Surrounded by his, city councillors and senior city administrators Monday morning at City Hall, Mayor Victor Fedeli announced he would be living up to a campaign promise of being a two term Mayor.
Surrounded by his, city councillors and senior city administrators Monday morning at City Hall, Mayor Victor Fedeli announced he would be living up to a campaign promise of being a two term Mayor.
“In the municipal elections this fall you're going to see a ballot without my name on it,” he said in his emotional speech.
“Term limits for elected officials should be instituted at all levels of government and it's important to lead by example. It has been an incredible honour to serve as your mayor.”
“You will find me in this office every waking moment for the next ten months … it was fun, it was exciting, it was filled with highs and lows, incredibly demanding and incredibly rewarding.”
“The best part was to see the look on my dad's (Hub) face when he first heard the words Mayor Fedeli.”
Fedeli said when looking back he sees the ability to get the city back in a forward moving direction and this will be his legacy.
“I think the fact I said it in one sentence that I really believe that we restored hope and we restored solvency.”
“That we put a fiscal plan in place that's really, really key I think those are the kinds of things that will be the legacy rather than oh we built this building, the bus station, or we had sold this land and Home Depot was built. That list will be a mile long and those are the results of our legacy which I believe is the hope and the solvency.”
As for regrets Fedeli says he has one and while it may sound political it is not.
“The regret is that we weren't able to negotiate sustainable funding from the province. That is a single regret in our term,” he states.
“I had hoped we'd get close, there were signs and highlights that we were getting close many times but we were shut out to many times and we couldn't deliver on that hope, so that's certainly one regret.”
He also noted that he abandoned the campaign promise of delivering a 'big fish' that single huge industry employer, instead focusing on delivering a number of smaller schools which included the expansion of a number of businesses.
“We landed many, many schools of fish instead you know the business retention and expansion program that the Mayor's Office of Economic Development instituted was a real eye opener,” he explains.
“It was an eye opener, it was one of our secret weapons at the end of the day -- when most communities were out looking for the car plant we were busy seeing what would it take Fabrene for you to expand in North Bay. And coming back to whether it our capitol budget or the hydro capitol budget and shifting gears and changing everything around so that the capitol budget could accommodate them so they could do an expansion and hire more people.”
“I think we always chase that but I'm more happy with looking to the existing buildings, the mining sector and seeing what can be done not only to get them back to work because I see them one by one coming back to work, but what can we do additionally to make North Bay the place when you do expand.”
Fedeli says he still has tons of work to complete over the next ten months and won't speculate if he will be running for provincial office, but says he is not finished living in the public eye.
“For ten months I am going to continue to remain neutral and be critical and be praising of any government action that needs praise or criticism and then I am going to relax for the month of December and then we'll see in January whether Patty kicks me out of the house.”
“I said recently my work in the public service is not done, I know that much about myself, I really think in the role of the mayor (I've said this and it will sound funny) when I'm a lot older I'd love to do it again.”
“I'd really love to be the Mayor of the City of North Bay again sometime in the future. Certainly if it ever got to the point that I didn't like what I saw in the city I would do it again and I just have confidence that the public is going to not ever let that happen again and I won't need to run for mayor. But I'd love to do it again sometime in the future.”
