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#POCOvotes2018: Patrick Alambets

Patrick Alambets Phone: 604-472-1495 Email: faderigg@telus.net Patrick Alambets doesn’t want your vote. He just wants to disrupt the vote for the mayoral race frontrunner, Coun. Brad West.
Patrick
Patrick Alambets

Patrick Alambets
Phone: 604-472-1495
Email: faderigg@telus.net

 

Patrick Alambets doesn’t want your vote. He just wants to disrupt the vote for the mayoral race frontrunner, Coun. Brad West.

Unlike when he ran against then-mayor Scott Young years ago, Alambets is mounting no formal campaign this time around.

Alambets is just a paper candidate, he insists, but he said he believes he’s the most honest candidate in the Port Coquitlam election.

Truth be told, he just wants to stick it to West, city hall staff and — most of all — PoCo MLA Mike Farnworth, West’s former boss.

“I know Brad and Farnworth are tight,” Alambets said, “but I’m not really fighting Brad. I’m fighting Farnworth.”

Alambets, who declined to provide a photo of himself to accompany this article, has nothing nice to say about the veteran provincial politician (currently, the province’s public safety minister and solicitor general) who last year won his largest-ever margin of victory — with West as his campaign manager; Alambets said he believes Farnworth is grooming West as his successor.

But he also has nothing positive to say either about the council West has been a part of since 2008.

As a council watcher and critic for the past decade, Alambets said, that council and senior managers have gone out their way to keep secrets from taxpayers.

There’s no transparency at city hall, Alambets alleged, and he said he feels he has a duty to warn future incumbents.

He cites his freedom of information requests as an example: Alambets said he has filed numerous FOI requests — his latest about a former city supervisor who was convicted this year of theft. Alambets said he failed to get any answers about the subsequent internal audit, and most of the information provided to him was redacted (issues around land, legal and labour issues are typically shielded by municipalities).

Alambets is also still sore about council silencing him for a year.

The 2015 order banned him from asking direct questions during open question period, largely after Alambets publicly verbally attacked Mayor Greg Moore and his family.

“When [council] issued that prohibition to me, I had reached the point where I was so disgusted I didn’t care to go anymore. I just went in there for one last go at it,” he said.

Alambets said he wants to get his side out about what he calls city hall “corruption” but will we see him in another campaign? “Never again! This is my last time,” he said emphatically.