Rocky View County constituents will see a familiar face seeking election for the third time this fall.
John McMurray, 51, a resident on a quarter section between Airdrie and Iricanna since 1995, said he hopes to represent Division 6 in the Oct. 21 municipal election. He ran consecutively in the 2008 and 2010 elections, but was beat-out in the last term by incumbent Councillor Greg Boehlke.
“This County is a fabulous place to live and work. We need to focus on preserving the community,” he said.
McMurray holds a master of business administration from the University of Athabasca and is currently an engineer with Halliburton. He said he thinks his analytical abilities and forward-thinking skills developed over more than 20 years working as an engineer will be an asset to implementing much-needed change in the County.
“The rural nature is what attracted me to it (the County) in the first place. We need to focus on preserving that and not pursue developments that don’t have benefits,” he said.
“We need better decision-making on a County level and to diversify our costs. There has not been good long-term decisions for urbanization.
We don’t need to compete with the urban centres – they already have the shopping malls.”
He added that applications presented to council need to be analyzed from a net-value perspective. In line with his 2010 election campaign, McMurray said there needs to be more risk management and more economic balance for development proposals.
McMurray said he was pleased with the draft of the County Plan and hopes to see it approved by the current council without many changes. Because the plan will provide a strategy for how much growth to allow in the County with a projected 2.5 to three per cent growth in the region annually, McMurray said he thinks it reiterates the desire of residents to maintain and protect the rural nature of Rocky View.
“It was driven by citizen input rather than development desires,” he said, adding that new plan’s goal to be financially sustainable was lacking in some of council’s recent approvals.
However, in regards to the County’s escalating debt, McMurray said he would like to see an increase to the cost of levies charged to developers to pay back the debt incurred by developments.
“We are too far in debt. There needs to be a cost of repayment so the debt burden doesn’t fall on the back’s of taxpayers,” he said, adding that creating a business tax was another possibility.
Although McMurray has no experience in public office and said becoming a councillor would be a learning curve, he thinks the County “could stand to see new people come in.”
“Experience is valuable but so are new ideas,” he said, adding new representation from the east part of the County would help to alleviate the tensions between council’s perceived east/west voting split.
“Many democracies recognize the need for change and choice, (so they) have term limits to prevent incumbents from wielding too much influence.”
He concluded he hopes to see more voter participation in the fall election as he said local elections generally have more impact than provincial and federal elections, yet have lower turnout.
