Councillor Carmen DeRose, 62, is finishing up his first term as city councillor and he hopes to continue being a voice for local residents.
“I want to help people,” DeRose says, in an interview with ThoroldToday. “A lot of people are apprehensive about reaching out to City Hall and feel intimidated, so I try to be their voice and I try to help them any way I can.”
If re-elected, DeRose wants to keep looking out for the residents of Thorold.
“I’m finding our taxes are constantly rising without the appropriate levels of service that we should be getting for the amount of taxes that we’re paying,” DeRose says. “The biggest issue I find with the city is it continuously gravitates to wants instead of needs. Having taught economics at Niagara College for 21 years, you have to take care of your needs before you wants.”
DeRose points to the Canada Games facility which he opposed.
“With that building maybe one percent of the population is ever going to step foot in that place,” he says. “Meanwhile there are roads that are crumbling: Broderick Avenue for example, Bolton Avenue sewers, that keeps getting deferred and people are getting fed up.”
Another sore point for DeRose is that other city councillors voted to receive a pay bump back in 2020.
“I didn’t think council deserved to vote themselves a pay raise in the middle of COVID,” says DeRose. “That bothered me. I’ve been giving my extra money mostly to charity. I didn’t agree with it.”
There are things DeRose is proud to have achieved during his first term on city council.
“I collaborated with our economic development officer, CAO, and public health officials to help attract several doctors to town,” he says. “I’m proud of the fact that I passed a motion to get a crossing guard at Keefer and Sullivan.”
DeRose is also proud to have been the one to propose that the city declare a state of emergency on mental health, homelessness, and addiction.
DeRose, who is a teacher at Our Lady of the Holy Rosary Catholic Elementary, says his vision for Thorold is one where money is spent more wisely.
“I find that for some reason some of our amenities aren’t being take care of before we start adding new amenities,” says DeRose. “We have to take care of the deferral list. We have to spend taxpayers’ money wisely and prudently as people are struggling right now with inflation. Everything the city does now is going to cost more. We have to be very careful with taxpayer’s dollars and respect them as if they were ours.”
For his campaign, DeRose plans to listen to residents.
“I’ve been holding various roundtables with different segments of the community,” he says. “I put out a survey to get questions answered as to the direction people want us to take. I’m not doing this for myself, I’m in this to be the voice of residents. I want to do a lot of listening so I can shape the next four years into what people want and what people expect.”
DeRose is a lifelong Thorold resident and has a long history with the city. His great grandparents moved here from Italy to help build the Welland Canal.
“I’ve got a lot of pride in Thorold,” DeRose says. “We’re in an ideal location, close enough to the border and away from the big cities. I’d like us to keep that small town feel that I enjoyed growing up. I want my kids to grow up in a similar community where they feel it’s a small town.”
For DeRose, being a city councillor is just another way he’s trying to help out the local community.
“I’m honest, I have integrity, and people can call me 24/7,” he says. “I got to bat for them and that will continue. Just trying to help the people in the community, that’s what I’m about.”
