By JOAN MCCOY
Leader staff writer
Cabot Alderman David Polantz is in his fifth term on the city council. Now, he says he wants to be mayor.
Polantz has been among those known for months to be considering running, but he would never say how serious that consideration was, only that he was praying about it.
He made his announcement quietly to news reporters following Monday night’s city council meeting.
“I am going to run,” he said.
Polantz said in a phone interview Tuesday that he has not developed any sort of platform, but if elected mayor he would continue the work he has been doing for nine years.
“I want to continue to work on quality-of-life issues,” he said. “This is home to me, and I want to work with everyone to ensure it is the best it can be.”
When he was first elected, Polantz worked to get a federal grant for about $500,000 to build sidewalks in Cabot and he has continued to stand firm on waiving sidewalks in new developments. He says that no matter how remote a development seems when it is started, all of Cabot will eventually be covered in houses or businesses and people need to be able to walk to them without getting in the street.
“The goal here is to provide people with a way to move about without cars,” he said.
In recent years, Polantz has sponsored much of the legislation that has gone before the city council. Much of it he says was about “Trying to maintain a system where everybody is treated with equity regardless of who they are or how much they have.”
He said he is proud of the impact fee on building that could be ready for the council to act on before the end of the year.
“The impact fee will be a major shifting of the cost of infrastructure from the people who live here to the people moving in and creating the demand,” he said.
The resolution calling for an impact fee rankled bankers, builders and developers who said they should have input into imposing the fee since they were the ones who would pay it. The mayor and council eventually conceded that they were right and included them in discussions.
Polantz counts the new improved Cabot budget as among his best efforts.
“I’m very proud of getting the budget into a readable form so people can understand where the money is going,” he said.
Polantz says he doesn’t have a campaign manager yet and he doesn’t anticipate holding any fund-raisers until early in 2006.
“People need to spend time with their families now,” he said. “That’s what the holidays are all about. We’ll fire all that up after the first of the year.”
