The current term will be the last for White Rock Mayor Wayne Baldwin.
He confirmed to Peace Arch News Thursday that he will not run for a third term in office in this fall’s municipal election. Baldwin said he had decided even before being re-elected in 2014 that he would limit his time in office to two terms.
“The first term was pretty chaotic,” he said.
He said adding that he had been dealing with the death of his granddaughter, the death of two councillors, a byelection and the death of a jogger struck by a BNSF train. The latter, he said, had looked at one time like it would lead to extreme fencing of the waterfront area at the insistence of the Canadian Transportation Agency.
“It threw us off any strategic plan we might have had…it was not a good place to stop,” he said.“But one decision we did make during the first term was to buy the water utility from Epcor. I would have hated to see that go awry under another mayor.”
He says he sees this as his greatest achievement as mayor, along with “being able to provide a fairly positive environment for development – I haven’t been on board with all of it, but I agree with the notion that we need to have a density increase to cope with growth rather than spreading out, and it’s led to the promise of community amenity money that is a huge, huge bonus to White Rock.”
A former major in the Canadian Forces, he had served as White Rock’s city manager for 23 years up until 2006, and was first elected mayor in 2011.
More to come…