Councilor Bart Ricks announced Monday that he will make a bid to retain his seat on the Centralia City Council.
Ricks, 32, an attorney at the Mano, McKerricher and Paroutaud law firm in Chehalis, was selected among five candidates for the Position 1 at-large seat in January 2014 after Bill Bates vacated the position partway through his term to take a job in Sedro-Woolley.
Councilor John Elmore, who was selected by the city council in the same nomination process in December 2012, nominated Ricks for the open position.
Ricks said he decided to run for the seat because of a sense of personal responsibility to help make Centralia a better place to live and raise his children.
He said he wants to consider out-of-the-box solutions to deal with the city’s perennial issues with flooding and roads while focusing on reducing regulations on businesses.
“You can’t run government without funding and you have to make those hard decisions, but if you have regulations make sure they’re appropriate, effective and not burdensome,” he said.
Ricks couldn’t point to any specific regulations he’d like to see changed. He did point to the council’s decision last July to drop a rule for homes larger than 3,600 square feet built in the city’s Urban Growth Area to have a sprinkler system installed.
“We went around and around and got rid of that unnecessary stuff,” he said.
Ricks was an outspoken critic of the recreational marijuana industry coming to Centralia. He was reluctant to support the reconstruction of the Pearl Street Pool.
