Mayor Terry Ugulini hopes that local residents will choose him once again to lead Thorold through the next four years.
“It takes at least two terms of council to forward an agenda,” Mayor Ugulini says, in an interview with ThoroldToday. “We went through the majority of a pandemic so these haven’t been normal times. I’m looking forward if re-elected to serve a normal council term without the pandemic.”
Ugulini was elected Mayor in 2018. Two years into his first term the pandemic broke out.
“We learned through COVID how to pivot and make changes and react to the situations,” he says. “There was no playbook for that. I’m talking council, city staff, across the board that was a joint effort, everybody working together and pulling in the same direction.”
In spite of a global pandemic, Mayor Ugulini feels that he has accomplished a lot during his term.
“The big thing to me is that our residential growth was matched with a surge in commercial and industrial growth,” Mayor Ugulini says. “Through COVID and now into the future we’re seeing a gain in good-paying jobs. I don’t think there are many municipalities across Ontario that could say the same thing.”
Mayor Ugulini ran his last campaign on economic development, business retention and expansion, and he feels like he has delivered upon that promise.
“If you take a drive throughout our community it’s exciting to see what’s going on,” he says. “We’ve got Norgen Biotek more than doubling in size. We’ve got Quartz company who brought over 100 jobs and is expanding already. We see the Thorold Multimodal Hub, we already have at least seven businesses in there. You see Book Depot doing an internal expansion, iPoly is doing an internal expansion. On top of that you’re seeing excellent small businesses set up in Thorold.”
There are many city projects that Mayor Ugulini is proud to have accomplished.
“We did the downtown revitalization, we did the Battle of Beaverdams Park, we are working on the operations centre, we passed the fire hall, the first phase of St David’s Road,” says Mayor Ugulini. “We kept the city moving forward because the worst thing you can do is sit on your hands and do nothing. When you fall behind on all your infrastructure projects, the cost never goes down, it keeps going up. At the end of the day that’s going to pay huge dividends to the taxpayer.”
If he gets re-elected Mayor Ugulini has a long laundry list of projects he would like to accomplish next.
“It’s not limited to these projects but I would like to see the total completion of Townline and St David's Road to Ormond Street with full active transportation,” Mayor Ugulini says. “I would like to see Broderick Avenue done. It’s one of the worst roads in the City of Thorold. Hopefully that will be budgeted for next year. I want to see the Eco-Park and Bridge in Port Robinson continue to move forward. Another key project is the expansion of our public library.”
Mayor Ugulini says the first thing on the agenda of the newly elected council will be the drafting of the city’s new official plan.
“Some of the things that are important that need to be incorporated into our official plan are climate change and bio-diversity and where we want to see intensification within the city,” he says. “Every city is growing so we know that we have a lot of growth area within the urban boundary. We need to do that properly and responsibly.”
Before Mayor Ugulini can further his agenda, he’ll need to be re-elected first. His competitor in the upcoming municipal election is newcomer Damon Ford.
Asked why people should vote for him, Mayor Ugulini says that the proof is in the pudding.
“We’ve done a lot of positive things for the community,” Mayor Ugulini says. “I think moving forward we need that level of experience. Not only at the city level but to carry that over to regional level. I think I can offer that to the community. I hope they elect me for another term of council.”
