With the election approaching, voters in King’s Town will have three candidates to choose from to represent the district in Kingston City Council.
City council is a governing body for municipal decision making. The King’s Town councillor will represent constituents living from the waterfront between John Counter Blvd and Johnson St until Division St. Municipal elections will be held on Oct. 26.
Aba Mortley, Sci ’02, Melissa Reid, and Greg Ridge ArtSci ’13, have announced their intentions to run. The candidates spoke with The Journal about their platforms.
Aba Mortley
Mortley is a professor — and the esthetics program coordinator — at St. Lawrence College, the owner of Cher-Mere Day Spa, and a mother of four.
After living in Kingston for 25 years, moving from Trinidad to attend Queen’s, she said her experiences have shaped her perspective on issues facing the City.
Mortley is running for council to improve transparency and accountability, to build healthy, strong, inclusive neighbourhoods, support smart, sustainable growth and infrastructure, and support local businesses and jobs.
She identified housing as a key priority, noting that Kingston’s low vacancy rate and high demand are closely tied to homelessness. She said expanding access to social housing across income levels should be part of the City’s response.
Addressing homelessness also means recognizing the concerns of residents and business owners for Mortley.
“We can be really empathetic and want to do something for homelessness, and we also can be concerned about how people feel and want to feel safe in their neighbourhoods,” she said.
Mortley said the challenge is finding ways for those priorities to work together rather than treating them as competing concerns.
“As somebody who has had a small business for 15 years, I have employed up to 13 people at a time,” she said. “Multiply me by however many little businesses are in Kingston, […] small business and medium business are really the backbone of most economies.”
She wants to reduce red tape that leads to delays and uncertainty, not to take away accountability, but to “make sure that it’s more accessible to somebody who’s already wearing 10 hats and trying to support the community with a business idea that they have.”
Mortley listed accountability as her second key priority in her platform.
“We’re at a time where our dollar is being stretched; we want to really be accountable to where our money is being spent and how it’s being spent,” she said. “Not just for today, but for people who are coming after us.”
Melissa Reid
Reid is an independent landscaper and home renovator. She is also founder and operations manager of the Peer Outreach Empowerment Team, a non-profit organization that aims to provide day-to-day support for people experiencing homelessness, addiction, and mental health challenges.
Reid is campaigning for greater affordability and responsible growth, affordable housing, a Kingston heritage approach that reflects the city’s full history, action on recent changes at Utilities Kingston and the closure of consumption and treatment services, and measures to address food insecurity.
“I work a lot with the unhoused community and people experiencing addiction and mental health [challenges], which a lot of people have said, well, that makes you a one-issue candidate,” she said. “I would wear that title proudly because it’s probably the biggest issue of our era and it’s affecting everybody.”
Reid said people directly affected by municipal policies need to have a greater role in shaping those decisions. She found the City’s decision to create a new public corporation to oversee the $3.2 billion water and wastewater operations lacked transparency to the public.
City and Utilities Kingston representatives said in a Kingstonist article this move will allow the City to transfer an estimated $150 million in current utility-related debt to a new entity and allow additional borrowing and expansion to utilities assets without the need for City Council approval
“I’m not arguing that their idea isn’t a good idea, but my problem with it is that it’s billions of dollars of taxpayers’ money that none of us had any idea what was being expected,” she said.
Another concern for Reid is the Ministry of Heath’s plan to shut down Kingston’s supervised drug consumption site at the end of September, replaced with a Homelessness and Addiction Recovery Treatment (HART) hub. Reid anticipates gaps in service following the closure. Reid is pushing for a transition plan for the Oct. 1 service changes and consideration for the cost of inaction.
Reid said the stigma surrounding drug consumption can make it difficult to address the issue.
“We’re the last supervised consumption site to close in Ontario,” she said. Reid said Kingston has had the opportunity to learn from communities where similar services have already closed, including the resulting gaps and impacts. “Kingston is in a worse position but could have been in a better position than any other city.”
Reid said the city has reached a point where it cannot continue relying on trial and error when making major municipal decisions.
Greg Ridge
“I’ve been born, grown up, and live in the district of King’s Town; it’s an area that’s very close to my heart,” Greg Ridge said. He has served as King’s Town’s district councillor since November 2022.
Ridge said his campaign is focused on four priorities: housing, affordability, arts and culture, and community safety.
“We’ve done a significant amount of work in terms of increasing the amount of affordable transitional supported housing units that are available for people,” he said. In September new supportive housing units will be made available, with 33 allocated to seniors at a new facility on Queen Mary Road.
During his time in office, he secured $200,000 in municipal grants for organizations addressing food insecurity. Ridge said food insecurity is particularly concerning in Kingston, with one in three households impacted.
He also pointed to investments in arts and culture to strengthen Kingston’s broader economy and attract visitors to the city.
“When you’re talking about funding for arts projects, you’re talking about not just paying the artists, but paying anybody else who’s related to that,” he said.
He said those investments create “economic multipliers” that reach the community as a whole. Protecting existing arts opportunities while also supporting new ventures is a priority.
Ridge is also hoping to invest in the community by investing in roads, parks and active transportation, while strengthening partnerships around mental health, addictions treatment and homelessness support.
Tags
2026 municipal elections, candidate platforms, King's Town district
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