PORT ANGELES — A critic of the current Port Angeles City Council has declared his intention to run for election to the panel.
Financial adviser Travis Berglund, 34, announced this week that he will run for the four-year Position 4 seat held by Dan Gase, who is not running for re-election.
Berglund, a Redmond native who grew up in Port Angeles, said council members should focus on more important issues and be more collaborative.
“I see them focusing on issues that are centered around personalities,” he said Thursday.
Council members should be paying more attention to the general fund budget and “supporting businesses in the retail core and listening to their needs,” he said.
“We need a council that truly does represent the people,” Berglund said, citing municipal water fluoridation.
An opponent of fluoridation, which he views as “medicating people against their will,” Berglund said he will honor the outcome of the Nov. 7 advisory ballot on the practice regardless of the outcome.
He said he is against changing the city’s code status to second-class status, which the city council voted this week to include on the Nov. 7 general election ballot.
“That’s a terrible thing if that were to go through,” Berglund said of the change-in-government measure. “It weakens our town.”
Berglund, a 2001 Port Angeles High School graduate, was in the Marines for two years after high school and left the service with an “early discharge, other-than-honorable,” he said, declining to elaborate on Thursday.
He lived in San Diego, Calif.; Newark, N.J.; and Seattle before returning to Port Angeles in 2004.
Berglund became a financial adviser in 2006 after two years of classes, he said.
He was a financial adviser at First Federal from 2011-15, then started Financial Advocates Investment Management in downtown Port Angeles, which he still owns.
Berglund, who has never run for or held elective public office, is treasurer of the Peninsula College Foundation board, past president of Port Angeles Noon Rotary and past board chair of Volunteers in Medicine of the Olympics.
He and his wife, Crystal, have three daughters, ages 8, 6 and 2.
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Senior Staff Writer Paul Gottlieb can be reached at 360-452-2345, ext. 55650, or at pgottlieb@peninsuladailynews.com.
