Cartmell Won’t Confirm Mayoral Run, Despite Calling for “New Leadership” at City Hall

If he looks like a mayoral candidate, and talks like a mayoral candidate, he’s probably a mayoral candidate, right?

Coun. Tim Cartmel held a press conference Thursday — outside of his ward — that demanded council and administration be more accountable for over-budget and delayed construction projects. The signage read “It’s time for new leadership and better projects.” It felt like a mayoral campaign. But despite repeated questions about a potential run for the mayor’s chair, Cartmell said he still hasn’t made up his mind.

The irony was evident: a vocal councillor standing behind a sign demanding new leadership, but saying he’s still not sure about making the run for a big chair. It left us reading between more lines than if we all had Kafka novels in our hands.

“The leadership I’m talking about is leadership at City Hall and in our city administration,” he said. “It’s time for council to show a much different level of leadership. It’s time for us to take these concerns seriously. It’s time for us to stop accepting at face value the information that we get from city administration.”

That was his answer to “are you running for mayor?” question no. 1. Here’s his answer to “are you running for mayor?” question no. 2.

“There’s a lot of different stuff in the works, the regulations around the provincial legislation on Bill 20, that talks about municipal parties, slates, funding, campaign rules and that kind of thing. So, I have not decided exactly what I want to do in terms of the next election. I think I have a lot more to offer to this city, though, in terms of an elected official.”

Because municipal politicians and wannabes aren’t sure what Bill 20 will really mean for the next set of local elections — what it will mean for campaign rules, fundraising and political parties — it’s understandable it could make incumbents want to take a wait-and-see tack.

Yet, Thursday’s presser marked a significant course correction if Cartmell indeed wants to go for the big job.

Let’s be real — with tax hikes, project delays and having to deal with the financial hell of coming out of COVID — this city council was always going to be in tough when it comes to popular opinion. And, it’s pretty clear that this is an unpopular council, and the mayor’s approval rating makes Justin Trudeau’s national popularity numbers seem… good. A Leger poll in June pegged Mayor Amarjeet Sohi’s approval rating at just 16 per cent.

So if any current member of council wants to go for the big job, that person needs to start publicly differentiating himself or herself from the rest of the group. The truth is, over this council’s term, only Karen Principe and Jennifer Rice have been truly consistent at being true outliers; they’ve voted against budgets, asked to re-open spending debates. And, largely, they’ve been criticized, even lampooned, in the media.

Cartmell needs to start showing himself off as a true alternative. He can’t go into Mike Nickel territory, obviously, but he has to start baring his political teeth, or else he runs the risk of being seen as a decent talker, but just another member of the same old city council.

So, did Thursday accomplish that?

Cartmell said Edmontonians are “embarrassed” by a decade’s worth of cost overruns and major delays to projects such as the expansion of the LRT to Mill Woods and the current project to expand it to the west end. He said that Edmonton is paying four times more to build a fire hall than Leduc. He said a new Riverbend library is nearing a pricetag of $40 million. Meanwhile, residents and businesses bear the brunt of these delays. He pointed to businesses on the main floor of West Block, near the intersection of Stony Plain Road and 142nd Street, that face years of being cut off from the street.

“It is their time and their money that we are wasting,” Cartmell said of Edmonton taxpayers. “Our residents, our constituents, their time and tax dollars have become collateral damage for a city that seems to have forgotten that our people are more important than our projects – and that business owners are more important than the convenience of construction contractors.”

Cartmell said that, in the upcoming budget process — where councillors and administrators will try and trim the fat to prevent a forecasted 13 per cent tax hike — that all pending capital projects should be frozen. If the shovels aren’t in the ground, the city needs to throw up a stop sign.

He also wants council to create an Infrastructure Standing Committee, which would provide third-party advice directly to elected officials. Cartmell says the hard advice that council needs to hear shouldn’t be filtered by administrators. If the committee feels bids on a project are too high, or the timelines are unrealistic, that advice should come directly back to those who were voted in.

Percy Wiredu, owner of El Corazon in the West Block, said business has dropped 35 per cent since the tearing up of the streets near his restaurant.

“We have received minimal communication from the City throughout the road closures,” he said. “We don’t have any insight into why the road was closed for so long and we don’t have any idea on when the road closure in front of El Corazon will be over. This makes it difficult to proceed with business operations and make plans for the future.”

Cartmell said the cash-strapped City’s priority has to be to simply get things done. While he’s sympathetic to Coun. Andrew Knack’s proposal to offer tax relief to businesses impacted by construction delays, he’s not sure the city can afford it. And he said the relief can only come because of construction delays — it can’t be paid out when construction begins.

“When we set the expectation, that you have an establishment on Stony Plain Road… that you can expect the road to be torn up for a year. But, after a year, you will see a sidewalk and at least a lane on that road to help your establishment recover from that one-year delay. When one year becomes two and three and four, then I think we need to talk about it. I don’t know if we can establish a pattern where we say that as soon as there’s a construction site in front of your establishment, you can automatically expect some sort of grant or compensation. That is a bit of an open book and a runaway train.”

(Ed. note: Later Friday, council defeated Knack’s final push for a compensation plan by an 8-5 count.)

So, though Cartmell wants council to start making course corrections sooner rather than later, there will no doubt be many of us who will see this exercise as electioneering with 2025 in mind. And, while Cartmell hasn’t committed, a lot of us will see today as a step closer to “yea” rather than “nay.”