Welland mayoral candidates share focus to improve taxes, infrastructure, homelessness

The municipal election is just a week away, and some municipalities in the Niagara Region will be seeing new faces as mayor.

That includes Welland, where eight candidates are vying for the position — CHCH News spoke with three candidates that are looking to replace him.

The mayor’s seat in Welland is up for grabs, after the former mayor, Frank Campion, decided not to run for re-election.

April Jeffs was previously the Mayor of Wainfleet from 2010 to 2018, then she was appointed as Chair of the Niagara Parks Commission.

She says if she were elected, the issues she would focus on first would be high taxes, infrastructure and homelessness.

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“I want to do a value for money audit so that would give myself and council a really clear picture of the finances, because I feel like the money is there, but it’s just not being allocated properly,” said Jeffs. “The other thing I would want to do is implement a homelessness and addiction task force.”

Graham Speck is a local business owner and a two-term Welland City Councillor, who says residents are telling him about the same issues.

“Taxes in our city have increased substantially, approximately 18 per cent increase in spending by the city over the next three years,” said Speck. “Shortly after that our roads, sewers and sidewalks — our infrastructure is deteriorating, desperately needs continued re-investment into fixing Welland and making it better.”

David McLeod is a longtime Welland City Councillor, since 2010, and he says the top four issues are: housing, taxation, infrastructure, and homelessness, but he says there are many more.

“My main goal and my training tells me that we must move the marker on all these issues, and decide what the top two issues are, share it with the public, and go after them on all those files,” said McLeod. “its all important.”

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Candidates were also asked their thoughts on the big changes coming to Niagara Region’s governance — there will be no more regional councillors elected, but instead the 12 mayors will make up the council.

“I think because I have served in that dual role as Mayor of Wainfleet, I didn’t have a regional councillor to lean on, it was just myself,” said Jeffs. “I know it’s going to be a particularly big job moving forward into this next term.”

“The demands of our time, it will be a challenge, but this is what we signed up for,” said Speck. “The workload for all the mayors will be substantially increasing.”

“It’s going to be different and it’s a fresh start at the region,” said McLeod. “I want to hear directly from regional municipalities about what their actual challenges are in their community, and then help them achieve their goals while at the same time, they’ll be able to help us achieve our goals.”

There are eight candidates running for Welland mayor, including Pat Chiocchio, David Clow, Brandon Simon, Gary Graziani and Natashia Bergen.

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