The mayor of a small town in Ohio has resigned after making national headlines last week for saying that allowing ice fishing would lead to prostitution.

Craig Shubert, the mayor of Hudson, which lies about 30 miles southeast of Cleveland, tendered his resignation from the largely ceremonial post.

Last week, Shubert suggested during a city council meeting that allowing ice fishing at a local park could lead to prostitution.

“Does someone come back next year and say I want an ice shanty on Hudson Springs Park for X amount of time?” Shubert said during the meeting.

“And if you then allow ice fishing with shanties, then that leads to another problem. Prostitution. Now you’ve got the police chief and the police department involved.”

Shubert, whose comments went viral and led to him being ridiculed on social media, later issued a clarification, saying that his statements “were made out of concern for our community; what could become of unintended consequences of new legislation, based on my prior television news reporting experience.”

He added: “My attempt to inject a bit of dry humor to make a point about this, in the midst of a cold, snowy February, was grossly misunderstood.”

“When I entered the race for mayor in 2019, my objective was to bring about change,” Shubert said in a statement.

“To shake up city council and our city administration, to return Hudson to its core conservative values, and to focus on the needs of our community; not the wants of a few.”

Shubert, 65, said that he had planned to retire, especially after the death of his wife in September.

He wrote in his statement that “my role as a change agent is complete.”

Shubert had been known to make outlandish statements in the past. Last fall, he claimed that a high school creative writing class used a textbook that contained child pornography.

His statements led to threats being made against school board members even though there was no child pornography used in the class.