Coun. Chuck Puchmayr is hoping seven is his lucky number.
The incumbent councillor has announced his name will once again be on the ballot when voters go to the polls in the Oct. 20 municipal election. He served as a councillor from 1996 to 2005, was New Westminster’s MLA from 2005 to 2009, and after retiring from politics following a lifesaving liver transplant in January 2008, was re-elected to council in the 2011 and 2014 civic elections.
“I feel really healthy. It’s almost 10 years on gifted time. What better thing to do than to continue to give back to your community?” he told the Record. “I feel that I have been very effective, and I have a lot of support from the community to continue.”
If elected to another four-year term in October, Puchmayr would be the current longest serving member of city council at 20 years. He said there are still issues he’d like to take on as a councillor, such as helping to establish a sister community relationship with the Tl’etinqox government and increasing the availability of city data.
“We have been working very hard on open government. We actually won a national award for our work on open government,” he said. “I want to continue that. When I leave council, I would like to have a government in place that is a government that a citizen would like to see. That’s one that has full disclosure and openness, and easy access to data. Whether it’s comfortable or whether it’s uncomfortable data regardless is irrelevant. I think that the citizens deserve an open government.”
Having worked on “dysfunctional” and divided councils in the past, Puchmayr said he’s “very concerned” about the new New West Progressives slate and the impact that some of its candidates it could have on the city. Puchmayr said he’s proud to be endorsed by the New Westminster and District Labour Council.
“We have good citizens on both sides of the spectrum, but we do have some people that are very political and have a track record and a history of being extremely adversarial,” he said. “That is not healthy for a city.”
