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Kiss wants to continue involvement

I was farm-raised in rural Saskatchewan in a multicultural and multigenerational family
87055westernstarPaulaKiss
Paula Kiss

I was farm-raised in rural Saskatchewan in a multicultural and multigenerational family. After volunteering overseas, I obtained a civil engineering degree from the University of Saskatchewan and worked on a variety of projects across Canada and around the world. This education and experience provided me with a strong background in community engagement, planning and implementation.

I moved to Nelson five years ago when I decided to return to Canada and “settle down.” I chose Nelson because it was my ideal community — small, socially connected, beautiful, walk-able, accessible to nature, with a diverse economy.

I became heavily involved in various organizations as a co-founder, board member, or volunteer participant.

Given my passion for contributing to this community, my logical next step has been to pursue a position with city council.

TOP THREE ISSUES

I don’t have “issues” as part of my campaign, only one main strategy – intelligent planning. This speaks to most every issue that Nelson experiences. Many of Nelson’s recurring problems (housing affordability, transit, development, economic vitality) are intrinsically linked. In order to find viable solutions to any issue, we need to understand the links and make decisions that take us towards improvement of one or more without setting us back in other areas. We could undertake many innovative projects that have spin-off benefits.

3 of my many goals and ideas are:

#1. Encourage secondary suites through bylaw updates and fee structure. This will improve housing affordability, create a more varied and resilient housing supply, ease debt burden for young families who own suite-able homes, draw community closer through integration, stimulate the local construction economy, and help local businesses hire and retain staff who will now have places to live.

#2. More support for completion of the skatepark. We must recognize the needs of our youth. Such a park would improve mental and physical health of our youth, improve inter-generational engagement, bring outsiders in to recreate in our community, create work to build and maintain the park, improve our sense of community, encourage diversity, and promote community pride.

#3. Build beautiful covers on some of our most heavily used stairways.  This can be done in partnership with local mills and timber framers (or metal workers) in order to support and promote local materials and skilled labour. Cascading positive effects would be to reduce financial and environmental cost of snow clearing on tax payers, reduce carbon footprint of city, increase safety and walk-ability of our community, reduce downtown parking demand, improved health, welfare and connectedness of residents. This also has the potential to become a tourist draw, further adding to the beauty, pride and uniqueness of our community.

I would like to include improvement to our transit that would increase rider-ship and economic viability. However, I believe this process is heavily dictated by BC Transit. I need to do more research on this partnership before understanding what’s needed to improve our system and bring back service on Sundays.

With sufficient partnership building, fiscal responsibility, and creative and wise leadership, we can produce lasting and positive impacts on our community.