A few months ago, trustee candidates Dale Ricker; Roland Rose and Vicky Cunningham and I — TEAM Fredonia — embarked on a villagewide “Listening Tour” of Fredonia. The goal of this was to inquire what our residents thought were the most important issues in our village for a new government to tackle if we were elected into office.

The issues that were expressed most were infrastructure, economic development, municipal cooperation-collaboration, a better relationship with SUNY Fredonia and young adults in our community, more resident input on projects and better maintenance and accessibility issues concerning sidewalks in the village. I have focused my campaign on these items and this will be achieved through my strong leadership and integrity; my commitment and respect for our community, current personal relationships with surrounding leaders and public input.

In order to tackle our need for infrastructure improvements, the comprehensive plan for the village must be updated. Many grants require municipalities to have an updated comprehensive plan to receive funding. The current plan is more than five years old and many of the items have not been addressed. Paying for plans that have never been utilized is a waste of money. I would propose to update this plan and immediately propose to use current unreserved excess fund balances to improve our water and sewer mains; roads, water treatment plant, and waste water treatment needs and create a plan to use capital dollars in the future to keep this as a focus.

Creating economic development will be accomplished by first reviewing our building codes and ensure that they are up to current standards and they are being enforced fairly. Second, I will be planning meetings to invite private investors to discuss opportunities and ideas that exist in Fredonia. Developing a working relationship with these business persons is essential to future development. I plan on contacting all agencies that could assist with potential projects. These agencies would include the county IDA; the Local Economic Development group, Chamber of Commerce and Chadwick Bay Association and New York state will be utilized to ask for grants to assist potential projects. Small base hits will usher in home runs eventually.

Municipal cooperation will enable our communities to provide our residents with the most efficient and effective use of public money. I would like to pursue shared facilities on many levels.

Our failing facilities and offices need to be moved to a state of the art facility that could be shared with neighboring communities to be most efficient. The more municipal cooperation that we can have, the more grant money that can be sought. I plan on achieving this through strong leadership and the relationships I have already with the many surrounding community leaders. My commitment and respect for our community along with public input will move us forward on this topic and start us down the road of collaborating for efficiencies with other municipalities. The TEAM concept that “Together Everyone Achieves More” will be essential to working together.

The collaboration of the city of Dunkirk, The State University of New York at Fredonia and the village of Fredonia, known as The Central Connection, needs to continue so that we can collaborate together to seek common efficiencies. A community calendar of events would be helpful to all involved to keep all residents informed and connected. An app for our cell phones may be something to pursue to communicate with area residents. I would be interested to pursue these items because there is so much going on in our communities. If more people were informed, more people could be involved. We have so much to offer in our area and getting people to attend more activities will help assist our economy as a result.

Having a better relationship with SUNY Fredonia on event items such as the community leaf raking day that the students volunteer for, would be an easy small item to work on. We could coordinate our DPW to follow the students’ efforts to ensure that after the leaves are raked up they don’t get blown away. Even the smallest of efforts for collaboration can be achieved by coming together. Once these small efforts have success, bigger items can be tackled.

I would like to establish new community based groups to address issues in our community concerning our youth. The need for a community center or additional programming such as music in the park directed toward our younger generation would be possible ideas to pursue.

Keeping this group of people in our village is vital to the growth of our population in the future.

Public input is very important to me as a leader. This is something I will continue to require when public money is used. The Barker Common Improvement Project is an example of a project that needed lots of public input.

It did not start out this way.

The board recognized the need for the public input and approved an architectural-engineering firm to assist in the project that believes in heavy public input. This project has gotten on track with the needs and wants of the public as a result of the public input that was sought after.

I plan to address sidewalk deficiencies to be ADA compliant for our disabled residents and as a result move toward a more walkable Fredonia. With an aging population, getting downtown is essential for our residents. Mobility to activities, stores and establishments downtown can be a challenge with our current sidewalks. Replacements need to be done to enable movement to our village. A plan to make changes to sidewalks to accomplish these goals will be sought after and maintenance of these sidewalks is essential. This is an item we heard about as a concern from our citizens when we did our listening tour of our village.

I have invested many hours attending numerous wonderful events our village and surrounding communities have put on over this past summer. This, coupled with the listening tour, has highlighted many important campaign issues.

Teamwork between the mayor, trustees, village employees, residents as well as SUNY Fredonia and surrounding municipalities is the concept that I propose to accomplish the goals that need to be done in Fredonia. If we work together and each individual understands their job as part of the team that they do, everyone wins.

Leaders listen and utilize the team to accomplish the goals. We are in this together and as a TEAM Together Everyone Achieves More. I am proposing that this is how Fredonia is to move forward.

Douglas P. Essek is candidate for the village of Fredonia mayor.