Mayor Bryan Paterson announces he will run again

Mayor Bryan Paterson announced on Tuesday he will be running for re-election in the upcoming municipal elections.

It was a guessing game of whether or not Paterson would run for a second term. He tells CKWS News that he wanted to make sure he knew in what direction he would take the city.

“It was very important to me that if I was going to run again, it was to talk about what we’re going to do next.”

The election will take place Oct. 22. The mayor said he wants to continue to invest in the city of Kingston as he stood at the podium at the Sanctuary Coworking on Tuesday.

He was vague on details for his possible second mandate, but says he has big plans for the city that will help compliment ongoing projects in Kingston.

“I’m going to be unveiling a couple of exciting projects for the waterfront, we’re going to be talking about a few neighbourhoods we are going to revitalize. I’ve got some other really exciting things that are going to add to the vitality of the downtown.”

Those projects include the upcoming construction on the third crossing, a bridge that will connect the east side of the city to the west — along with improvements to the quality of life in the city of Kingston.

“Now that we’re building the physical infrastructure, I want to talk about how we can embed that into our community, so that we can have walking trails from the downtown right up to the third crossing, then across the Cataraquay River.”

Paterson, who has a background in economics, says he wants to keep focusing on building more housing to address Kingston’s low vacancy rate, which right now sits at 0.7 per cent.

He also spoke about continuing investments into Kingston’s downtown layout, as well as revitalization of “key neighbourhoods,” although he did not mention which ones.

In a blog post Paterson released after the announcement, he highlighted projects like the the Third Crossing, Kingston Pen Tours and investments in transit as highlights of his last four years as mayor.

Paterson is the first to announce his bid for mayor in Kingston. Other possible candidates have a month if they want to put their name forward for the job.