Westport Councillor Joe Aragona Runs for Mayor
One-term Councillor Joe Aragona is running for mayor in Westport. He said he wants to “continue the good work that's been done, build upon that base and take the village to the next step.”
Aragona said the last four years on council has been an education but one he has enjoyed, especially the “whole mechanics of getting things done.” He sees himself as a collaborator, “advancing the cause of the village and working on that with a team.”
He believes it is important to make decisions and evaluate issues based on the future impact, five, 10 or more years down the road. He has seen what happens when municipalities take short-term approaches and find themselves with crumbling assets in addition to other financial pressures.
“The province has proven that it's not coming to the rescue of municipalities, and municipalities have to figure out things on their own,” he said.
Aragona was a journalist early in his career and has run a marketing agency in Ottawa for more than 35 years. His company provides business-to-business marketing services to telecommunications and technology companies in Canada, the U.S. and Europe. He has also worked as a director of marketing for three technology companies. He is semi-retired with plans for full retirement on the horizon.
He believes he brings the mindset of an investigative reporter to council business. When it comes to making decisions, “I like to have all the information,” he said. “It comes back to my experience as a journalist where I liked to dig into the facts.”
He also brings a business perspective to the table, especially when it comes to finances. Apart from being a councillor, he is a director with the Westport Tourism Group, a volunteer organization that works with the business community to support economic development initiatives. He said it exposed him to the struggles that local businesses experience and how critical they are to “the tourism economy that this village relies on.”
He said he is not a politician who goes in with his mind already made up, he doesn’t have a hidden agenda, and his views are not set in stone. “I'm open to conversations with different people with different perspectives, finding common ground, and figuring out what can we do with that to advance the cause of the village.”
He likes to think outside the box. “I'm not a fan of we can't do it that way because we never did it that way. I'm a fan of asking the question, why can't we do it that way?”
He thinks the current council has advanced the village’s financial and asset management, which he wants to see continue.
“As a village, we own several very important assets that need a lot of attention… I think the next step needs to be, how do we apply day-to-day, year-to-year processes to making sure that those assets are maintained and that they retain their value?”
He said some important conversations need to be had about what to do with town hall, the post office, the arena and other assets. Aragona credits Friends of the Arena with improvements to the arena, but he said the village has a lot of infrastructure that needs to be taken care of, roads like Spring Street for example, and “finally figuring out what we're doing with water and wastewater to support expansion is critical.”
On the issue of council exploring a move to a single-tier municipality, he said over 10 years the move could save the village some $5 million. “So from a financial aspect, it makes sense. But I think we need to look at what does that mean in terms of how you operate as a municipality?” In any event, he said council “stalled out” on the question and it would need a lot more study.
Aragona and his wife Rosa moved to Westport in 2021. They’d been frequent visitors from Ottawa before that. He said there's a sense of community here he has not found anywhere else he’s lived. “It's more of, we're all in this together, let's all support each other,” he said. “I didn't get that anywhere else. I certainly didn't get it a lot in Ottawa… It wasn't difficult for me to say I want to contribute in some way to this place.”
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