Sahitya Pendurthi is a project manager for an IT distribution company working remotely from Sackville. Pendurthi came to Canada from India as an international student ten years ago, chose to become a citizen, got married and settled in Sackville. Pendurthi says she fell in love with the town after her husband, an Amherst native, first brought her here.
Listen to CHMA’s Meet The Candidates interview with Sahitya Pendurthi, which took place at CHMA on November 9, 2022.
Pendurthi is running for Ward 3, where residents will elect four councillors from a pool of nine candidates, including Pendurthi, Josh Goguen, Alice Cotton, Virgil Hammock, Bruce Phinney, Michael Tower, Allison Butcher, Charles Harvey, and Sana Mohammed. All candidates have interviews on CHMA, except for Charles Harvey who declined our request, and Sana Mohammed, who has yet to respond.
CHMA is compiling all its election coverage in one place, for your convenience. For more candidate interviews and other local elections coverage, click here.
TRANSCRIPT Sahitya Pendurthi at CHMA, November 9, 2022
CHMA: Sahitya Pendurthi, thanks for joining us.
Sahitya Pendurthi: Thank you for having me here.
CHMA: So for those who may not already know, do you tell us a bit about yourself?
Sahitya Pendurthi: I am 37 years old. I was born and raised in India in a middle class family. My parents had to do two or three jobs to go up in their status to be able to afford to send their kid to Canada to study. I came here 10 years ago as an international student. I worked my ass off to become a Canadian citizen because I don’t think many Canadians realize how good they got it here. Especially women and the rights that you have here. And one of the reasons I’m running is because of how much I value the rights and freedoms we get in this country.
I met my husband in 2019. He is from Amherst. He was born and raised in Amherst, and lived in Sackville for seven years, met me in 2019, brought me to Sackville and I just fell in love with Sackville. I had to be part of this community. I started looking for houses to buy on my own. It’s really hard to convince the bank that as a woman, I can afford a house by myself. But I did end up buying a small piece of land by King and Crossman in 2020. We then progressed in our relationship, got engaged, and we’re lucky enough to be able to relocate to Sackville permanently. Last year, we bought a house on York. We got married on the 15th of October, a week before I realized that there is going to be a municipal election. And there were only four candidates running for four seats. That’s… yeah, that’s what gets me to this chair here in front of you.
CHMA: Okay, so that’s my next question is what factored into your decision to run for town council. And so one of the things was, you saw that kind of democratic deficit, you thought, oh, we can’t have an election with no election?
Sahitya Pendurthi: That’s right. I think choice is one of the biggest freedoms you have here. That has to be upheld. And that has to be everyone’s responsibility. People who will run for office, but also people who vote. And I know I don’t have the experience to bring to the table, but I do have that eagerness to learn and that passion to give back to the community that has given me so much to be part of this democratic country. Then, on my profile on Facebook, I did post some stats about how only 10% of our world is truly democratic. and Canada is in that 10% of this world. And just blows my mind that we only have less than 50% voter turnout.
CHMA: And it’s especially bad for municipal elections.
Sahitya Pendurthi: Yeah, yeah. Like Toronto, I think there was 29% voter turnout in Toronto, the municipal election they had last month.
CHMA: I think that Tantramar can beat that. But we’ll see.
Sahitya Pendurthi: We have to, we have to
CHMA: Do you have some issues that you’re thinking that you’re bringing to the table? If you’re elected to council, what do you think are going to be your concerns or issues that you want to bring to that council table?
Sahitya Pendurthi: I think my first one is one of the issues that you wanted to address, the transparency piece. Something as simple as looking up the annual budget for the town. When I looked up the document on the town website, the 2021 budget had 2019 numbers in it. And to a common citizen, I don’t have the time to go ask the council why this is not updated. I feel like it should be their responsibility to be diligent about what is being uploaded on the website, especially when it’s public facing and is meant for transparency.
Another thing that caught my eye is the mayor and council member page on the website says their term was still May of 2025. Here we are talking about an election happening in less than a couple of weeks. And the page still gives you wrong information about how long the current term of the mayor or the council members is. Small things. I understand it could be some lack in keeping up with the documentation. But I feel like we have to hold ourselves accountable. And question those things and that’s how we would be more transparent. Right? That’s, yeah, I think that’s one of my main things.
