“Actually, I just came here by bike,” says mayor Anja Schouten with a laugh when the photographer of media partner Alkmaar Centraal captures her as she enters the official car. Exactly two years after it was announced that she would become mayor of Alkmaar, we follow her during her work. The car – with driver Mike – serves as an office between work visits. “And, do you still want to be mayor?”
It is the start of an afternoon with several working visits: Koedijk, Schermerhorn and the Kunstuitleen in Alkmaar. Everyone knows she’s busy. It is also said to her several times. “It’s important to be visible,” says the mayor. “After the fall of the college, it really was a choice that I would continue to go to events. Even if people don’t actually expect it.”
Otherwise, if Alkmaar still had a council of aldermen, the working visits she is making today would not all have been made by the mayor. “No, normally you divide something like that. The event we are going to first, that would have been picked up by the Alderman for Sport.”
Invisible monument
That event is the Genissen Game Day in Koedijk. After that, the celebration ’30 years Smallest House’ in Schermerhorn is on the program. Finally, the mayor will open the exhibition ‘Invisible Monuments’ in the Kunstuitleen. “I also have an invisible monument,” she says in her speech there. “That’s the V&D clock. I used to wait there for my aunts from Sint Pancras and Langedijk, when they went ‘statt’. And later I waited for my boyfriend.”
It is unavoidable that others sometimes have to take over her tasks. “For when I’m ‘devastated’, that’s what it’s called. In the absence of the mayor. I’m not absent, I’m devastated.”
Serious accident
Her explanation is interrupted by a phone call, there is a serious accident happened. It soon becomes clear that a child has died. “A very nasty message,” she says. It visibly touches her as a mother. And she knows the care providers involved personally.
Driver Mike knows what is expected of him in these situations. The official car therefore drives extra slowly across a parking lot to give the mayor time to complete the telephone conversation. But after that the next working visit really awaits and she doesn’t show any signs of her concern for a while.
read here the whole interview from media partner Alkmaar Central with mayor Anja Schouten.