By Tucker Henderson

Reporter

As January begins, a new era of civic duty dawns as New York Mills mayor-elect, Latham Hetland. He is set to be inaugurated at the January 14 city council meeting.  ¶  Hetland, age 29, is likely the youngest mayor the city of NY Mills has seen in its 140 years of history. He is a 2013 NY Mills graduate and has been a member of the city council for the past eight years.  ¶  “I’ve always been interested in how different government entities operate since I was a kid,” said Hetland. “When I moved back to New York Mills and started at the bank, I just wanted to see how our community worked in a different perspective than when I was growing up and part of that was getting involved in different nonprofit organizations.  Then getting involved in the city. So it just felt like a right fit and there wasn’t a lot of people running either and I wanted to keep things happening in our community and I felt like the timing was right.”

Hetland had been attending city council meetings for a year prior to running for city council to get a feel for the way the council operated and the city’s plans that were in motion at the time. When he was elected to the city council, he obtained copies of meeting minutes since 2002 in order to get more fully acquainted with the city’s recent history of their operations and to try and see the full picture of the past two decades of council precedent.

“I didn’t want to commit to something I had no idea about,” he said. “So that was really informational for me and then I started learning from the existing council and mayor, which was huge, because otherwise it would have been really terrifying for me.

“It’s just so interesting,” he said of the past meeting minutes. “I’ve read through all of them because I like to know what’s going on. Precedents aren’t written anywhere, so if there was something that happened and we did this before, you have to have a justifiable reason to do something different.”

Throughout the past two terms as a city council member, Hetland has sat on a variety of committees including those pertaining to budget, EDA, zoning, public works, police and fire department. During his time on those committees, he felt that he gained a good grasp of the procedures, goals, and future of these aspects of the city and decided to run for mayor this past summer.

“I was talking to the current mayor, Marsha Maki, and we talked about it and she said that she thought that I could be a good candidate for it,” he said. “She said she would be willing to run for my spot on council, so I filed for mayor and she filed for council. It just felt like it was right for me.”

In the next two years as Hetland fills his term as mayor, he said that he looks forward to maintaining the positive progress the city has made in the past decade as well as looking forward to continuing to meet those goals.

“Overall, I’m most excited for the continued growth of our community,” he said. “We’ve made a lot of progress in the past few years and I think that progress is going to continue. I hope we can do that in an economical and efficient way and continue being the safe and virtuous community that we are.

“We will be doing another strategic planning on part of NYM Forward in the next year, so I think it will be good to get into the community and get more insights on what our community is looking at now,” he continued. “The last time we did that was 2017, with some updates in between, but just getting that full picture of as many people as possible in our community, I think is a really important thing to help create a baseline for our decisions and what we’re trying to do moving forward.”

While Hetland did run unopposed in the mayoral election, he appreciates the support behind his new appointment, nonetheless. With the support of mentors such as mayor Marsha Maki, he decided to heed the call of many like-minded community members who thought he would be a good fit for the position.

“It’s been a good feeling,” he said. “I’m excited for the opportunity and the responsibility. I’m really fortunate that I’ve had two terms of city council experience, so I do know how things work, typically. I’m also really thankful for the staff of the city who have an incredible amount of knowledge of what they’re doing. So I feel confident about the next two years that I will be mayor.

“I’m excited to represent New York Mills,” he continued. “I try my best to be available and transparent, I want people to talk to me. I’m always around, you can always get a hold of me and I’m always looking for find creative solutions to do the best thing possible for our entire community.”