Aaron Frisby, owner of The Tube Shack, is running for a seat on Lake Cowichan’s town council.
Frisby said he has been a business owner in Lake Cowichan for the last 12 years and would like to bring his entrepreneurial problem-solving abilities to the town council.
He said that as a councillor, he can add knowledge and suggestions to discussions with his extensive experience in construction, business and tourism.
“Although I have never been involved in local politics before, I do have a history of sitting on sports group executives, organizing fundraising events for charity and being a chairman on a safety committee for a company with 300 staff, so meeting structures are not foreign to me,” Frisby said.
“If elected, I want to be the engine that powers the council to over-achieve, not only completing existing projects like Kasapi Park but being proactive in finding unique solutions to our housing and staffing shortages.”
Frisby said that as a new councillor, what may seem normal to the existing representatives may seem out of place to him so his focus will be asking the challenging questions, holding town staff accountable and enquiring about how the town is spending taxpayer funds on assets like the Cowichan Lake Education Centre, that has lost close to $1 million in the last five years.
“My biggest strength is knowing that I am not an expert on the issues that may be brought to the council table and other small towns in B.C. have likely experienced similar battles,” he said.
“We need to learn from others who lived through the trial and errors and not be afraid to ask for help from professionals. I am going into this campaign with my eyes wide open, knowing that it is easy to throw stones from the outside and that the wheels of government turn a lot slower than the business world, but I would like to be the councillor who gives this process a kick-start.”