After 15 years of raising a family in Lethbridge, one City Council candidate is looking to give back to the community he loves.
Mike Schmidtler says he moved his family to Lethbridge for a job opportunity. He and his family chose Lethbridge because it sounded like a great place to finish raising a family. He says over the years he and his family have truly fallen in love with the community; both his kids have attended post-secondary studies in Lethbridge and have settled and bought houses in the city.
“I think it’s got so much going for it, and I think I’ve got some very good real-world experience that I think would be good on council,” Schmidtler says.
Schmidtler says he believes that for Lethbridge to continue to grow, it is important to attract new business to the city. He explains that north of Lethbridge, you are seeing a large number of people moving to cities like Calgary, but are not seeing the appropriate spinoff coming down to Lethbridge.
“You start to think about it. What is it about Lethbridge that’s making us grow so much slower than a place like Calgary? Now, Calgary’s got some natural advantages because it’s a big city, but what brings people to a place is a job. But if you don’t have a job to go to, you’re not going to move somewhere. That’s why I moved here. I had a job to go to.”
“You start looking at, well, what would be the impediments to businesses opening up here? And so then you start looking at, well, what are taxes like in Lethbridge, and not just residential taxes, but business taxes.”
If elected, the retired water and wastewater engineer says moving forward, he would like to help move the Lethbridge Trade and Convention Centre project, formerly the Agrifood Hub and Trade Centre, project forward on a positive note.
“That’s not a popular opinion because I think people, they just want to look at it and say, we never should have, we never should have done it. I look at it differently and say, if we did it the right way, and it was the right building to attract what we need, now we can build a hotel. Now we can build all the other things around it. And we don’t have to put the money into it as taxpayers. If it’s the right building, and it’s got the right press, and it’s seen as a positive in the community, the private money will follow it.”
“That’s what we need. We need to get over that now. We need to start to promote the place so we can attract private investment to use that as a seed, basically, to attract other money.”
According to Schmidtler, when it comes to future infrastructure projects, such as a third bridge, he says it is important to come up with a business case to spend the money.
“My argument would be, let’s put together a business case that puts that in the right place, that potentially uses a third bridge to help promote our airport,” he adds. “Also, some sort of multimodal avenue. When they talk about intermodal, they talk about truck to rail. But what can we do with a third bridge that would help our airport be more economically viable, and airports don’t make money on passenger traffic, they make money on cargo.”
“If we can make a business case that the bridge can help to increase the economic activity, not just in Lethbridge, but in southern Alberta, for instance, Medicine Hat through Lethbridge and our huge agricultural corridor, if we can continue to build on that, and that bridge and the airport can somehow be part of that, it’s much, much easier for us to be able to attract federal and provincial funds, because it’s part of a bigger, you know, a bigger plan. That’s what I’d like to see.”
He says he thinks that Lethbridge City Council could use some business expertise at the table, and because he is retired, this will be his full-time job.
“I’m very pleased with where we’re at in our life. I think we’re going to be just fine. I’m not doing this for the paycheck. I understand that for me, I’m a slow reader, but I intend to do a lot of reading. I intend to talk to a lot of people.”
Schmidtler says something he has learned through campaigning and door-knocking is that not everybody wants to talk to you. You know, some people are just polite and say, Thanks. Others didn’t know there was an election. But, out of a hundred doors in a night, you’ll get two or three really cool conversations where I may have had a perception about something.”
He adds that being able to have these conversations with voters helps him learn more about the needs in the city.
