master Plan of 2012 is something Fedeyko would like to revisit to ensure Cochrane is keeping up with the demand for recreation - including ice time and ball diamonds.
Combined with greater public engagement, she believes contentious issues such as the west end dog park would be avoidable.
“It goes back to that public engagement piece and having better conversations with people, ” she said, emphasizing that the town needs to work harder to go to people in their communities, rather than always making people go to the town at the RancheHouse.
Social media may be a “double-edged sword ” but it's also a reality and Fedeyko would like to see more efforts made by council and administration to connect online.
When it comes to economic development, she would like to see the town focus first on existing small businesses - reiterating that small businesses support local banks, which support major events in town and that it's the small businesses, not the corporate chains, that are the grassroots fibre to flourishing communities.
Learn more at iammarni.com or Facebook.com/iammarni.
Fedeyko will take part in the Cochrane Eagle all-candidates forum Sept. 26 at the Cochrane Lions Event Centre.
[email protected]
