Back in the Groove.

It's been a sort of get back to normal week this week, I've even manged a few days of paid work, quite a change after spending pretty much all of the previous month involved in one way or another with elections, councils, or politics.

After changing portfolio's at Mendip, I've now got to get to grips with the all new "Regulatory" function, it appears that I have inherited Licensing, Car Parking Enforcement, Planning Enforcement, Environmental Health, Contaminated Land, Environmental Protection, Community Safety and Civil Contingency, basically everything from parking tickets to nuclear war!!

It is going to be a very steep learning curve for the next few weeks, with the first meeting of the new cabinet scheduled for early June, we all need to have our fingers on the pulse before then.

At county I've done my initial introductions and all of the legal stuff, we have our AGM on Wednesday next week, as a new boy I'm not expecting to be given any particular area of responsibility, I think the next 12 months will be a small matter of learning the ropes and representing Shepton effectively at county level. I already have a large case load that I'm working my way through, and if it is anything like my Mendip experience, dealing with cases gets you involved with the various departments within the council and enables you to learn who does what much quicker than any training course.

Tuesday night next week sees the first meeting of the new Town Council, we have lost three very experienced councillors in Margaret Robinson, who retired before the election, with John Gilham and Colin Lockey who were not re-elected. These three have been replaced by Susan Gibbs an Independent with no previous council experience and two Liberal Democrats in the form of Sue Cook and Garfield Kennedy. Sue similarly has no previous experience while Kennedy has at least served a few months at District level.

 I think Tuesday's meeting will be very interesting, there is no political majority at Town level, the Conservatives are still the largest group with 6 councillors, so there will have to be cross party support for whoever wants to hold the various chairmanships and portfolio's, I suspect the machinations could go on late into the evening!