Westlock’s longest-serving current town councillor is taking a run at the mayor’s chair.
Marjorie Sterling Miller, 68, has been a Westlock town councillor since first being elected in 1998.
“I like what’s happening in our community and I want that to continue,” she said.
In her time on council, she has been involved in many different initiatives, but a few stand out as ones she is especially proud of being involved in.
Chief among those is her involvement in the Westlock Regional Water Services Commission, Sterling Miller said.
In her early days on council, she said the town under the mayoralty of Shirley Morie was looking into upgrading the community’s water treatment system and putting money into reserves to pay for it.
The cost was expected to be quite considerable, she said, which prompted negotiations with other municipalities to expand the scope of the project and get more partners on board.
Those negotiations paid off with the creation of the water commission and the construction of about $29 million in new transmission lines, new pumping stations and new lagoons.
“When you look at the fact that we’ve got an upgraded treatment plant, we’ve got a bigger reserve for our water, we have new piping … everything throughout has been upgraded or is brand new,” Sterling Miller said. “We would never have been able to put that kind of money out.”
The original work on a new treatment plant would have been around $12 million, she said, but adding in new partners opened up new funding streams, including help from the provincial government.
“That one, I can actually say, I was right there, right at the very beginning,” Sterling Miller said.
Should Sterling Miller be elected as Westlock’s next mayor, she said she intends to run a financially responsible ship.
“The one thing that we as council will really have to look at is our budget,” she said. “We may have to be very creative in how we can get ourselves into a better standing than we are now.”
In that respect, she said the recent road overlay projects will help keep the town’s road repair budget down over the next little while.
Sterling Miller also said she would like to see the town continue to expand, particularly in terms of industrial development.
“We have to have a better, positive attitude towards that,” she said. “I believe with our new administrator we will probably do just that.”
If elected mayor, Sterling Miller said she would continue to promote all that Westlock has to offer, including the Pioneer Museum, Canadian Tractor Museum, Wacky Saturday and the continually successful North Country Market.
“I just think there are so many things that are just starting to really roll well and we’ve just got to keep the ball rolling,” she said.