There are bigger concerns, like housing, climate change. So many more issues like potholes in the community that I need to learn about and figure out a way to help the resources that we have to implement plans to make it better. But I’m a project manager by profession. So for me, when I see small things that I can fix right away, that can lead to a betterment of the society, I feel like we need to address those right away.
CHMA: I wanted to ask specifically about housing. You know, it’s typically sort of a provincial jurisdiction, there’s federal money for it. The municipality hasn’t taken a big role in this. Do you think that a municipal government should be doing something to help address this housing crisis that we’re in? And if you do, what kind of things do you think the municipality can do?
Sahitya Pendurthi: I think the municipal government has to take a step towards making this our concern, because it’s directly affecting the jobs that we can keep here, the people that will come into our society, the number of people that are leaving this community to go find a better place to live. If I have to pay an $800 rent here in Sackville for a basement apartment, versus $1,100 rent in Moncton where I could have 10 times more jobs, how do we expect to keep our communities together?
I think for me being a longtime renter in Toronto, I have seen what municipalities like Toronto can do, to cap their rents to make more robust reasonings for evictions, keeping the landlords more accountable. But I think there’s so much more to do from municipal level all the way to federal level to keep housing more affordable to people who actually need it. Hearing a corporation buying housing on King Street and evicting 16 families, it’s just heartbreaking. What can we as a government do to step into situations like that? I know it is a private matter. But I feel like there has to be some way to make laws where the greed does not overtake the need of the community.
CHMA: We’ve, you know, you’ve mentioned transparency, and some of those some of those just sort of simple things like making sure the website’s up to date. Are there other things that you think the town should do differently in terms of how it shares information or what information is shared? Or notification of residents or just that kind of interplay, that openness between what happens at the council table on the inside and what the people know about?
Sahitya Pendurthi: I definitely think right now you have a very… People have to go find the information for themselves versus us going out there to give out the information. Something as simple as maybe having a booth at the farmers market, every Saturday. Just a town council member manning a booth once a week, could open up so much room for conversations, and actually being very connected to the community. I went to a town council meeting on Tuesday. It’s a beautiful space. But I feel like it feels out of the community, not within the community somehow. And I think we’ll have to work really hard to bring the community back in there. Maybe pizza and beer? [laughs]
CHMA: [laughs]
Sahitya Pendurthi: At the community meetings? I do not know… Something to encourage the the citizens and our neighbors to participate and actually take interest in what we have to do to make it better.
And it would be unfair to think council members and the mayor alone can make these decisions because they are human too. And you will need all the feedback and help you can get from your community to make those decisions. And I feel like encouraging that involvement by the community in making those decisions will help us all make a better place.
CHMA: I wanted to ask a bit about amalgamation. Can you give me a best and worst? Something that when you look at this new sort of larger amalgamated municipality, something that you think, wow, that’s going to be great potential. This is the thing to look forward to, a thing to work on. But also on the flip side of that, something that you think whoa, this is going to be kind of difficult and maybe a challenge for this new region… iit’s not a Regional Municipality but bigger region that the council will be looking after. So a best best of and worst of this impending amalgamation.
Sahitya Pendurthi: Best would I think be us having a louder voice, because we represent a bigger area. And as much as we want to say every voice matters, we all know, you have to have these big numbers and these big regions to be able to say that this is affecting more than just a small community of a few thousand. I think that would be the positive of the amalgamation, the negative would be, the sum of the smaller voices might get more smaller. I like that we have members from each ward representing their area. But each ward now is also three, four little towns together. So that might be a little hard for us to concentrate on every single little town’s concerns. Their concerns might get lost in the bigger voices that are there at the table, which we have to be very mindful of, because we can’t let someone down to build someone up. So we have to listen to everybody.
CHMA: Okay, yeah. Is there anything else that you want people in Ward 3 to know?
Sahitya Pendurthi: I would love if everyone would show up to vote. I’ve read a little bullet about Elections NB trying to help us with doing transportation from the town to the voting location. I think now even that excuse is taken away from us. The excuse of it’s not being accessible has been taken away. The bus is supposed to run every half an hour. Please look up the information. Please get registered. Go vote. I don’t care who you vote for. Because if you want to complain tomorrow, you better have voted today. That’s all I have to say.
CHMA: All right. Thank you. Well, Sahitya thank you so much for coming. Really great to meet you and best of luck in this campaign and in the election.
Sahitya Pendurthi: Thank you so much.
