Frankly Speaking

Voters lined up at the Whalley Legion hall to cast ballots in a Surrey election - probably about 50 years ago. Photo from the Surrey Archives. An update: There will be a meeting for the eight Surrey mayoral candidates tonight (Wednesday, Oct. 3) at Morgan Creek Golf Club in South Surrey. It is sponsored by the South Surrey-White Rock Chamber of Commerce. I will be involved as one of the two moderators. The meeting is open to the public, and starts at 6:30 p.m. I am planning to post a more detailed look at the candidates running in Surrey and the major issues of the campaign thus far. It will appear on this blog in the coming days, as I find time to do sufficient research. Surrey residents who are planning to vote will have to pick through 84 candidates running on 10 different slates, along with a large number of independents, when they go to the polls on Oct. 20. While the sheer number of candidates and slates may seem overwhelming – and it is – there are many good ...

Tom Gill, who has been a member of Surrey council since 2005, is the Surrey First candidate for mayor in the October civic election. Surrey residents who pay even minimal attention to city politics must have been scratching their heads in recent weeks. One-term mayor Linda Hepner was retiring, but nobody was stepping up to the plate to take her place. This in the second-biggest city in B.C., where there are a host of serious issues facing the next council. It also occurred at a time when mayoral candidates in other cities, among them Vancouver and Delta, were coming out of the woodwork. There was a reason for the silence. No one was going to step up until the Surrey First slate, which has held every seat on council for the past seven years, said what it was going to do. The first hint came on Wednesday, when Surrey First Coun. Bruce Hayne announced he was leaving the slate. Clearly, some sort of backroom struggle had taken place, and he had lost out. Then on Friday, thre...

Hawthorne Park is popular with neighbourhood residents, as it is a quiet oasis in a very busy part of Surrey between Whalley and Guildford. Surrey council has voted to put 105 Avenue through the park, adding a great deal of traffic and cutting the park in two. While council has made its final decision, citizens who disagree can fill out a form to oppose the action through what is known as the alternative approval process. More than 30,000 forms need to be returned to city hall by mid-September in order to stop the council action. Frank Bucholtz photo In the past 10 years, Surrey council has become more and more remote from the huge number of people it governs. The last time there was a competitive election was in 2005, when Dianne Watts challenged incumbent mayor Doug McCallum and his dominant Surrey Electors Team (SET) which she had been part of. Watts went on to win and eventually corralled almost all the incumbent councillors, SET and otherwise, into the Surrey Firs...

The City of Surrey has more clout than it realizes in the year leading up to the provincial election. Thus far, it has been reluctant to use it. Mayor Linda Hepner, somewhat belatedly, realized that there was a problem with school capital funding. She only seemed to realize the depth of the problem after the Surrey Board of Education voted on April 21 to ask the city to suspend development applications in three fast-growing areas. She offered the board some support, saying a month later that the city and school district had to come up with “their own plan.” Hepner said the city will no longer sit idly in the face of school construction delays, saying “The formula is broken. We’re going to develop (a formula) ourselves and present it to the minister.” Surprise, surprise. The province was receptive to the issue, and indeed almost fell over backwards to accommodate the school district. The BC Liberals won five of the eight Surrey seats in the 2013 election, and at least two of ...