Through the 2017 Municipal Election season The Eagle 100.9 and Okotoks Online will be bringing you profiles of candidates to help you make an informed decision.

Tell us a little bit about yourself:

"I was elected to Town Council in 2010 and I served a 3 year term, I stepped down to focus more on family and I'm coming back feeling fresh and really excited about the next term. We're going to be editing and updating the Municipal Development Plan which is the blueprint and map that guides how we grow for the next 30 years. In 1998 we had an incredibly inspired document that has brought us this far, so this next document I want to make sure it's as progressive, forward thinking, and inspirational as our last MDP was."

What is the main part of your platform?:

"One of them is water, and it's always going to be water. We're prone to droughts, floods and everything in between, we know it was a dry hot summer and when we see developments in our community it creates anxiety and frustrations. I think there's opportunities in this election and in the next term to help explain and educate the public on how we need to work regionally with respect to the watersheds. The pipeline from Calgary is approved, it's just a matter of making sure we find adequate funding from the province to make it affordable to our community. There's also this really amazing shift in terms of our ability as a municipality based on recent legislation that's come out of the provincial government, to charge better off-site levies to development, so new development will play a role in helping us to fund future water. I'm hoping economic development will be an issue, there's a lot of families commuting into Calgary, and if we're going to be more than just a bedroom community we need to have our own local economy, and you do that successfully by attracting companies and corporations that set up our headquarters here. I think there's opportunities to continue to look for a way to attract a really innovative college, Olds has the Agricultural College, Lacombe has a university, there's really small communities around Canada that have attracted innovative niche post-secondary education institutions. I think some of the areas we might want to consider is IT technology, medicine, alternative medicine, green energy, there's so much opportunity, it's about being in the right place at the right time. When I started my term in 2010 there was a massive shortage of doctors in town, and we created a Physicians Retention Committee and it was incredibly successful. When you put heads together, you have a goal, network, and make things happen that's when they do, when we pull together. Another issue is growth, what it's going to look like, is it going to be more cookie cutter suburbia homes? Which is great, we've done a really great job up to this point but I think going forward we can do better. The new research is showing that mixed used densities creates more affordable housing, affordable commercial space, it creates walkable communities and greater social connectedness. There's so much research it's so clear that there are much better ways of growing going forward, so I'm excited to be a part of bringing that into our community. There's also going to be opportunities to talk about taxes, they keep climbing, there's more and more pressure. One of the platforms I'm running on is that I want to see a tax freeze for seniors, in the form of a rebate. I want to freeze their taxes for the next four years while we figure out how we can grow our economic commercial base to offset those expenses, I know it's not a major break but it's enough to send the message."

Why do you think you'd make a good councillor?:

"There's a million other issues that I'm passionate about, I want to start a youth committee, I want to talk more about innovation and construction," she says. "I really want to support businesses as well, there's ongoing concerns about red tape which is normal, but I think that we can do even more to make sure businesses feel they're welcome here. I think there's incredible opportunities in Okotoks to expand our economy to try to avoid just simply becoming a suburbia bedroom community to Calgary. Other communities have done it, if we look at successes in other areas of the world I think there's ideas we can adopt here and I'm excited to share those."

Every Okotoks candidate running for the 2017 municipal election will get to opportunity to explain who they are, their platform and why they are running. The candidate profiles are posted at random. If you are a candidate and have not been contacted, please email news@okotoksonline.com

Questions, comments, or story ideas? Email us at news@okotoksonline.com