Co Lambert entered the politics of Aa and Hunze through the departure of Bert Wassink. The GroenLinks alderman left for Terschelling in 2015 to become mayor there. “I was always involved in the background,” says Lambert, who was still an accountant at the time. “This came at the right time.”
Collaboration
“It wasn’t on my list at all,” he says of his work in politics. It soon became clear to Lambert that it was a fun job. “To this day. It’s just really nice that you get to deal with a lot of people and organizations, in your own environment. I’ve lived in Aa en Hunze for almost 30 years. Yet for the past 7.5 years I have met a lot of people, organizations and companies, all of whom I didn’t know we have within the boundaries of the municipality.”
He also mentions the fact that you are allowed to interfere with the living environment as a major advantage of the profession. “That you can do that together with a lot of people and organizations, that’s just great fun.”
In his 7.5 years as an alderman, he believes that he has achieved great things. Or, as Lambert emphasizes: us. Because, “you do it together”. “You can name football fields”, he takes as an example. For the first four years he was the alderman for sports. “You can also list things that weren’t in my portfolio, which I’m very happy with.” The new multifunctional center in Rolde, for example. “That has become a beautiful building.”
Concern
In his last term, Lambert is responsible for youth care, among other things. It has been on the plate of the municipalities since 2015. “It was not that bad in the first two years. But when the costs increased, and the money from The Hague did not increase, I think we had a deficit of up to 2 million. And that is significant on a budget of 65 million euros.”
“You can’t afford that year after year,” Lambert warns. “It cannot go on like this. It seems, even with extra money from The Hague, that we now have the shortage in youth care reasonably under control. But I am careful about that.”
Windmills
And there is another big file on Lambert’s list: windmills. “That was a complicated file, with a lot of emotion. A lot of things did not go well there either. Wind energy is fine, but it is simply dumped by the government in the municipality without consultation. There is a lot of nuisance from it. Still. There has not been spoken to us and not to residents.”
As far as Lambert is concerned, those windmills came along the highway, “where there is already noise pollution”. “But we were not allowed to talk about it with our residents. That is very frustrating.” But he won’t go that far to call that the greatest low of his career. “Because we can do so little about it.”
If he thinks back to something in which the coalition could have made a different choice, it is ‘t Ruige Veld. “We had care providers there who did not provide the right care. The whole situation was used to push away the entire care at ‘t Ruige Veld – where care has been provided for decades.”
In the future there will probably be housing construction, Lambert estimates. “I think that’s a missed opportunity. I regret that very much. It is an ideal place for people who have to live under supervision.”