Former District of North Vancouver council member Mike Little has declared his intentions to be mayor.
Little, who served three terms on council (2005-2011), announced his campaign this week.
“It’s been a poorly kept secret for a while,” he said. “I immediately missed the work that I had been doing. It’s fascinating work. You get to work with people and help problem-solve on a weekly basis on a ton of different issues.”
Little didn’t run for his seat again in 2014 because he was nominated to run for the Conservatives in the riding of Burnaby North-Seymour for the 2015 federal election, in which he placed third.
Little said he plans to make housing and transportation his top issues in the campaign. The official community plan, which he voted in favour of in 2011, is falling short on a number of its goals of keeping and attracting working families, Little said.
“Yes we’re building a ton of units but are we building the units that we actually need for our community?” he said, noting that developments approved by council have been rife with one-bedroom condos and a dearth of three-bedroom units suitable for families.
The same could be said of affordable housing, seniors-oriented housing and purpose-built rentals, Little added.
“I’m a free market capitalist. I think the market will eventually produce what we need but it’s not going to produce what North Vancouver needs or what Lynn Valley needs; it’s going to produce what the global market is interested in and right now that’s luxury condos.”
The current Emery Village project is a good example of that, Little said.
On transportation, Little said he’d like to review and possibly scale back traffic-calming measures meant to halt people doing rat runs when arterials are backed up.
“I think we do need to put some of those local street ends back on the table and find more local connections that will get us through congested areas or high-traffic problem areas,” he said. “It’s very nice to have it subdivision oriented but it’s also awful for people to be spending an additional 20 minutes there and 20 minutes back sitting in traffic just to get around the community.”
He’d also like to explore having an industrial-vehicles-only road under the Ironworkers, closer to the waterfront to keep heavy trucks off Main Street, and lobbying the province for better co-ordination of major stoplights. On the matter of mobility pricing, which the province is now considering, Little said he doesn’t favour anything that will put a cost burden on drivers or dissuade people who would otherwise drive to support local businesses.
Outside the two major issues, Little said he’d use his influence as mayor to refocus the local government on serving the populace.
“It seems our customer service is not at the level I expect it to be at,” he said. “In part, I think the culture of a municipality comes from the mayor’s office and I have a lot of ideas about how I would change the culture of the municipality, particularly as it pertains to accountability and transparency.”
Since 2015, Little has been working in the lumber export business, chairing the North Vancouver District Public Library Board and chairing the board of New Hope Community Services, a non-profit that houses refugees and asylum seekers at a Surrey apartment.
