Joe Mauro running for 6th term as City Councillor
LETHBRIDGE – Joe Mauro was born and raised in Lethbridge, graduating from the University of Lethbridge where he met his wife of 33 years, then working in banking, insurance and as a cabinet designer.
He says he’s passionate about how Lethbridge grows, and he believes council as a whole is doing many things right, including creating parks, trails and green space.
“We also seem to be doing well at maintaining all sorts of sporting facilities so that people can enjoy that, and I think we’re doing a pretty good job of doing the arts and culture, you know I think we’re trying to balance that all out and the city is doing a remarkable job at that.”
His concerns centre around people’s safety, and creating more monetary efficiencies within council.
“A lot of people just don’t feel safe in certain areas of our community and I think we need to address that. The other major thing is our growth. Taxpayers alone can’t sustain the growth that we are seeing. And everybody’s saying that when we hit 100,000, we [will] see that even more. And so with that, we have been a council that has gone into debt more than in th past, and that kinda concerns me.
“I think we need to be better at what we’re doing. We need to be more efficient, we need to be more effective. We need to have a leadership team…an administration that understands that there’s needs and wants and we need to weigh them out. We know that we only have a certain pot of money. We can’t have everything, and there comes a time when we’re going to have to just say no to the community, we can’t afford to do it.”
Mauro also hopes in the future that agencies and organizations coming to the city for funding could work together more, so that the financial burden on the city isn’t quite so high.
“I have a voice that seems to connect with a segment of the community that, from what I hear, isn’t very well represented. I want to continue to be their voice.”