Duane Hicks
Perspective.
It’s a quality mayoral candidate Dan Onichuk wants voters to remember when they see his name on the ballot in this month’s municipal election.
Onichuk, who served one term as mayor from 2003-06, is the youngest of the three candidates at age 54. And despite having spent the past eight years away from council chambers to focus on family, he said he’s very much in touch with community.
“I have children from age 16 to age 32, I have a mom that lives in Rose Manor, I have an uncle that’s challenged,” he noted.
“I’ve got a good perspective of a very broad swathe of our community.
“I hear it, I see it, I’m at the games, I’m at the high school, I’m at the public schools,” Onichuk added.
Onichuk took an early pension at age 50 and has been playing “Mr. Mom” to his three teenage sons. His three daughters are out of the house—one married; two others in post-secondary education.
He also spent a lot of time helping out his mother, Ann, and uncle, Nick Hnatiuk.
“I focused on family because you don’t get these years back,” Onichuk reasoned.
He said he decided to run for mayor again after careful consideration, and the encouragement of friends and associates.
“I was pondering it, and what pushed me over the edge was people were continuously saying, ‘Dan, we just don’t hear what going on there. And when you were in office, love you or hate you, we knew what was going on,’” he remarked.
“‘You were on ‘Talk Back,’ you were in the paper, you had a column you were sending out from the mayor’s office, and that doesn’t happen anymore.’”
Onichuk said if elected, he won’t have a steep learning curve given his past experience as mayor.
“I’ve heard the comments about me shooting from the hip,” he remarked.
“I’m [now] a little older, a little wiser,” he noted. “I understand how it works, the structure, the responsibilities.
“Will I need to be brought up to speed on things? Absolutely, but I’m a pretty quick study,” Onichuk said. “And time? I don’t have any other commitment other than my family.
“I’ve got the time to it,” he pledged.
Few would argue one of the big issues facing Fort Frances and many other municipalities is aging infrastructure.
The town’s asset management plan says council should be contributing more dollars each budget to replace infrastructure; right now, contributions are one-fifth what they should be.
Onichuk said he feels strongly about socking away more money to replace crumbling sewer and water pipes.
“Back in 2006, I really pushed [it],” he noted. “We had the asset management plan, we know what’s wrong. We know what needs to be fixed.
“And I pushed hard to put more funds into that.
“I would rather people pay a little bit more over the next 10 years rather than do nothing and then all of a sudden their taxes go up by 15 percent in one shot, similar to the situation was at that time because things were a mess, if you remember, when I got into office,” said Onichuk.
“Kudos to all of us there and all of the staff to make it work, but unfortunately the citizens had to bite a big tax increase.
“If we need [one] percent to make it work, let’s ask for a percent-and-a-half and that half goes into the infrastructure,” he remarked.
“We need to build it a little bit at a time.”
With the town’s tax base drastically decreased in recent years, due mainly to reassessment of the mill property here, it gets tougher each year for council to balance the budget.
If the town were, for instance, facing a $1.8-million shortfall in 2015, what could council do to make up for that?
“If we didn’t put in excess of $2 million into that Huffman School project, we would not be there right now,” Onichuk said.
“Those were funds that could have been better used for a lot of other things.
“I’m not in favour of significant tax increases, reducing staff—I’m not in favour of that at all,” he stressed.
“I think what we’ve got to do is use our current staff and equipment.
“For instance, we could do a lot more with our staff as opposed to using contractors in every situation,” Onichuk said.
“We could partner with other communities around here and First Nations.
“We can save money by utilizing what we have and/or providing them services that will bring money into the coffers,” he reasoned.
Onichuk noted the water treatment plant here produces almost double the water the town uses. This water is shared with Couchiching but it also could be provided to Alberton, where he knows of residents who would love to get town water.
“It’s not going to cost us anymore to produce it. It’s there. They dump it out into the river,” he argued.
“That would bring revenues in at a cost of what? Very little.”
He added that contracting out the expertise of the local fire department is another example.
When it comes to economic development, Onichuk said the town should not compete with the private sector but must do what it can to foster new start-ups.
“We can’t legally give somebody a tax break coming to start a new business,” he noted.
“But what we can do is, as opposed to selling an industrial lot unserviced and saying, ‘Buy the lot and it’s going to cost you $50,000 to put the sewer and water in,’ we can go and put the sewer and water in with our own crews when there’s not a lot going on.
“And then when you’re selling a lot, you can sell it for the same price so it’s like a tax break, but they’re getting a serviced lot for whatever the price, as opposed to an unserviced one that they got to throw another $50,000 into.”
Onichuk also said Fort Frances needs to market its natural beauty and laid-back lifestyle to attract businesses.
“We live in a high-tech world and we have to market our community and how we live,” he stressed.
“I’ve done a lot of travelling in North America, and to a degree over in Europe, and I tell you, every time they say we’re over Canadian airspace and they say we’re coming into Fort Frances, there’s a good feeling that comes around.
“We truly live in a very special place in the world,” Onichuk said. “We’re not affected by earthquakes or tornadoes and this and that.
“And we’ve got water.
“What’s going to be in biggest demand in the future?” he mused. “It’s not going to be oil.
“It’s going to be water and we’ve got it all around us.”
Onichuk said high-tech companies specifically look to put up branches in places where they can offer people a lifestyle and a good community to raise their family.
“I don’t know of any place any better,” he remarked, adding more and more such companies are setting up in smaller communities because of the lifestyle they offer.
“I know the issues with doctor recruitment are difficult, and there’s a lot of pressure on the doctors we have now, but the same thing goes for marketing this community [to attract physicians here],” said Onichuk.
“Our resources are our resources. The mill is the mill. It’s been bought and sold and bought and sold, and we have absolutely no control over that,” he stressed.
“But when it comes to marketing our area as a place to live, I’ve got to think that there’s a lot of people in the high-tech industries and other industries that love hunting, fishing, being on the lake, and a little bit of solitude 10 minutes from town, not 10 hours from town,” he added.
For more information, go to mayordan.ca or to his Facebook page.
