RED LAKE — Fred Mota is returning for another term as mayor of Red Lake.
Unofficial results show Mota, the incumbent, victorious with 1,397 votes.
His challenger Dean Martin received 306 votes.
Mota will be re-joined by most of the previous council with incumbents Warren Badiuk, Janet Hager, and Jamie Kristoff also winning re-election.
Newcomer Debra Geary got the final spot with 877 votes, beating out incumbent Dale Butterfield by 43 votes.
Mota said he thinks the reason almost everyone on council got re-elected was their experience.
“I think we have a really good, vast council with prior experience moving forward and I have nothing but positive things to say about our entire council,” he said. “So I look forward to our future work.”
Mota said the previous council accomplished a lot, even with the challenges the community faced the last four years. “We had two major forest fires with one complete community evacuation. We’ve dealt with the COVID-19 pandemic. We’ve had flooding. We had a wind event that had torn the roof off of our heritage centre.”
“But, our council paid over $4 million of debt down. We continued to invest in the community of up to $22 million of capital investments,” he said. “While we had challenges, we were able to show our community that we can move forward even during difficult times and I think that’s what the community saw.”
He added team work is very important for the success of the community.
“It’s okay to have a difference of opinions, but working together as a team, achieving mutual goals, is so very important and when we work together and we communicate well together, we’ll get things done together,” said Mota.
He said with the news of the suspension of the Pure Gold operations mixed in with the election, work still needed to get done among the celebration.
“It’s kind of been a whirlwind for the past 24 hours, and when this news came down too, it was like going to the dentist to get a tooth out,” he said.
But still, Mota said he couldn’t be happier with the result. “The community has supported me during the past four years during my mayoral tenure. And we have experienced a lot as a community together,” he said. “And I am again humbled. That the community continues to entrust in me, in the council, and moving this community forward is just overwhelming.”
This article has been updated with comments from Mayor Fred Mota.
