City of Grande Prairie council officially sworn in

Grant Berg (newly elected)
Gladys Blackmore (newly elected)
Wendy Bosch (newly elected)
Dylan Bressey (incumbent)
John Lehners (newly elected)
Mike O’Connor (newly elected)
Kevin O’Toole (incumbent)
Chris Thiessen (incumbent)

With five new faces and three incumbent councillors in the council chamber, Clayton suggests she is excited to get everyone together to finally get back to work.

“Over the next four years, we have a lot of things to work on. As we know, we’re still going through the middle of a pandemic, and that impacts decisions that we make on a daily basis. However, we look forward to bringing each other’s great ideas together.”

Clayton tells EverythingGP that all elected officials are eager to bring their new ideas to the table, although she says it’s crucial to take the next step with those ideas and work together to build the city’s strategic priorities plan.

“There may be different priorities for different councillors, but we’ll build a plan together and look forward to working on what that looks like over the next four years.”

With Clayton sitting on council for the previous two terms, she explains that every council is very different. Despite the differences, she says each one brings forward new learning opportunities.

“Last term we had some new councillors around the table. Councillor (Wade) Pilat brought different perspectives to the table and Councillor (Yad) Minhas has. So this time a new group, you take a little bit away from each of those to sort of form your experience, learn a bit and learn what you can do as a council and how you can work together to be effective.”

Councillor Grant Berg who is one of five newly elected council members, says the election was a busy time, explaining it wasn’t until Sunday night when he was able to sit down to look over the notes and assignments given by city administration.

Although it has been constant movement since campaigning, Berg tells EverythingGP he is excited to get started and help represent the people in Grande Prairie.

“There’s so much potential that we’re going to get to work on in shaping the city for the next four years. So yes, it was a lot of hard work, and we were dog tired but last night (Sunday night), things took a shift from taking down signs running a campaign to actually moving forward to running the city.”

Berg says although they were officially sworn in Monday, he says he doesn’t think it will officially hit him until motions start being passed.

“I think that’s where it will actually hit me because, so far it’s training and again passing stuff that we already knew like election results, so this was a nice little training wheels meeting where we got to go through the motions and actually do something tangible, but not impactful.”