Council Candidate: Leyk Looking to Change Things from the Inside

ST. CLOUD -- St. Cloud residents have a choice of nine candidates running for three spots on the city council.

Seth Leyk is running for a political office for the first time. He was born and raised in St. Cloud and currently works in healthcare.

He says he decided to run for city council after he sent messages to the current council and didn't get a response back. He says he had an issue with a neighbor of his calling the fire department about his backyard fires.

I decided to run for city council to see if I could maybe try to change things from the inside.  I really just think that was a waste of resources to have the fire department come out every day.  There was a good meeting that I listened to where they did discuss the fire pits, city council seemed confused as to why this party would be calling all the time.

Leyk says he also wants to go through the budget line by line and cut out wasteful spending. He says more taxpayer dollars should be going to schools, roads and public services like the fire department and police department.

He says he doesn't want to defund the police department, but he could see adding social workers to ride along with the police.

He also wants to look at how road improvements are paid for.

My wife lived on 3rd Street when they were ripping up the roads and they hit her with an almost $7,000 tax assessment.  That's a lot of money for a homeowner, for 3rd Street which everybody uses.  He response that got back from them was it improves the value of your home, to me that doesn't make sense the roads were already there.

Leyk says he also wants to make the school safer by adding more resource officers.

We are hearing from each of the candidates running for St. Cloud city council this week and next week. Absentee voting is open right now for the August 11th primary election, the top six vote getters will advance on to the general election in November.