City of Windsor Election
The residents of the City of Windsor cast their votes on October 25th and it appears they decided to stay the course. Two new Councillors were elected due to the new 10 Ward system. One incumbent Ken Lewenza Jr was defeated by 3 time candidate Ed Sleiman. The main issue in Ward 4 were the big hikes is water rates. Ken Lewenza Jr being the head of the WUC he seems to have paid the price for the hikes. That and the somewhat anti union feeling with the residents after the 101 day strike of last year. All of the other incumbent Councillors were re elected.
The Mayor's race was decided by good margin in favour of two time Mayor Eddie Francis. The race basically turned into a pro labour, anti labour public debate but the real issues were deeper than that. The media seemed to simplify the whole campaign into a labour fight. The Mayors campaign called for a property tax system update, moving forward on bringing more Jobs to the City with incentives, setting up a Downtown Development Commission to help with redeveloping the City core, and keeping the course with the last 4 years. Downtown is in terrible need of development and investment. My opinion is that development needs to come from the private sector, as every development and plan the has been done with taxpayers money has been a terrible failure. Hopefully we've learned from the past and realize Windsor can not survive and expand with only public sector investment.
I'd also like to thank all my supporters who helped with my campaign for City Council Ward 3. It was an honour to take a run at the job and I plan to take what I learned from this and run a much better campaign in 4 years.
Thanks....Don Merrifield Jr.