Cassidy Turner, Kane Salamon, Rosina Gordon, Rob Sinclair and Julie Sinclair are all about fixing roads. Photo: Supplied.
Wagga candidate for the upcoming local government elections, Rob Sinclair, is keeping his message simple.
His five-person ticket is running under the mantra, ‘Fix Our Roads’.
“There’s still plenty of work to be done on the roads and we want to put as much asphalt down as we can instead of gravel,” Mr Sinclair explained.
“You see it at the T-intersections where you get all the gravel building up, and that’s really dangerous, particularly for motorcyclists.
“So I want to build our roads better so that they are safer and smoother and, as soon as we get a drop of rain, they’re not falling apart.”
This will be Mr Sinclair’s second run for Wagga City Council and his first with a team that includes Kane Salamon, Rosina Gordon, Julie Sinclair and Cassidy Turner.
Mr Sinclair owns Wagga’s Empire Gym and said he wanted to see the community and the local economy thriving.
“I came down here seven and a half years ago; I have a business here and a house, my wife teaches at one of our toughest schools and I love it here. I’m staying,” he said.
Until recently, Mr Sinclair was the Wagga Liberal Party branch president but asserted that he doesn’t believe in mixing party politics with local government.
“I prefer to run as an independent even though my core policies are Liberal policies,” he said.
“I’m all about looking after small business, looking after people, trying to make things run more efficiently, and that’s all Liberal Party stuff, but in council you should work with everybody there, whether they’re the Greens, Labor or other independents and judge every single issue on its merits.”
As a small business owner, he said there were things he would like to see council do to support investment in the local government area.
“We need to have a more efficient planning department. They shouldn’t be making people who want to spend money locally jump through the amount of hoops that they do.
“Council has to make it as easy and as efficient as possible to put a development application through so business owners are not waiting ages and not being charged a fortune to put them through.”
Mr Sinclair said improved efficiency would help to reduce cost-of-living pressures in the community.
“We don’t want to have never-ending rate increases year after year after year. If the council can run efficiently and run themselves back to basics of what the people expect them to do, then that’s going to hopefully cost less money,” he said.
“Council is also running a $52 million debt right now and we don’t want that continuing to build up.
“We have to work harder inside council to make sure that we are not running deficit budgets because all we are doing is adding to our debt and then leaving that for our kids and our grandkids to pay off.”
The NSW local government elections will be held on 12 September.
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