Andrea Reimer At Large

Day One: Action, Lights, Briefs

For anyone wondering what happens between the election and the first day of office, I'm hoping that today's announcement of the Homeless Emergency Action Team and the first new shelter beds to be immediately opened helps answer that. More to come in the next few days including motions going to council which I'm told become public knowledge some time tomorrow on the city's website.

Although I literally raced through two hours of work at the Wilderness Committee to get to City Hall in time, I was only able to catch the tail end of the press conference. I was finally able to get into my email courtesy of two IT department helpers and my council assistant Marie. From there, it was onto the cafeteria where I negotiated successfully to take a real plate back to my office with promises to return it and a rather overwhelming 20 minute lunch/discovery of the emails I've been missing in my new clrreimer@vancouver.ca email address and a city council calendar with quite a few events that I didn't know about because -- you guessed it -- they were in my email.

From there, we had four hours of briefings on budgets, budget processes, capital financing funds, sinking funds, property endowment funds, legal, and HR (bet you didn't know over 70% of the city's workforce are men). Off to social planning social, a meeting with tenants worried about imminent evictions and capped off with the neighbourhoods for a sustainable vancouver open house. Much to be said about all but all that new email is calling...

Oh and the lights. Council offices come equipped with rather obnoxious overhead fluorescents giving me more sympathy for the mood of the councillors at some of the council meetings I've been at over the years. Before I hit the used furniture stores on Commercial this weekend, if anyone has a lamp or two they are dying to part with, drop me a line.

And so it begins...

After 11 months of two nomination campaigns and an election campaign, it was more of a relief than anything else to finally be sworn into office this afternoon. The ceremony was...stunning. In a good way. But alot bigger than the humble experience I had of being sworn in at school board what now feels like a lifetime ago.

Life in the three weeks since the election has, incredibly, been even more hectic than the election itself. In addition to laying all the pipe so that we could hit the ground running as a council, I also have a full time + job that I have to get caught up on post-election and now orchestrate an orderly transition down to part time. There's only a couple of us councillors in that position and we were notable today for the bags under our eyes and stumbling gait around city hall.

Cracking a rib in soccer yesterday also didn't help -- that's me squirming away in the unhelpfully molded plastic chair at the inauguration -- but a little bit of advil and a whole lot of community helped me get through the day.

And yet it's more than a little exciting to be rolling up our sleeves and getting down to work. 56 point platform? Yes we can!