Photo submitted by Howard Yeomans.
Howard Yeomans wants to be the next mayor of Saint John.
The lifelong Saint Johner is a retiree who previously worked in accounting and as a small business-owner.
Yeomans joined the race in 2016 and finished fifth out of five candidates. But this time he says he’s more prepared and understands what the job is all about.
“I’ve done a lot of things that are needed by a person who’s going to be mayor. I’ve done budgets for major companies, small companies. I’ve done accounting, I’ve been through the whole thing pretty well – including eventually owning my own small company,” Yeomans said.
It’s his background working with money that Yeomans believes makes him an ideal candidate.
“Everything comes down to our financial situation,” he said. “We need to analyze it completely – get as much information as we can from people that work for the city already.”
After running in 2016 Yeomans said he made a habit of attending the bi-weekly council meetings in person to get a better feel for the process.
That stopped when COVID-19 hit, and caused most of the last year’s meetings to be held virtually. The mayoral candidate says he struggles with computers, though he is a quick learner and could pick it up quickly if taught.
Yeomans doesn’t know exactly what he’d do to fix the city’s financial problems, but he has a few ideas of where he would start.
“Until a person’s in there, you don’t know exactly. I know (the city’s) got financial problems, but I won’t know exactly until I’m in there. The best way to start going is we have to work with what we’ve got, find ways to improve upon it, and expand our population, our businesses,” Yeomans said.
“Work and encourage with everything we have here, and the people here, but we need to try and bring in new because we’ve got to have more revenue in order to do better and move forward. And it’s going to take time. No one person is gonna cure it.”
One strategy he’d like to try as mayor is to market Saint John to residents of larger urban centres.
“We are in an ideal situation right now to encourage people from Vancouver, Toronto, any of those places, to move here if we show them what we’ve got for the price we’ve got it,” Yeomans said.
He’d like the city to market itself to businesses as well. Yeomans believes we have advantages here, and what matters is how the city can sell it.
“So much now is done online, that can be done from here, and yet they can come here and do those things, and build their company at a lot less cost than it’s going to be places like Toronto, Vancouver, Calgary, any of those places.”
