High River's Mayor is looking forward to 2017.

Craig Snodgrass says he's looking close to home in the new year.

"There's a piece that we often forget to focus on and that's the Town of High River organization inside that building," he says. "Our staff have been through a whirlwind with what they went through initially with the flood and then we doubled our staff with all the consultants and that's an area that's really going to be important to me in 2017, just getting getting that piece focused."

He says the staff and administration with the town does a great job and the quality of life in the town is linked directly to the work they do.

The Mayor says there are still a couple of downtown intersections that need to be finished up but they'll only be shut down for shorter periods of time, not the months that residents were used to seeing sine the flood.

When it comes to development Snodgrass says in 2017 Jodi Dawson and the Economic Development department have some serious branding and marketing piece they'll be putting into place.

"It's funny you know some people feel that we should have been doing this two years ago, while I was a big one saying 'you don't do that yet, it's got to be done right and we've got to get some things fixed before we start blowing this out to the world," Snodgrass says.

With a municipal election coming in October Snodgrass says he and his wife are still discussing whether he'll run again although he says he's not one to do an aggressive change downtown and then just run from it and leave it to someone else to make happen.

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