Tony Luck announces his intentions to run for Mayor

The mayoral race for the 2022 municipal election is now at two people after Tony Luck announced his intentions to run.

“After lots of contemplation and talking to quite a few people in town, having phone calls, and having people asking me, I’ve made the tough decision to seek the seat of Mayor for the city of Merritt for this election in October,” said Councillor Tony Luck.

Luck said he really wants to hammer home the ideas of having a collaborative council and have a strong community based leadership style.

“I will come to the table with a much different leadership style really working on the team process and getting more people involved. We have a lot of work to do coming in the next couple of years working whit the seniors levels of government and I think its going to be really important to have all of council to roll up their sleeves and really work. I want to make sure we have a really good collaborative process with the rest of council.”

When talking about the tough 2021 year, between the pandemic, fires, and floods, Luck said he is wanting to involve the community a lot more moving forward.

“I think overall the city has done a really good job in a lot of areas. I think one of the key pieces that we missed was the communication piece, I think there was a lack of proper communication in getting some of the information out to the community and that really set us back and hurt us. But having said that, we did a lot of good things in the city, there was lot of work that was done and staff was absolutely tremendous during that period of time. Moving forward I’m going to make the commitment to sit down on a regular basis to keep people up to speed moving forward.”

Luck added he thinks his experience and his different perspective on things will be beneficial to the City of Merritt.

“I’ve got a lot of experience. This will be my second city council so I got the small town perspective, I got the larger city perspective as well. I know some people don’t like that, they want me to have the smaller town perspective, but in the 21 century it is hard to do.”

“I think I’ve got a pretty broad perspective on whats happening in our community. I always look at it this way, first I’m a  British Columbian and second I’m a Merrittonian and I think you have to have that perspective especially when you look at what has happened to Merritt recently as we have got to work really hard with seniors levels of government and have that bigger perspective. As well understand how we fit into their plans and how there plans will work for us. So moving forward having a good understanding of those things we should be able to get some of the things we badly need like infrastructure for the city.”

Luck joins Mayor Linda Brown as the only two to publicize their desires to run for Mayor in the 2022 municipal election so far.

Residents head to the polls on October 15.