Starting with a long-list of 109 questions posed by Bowen Islanders, Andrea Little, Joyce Ganong, Gordon Reid, Sheilagh Sparks and Tina Nielson honed-in on 15 key questions to pose to mayoral candidates on Monday evening. The questions, at times, sounded like ones a person might have to respond to at a job interview. Some others asked for the specifics of issues and municipal business. Audience members, packed into Cates Hill Chapel listened intently.
The candidates, Stacy Beamer, Tim Rhodes and Murray Skeels talked about their strengths and weaknesses and also elaborated on the relevance of their past experiences to the job of mayor.
“A good leader drives the bus,” Beamer told the audience. “A good leader is able to admit that they are wrong and says ‘we’ more than ‘I’.”
His strength, he said, is looking at a complicated project and figuring out how to get “from here to there,” but his weakness is looking at the minutia.
“The details, the paperwork, that is my weakness, but I’m not afraid to seek help when I need it,” he said.
Tim Rhodes said that for him, a good mayor was a person who built consensus to help move the community into the future, adding that serving on nine commities taught him how municipality works. He said that good communication has been the basis for all of his work as a councillor, and that his greatest strength is also his Achilles heel.
“I care deeply about Bowen,” Rhodes told the audience. “Because of that, I agonize about every decision – we have to get this right.”
Murray Skeels told the audience that his experience working as a project manager on multi-million dollar construction projects for fifteen years proves his ability to lead a team.
“These projects follow a critical timeline and a disciplined process, and their success lies not in telling people what to do, but ensuring that all the correct steps had been taken previously so people can get on with their job.”
Skeels added that his strength is knowing Bowen intimately. Selling flooring on the island, he said gave him the opportunity to work with islanders from all walks of life.
“You’ve asked about my weakness: I can be curt. It is a holdover from the construction culture,” said Skeels. “But it isn’t polite and certainly wouldn’t be appropriate for a mayor. I am working on it, I have worked on it and I am getting better.”
Joyce Ganong asked the mayoral candidates how their leadership skills would help Bowen to move forward on the issues that everyone seems to agree upon, and, asked them to tell a story about how they have done this in the past.
Skeels told the audience that the key to moving forward on Bowen is simple: sell the surplus lands, retire the debt and move forward on the projects we all agree on including the community hall, Snug Cove house, affordable housing and the firehall.
“Establishing the priorities and how to move forward, I don’t see this as a big problem,” said Skeels. “But as far as a story demonstrating how I’ve done this in the past is a little beyond the level of my nerves for this evening.”
Beamer followed this response by stating that on Bowen Island, we look at all of our priorities and projects as separate issues.
“But Bowen is dynamic and all of these issues are interconnected,” he said. “We have to look at infrastructure not just as pipes, but also as social services, parks and rec, or things for seniors or the young, these things are all interconnected. My style is to bring this big picture into the equation – but not in a way that doesn’t honour the details.”
Beamer offered the story of the turf field as an example of how he is capable of getting things done.
“We had a field designed that was beyond our ability to pay for,” Beamer told the audience. “I stepped into the background… looked at the drawings and redesigned them changing the storm sewers, and then oversaw the construction on behalf of the municipality, which is one of the times that I stepped forward to do what I do.”
Tim Rhodes said that moving forward has been an issue with the council he served on, and those previous to that.
“I think at some point we get stuck in an idea a little too rigidly,” he said. “We need to re-assess things as we’re moving forward and that doesn’t mean starting over, but it means finding other ways to do it.”
Rhodes told the audience that his trick to getting things done was to approach problems from a business perspective, and he told the story of a call for proposals by the Chamber of Commerce for a new Bowen Island guide.
“We put forward a proposal that was a business plan that showed where revenues could be made through the guide, several years later tourism was up on Bowen 85 percent.”
The candidates also faced specific questions on their vision for a community centre, on lot 2, and on development in Howe Sound. They moved quickly enough through the 15 slated questions efficiently enough that Nielsen and Ganong had time to add two more: one on engaging youth, and another on climate change.
