12:00a.m. 31st March 2008

| By Jane Gardner

Now she has made it out the other side of a stressful election, Anna Grosskreutz has a wedding to plan and less than a month to do it.

The division 1 councillor will finally marry her bikie fiancé Russell Eggmolesse at a public ceremony at the Beerwah community hall on April 26 – and no, they won’t be hyphenating their last names.

“It’s taken 25 years for everyone to pronounce my last name, and even now most of them just call me councillor Anna,” she said with a laugh.

By 8.30pm on election day, Anna became the first clear winner of the election.

She recorded 6775 votes, or 52%, over fellow ex-Caloundra councillor Dell Winkler and businessman Steven Attrill.

One of the more interesting characters on the new council, Anna loves her Harleys, is a martial arts expert, grew up watching wrestling and practicing the moves with her two brothers and sisters and is the proud owner of Caloundra’s most water efficient garden.

After a tense neck-and-neck start to the polling, the councillor of 12 years was ecstatic when the votes began to swing in her favour.

“It makes me feel very proud of the community who elected me because right through people were saying (I) should be feeling confident but you can’t afford to feel confident,” she said.

“I used my martial arts training to keep my head down and keep centred and not get fazed by some of the nastiness that happened in the election. I kept it positive right to the end.

“Some of the earlier polls were fairly even, then all of a sudden the Glasshouse country area kicked in with a big woompah! That was when we got really excited.”

One of Anna’s great passions as a councillor has always been housing affordability.

She hopes she will land that portfolio and has done the ground work for the establishment of a taskforce that only needs the mayor’s approval.

“I do (think there is a solution) because there are layers of issues. All three levels of government have been layering up the costs without thought of what the end result is, so it’s a matter of unravelling those and making recommendations to the other levels of government who have all signalled that they want to be on the taskforce.

“I’ve got it there ready to go. The council just has to form up and mayor Bob has to give me the nod to start it and I’ll be doing that straight away if I get that portfolio.”

Her other focus is child safety, in particular, addressing issues with lack of pedestrian facilities around Meridan State College and Pacific Lutheran College.

One of her first acts in council will be to investigate complaints of helicopters flying low over houses in the Bellvista estate.

Her vision for the Sunshine Coast involves strengthening ties with state members – a strategy that has proved very successful for Anna in the past.

“I’ve always had a work ethic of working closely with the elected state representative (for Glasshouse) Carolyn Male,” she said. “We have formed a good partnership. I want to extend that to include Mark McArdle and Steve Dickson.

“It’s worked the $70 million Beerwah crossing road network and you don’t get that sort of money by playing opposition politics.”

In her time as a councillor, Anna has achieved a $190,000 school safety project for Glasshouse Mountains Primary, a community hall and library, the upgrade of the Aquatic Centre, cemeteries and bridge replacements, funding for community groups and the $2 million soon-to-be-constructed Tourism and Information Centre at Glasshouse.

And now she’s celebrating her fourth election win by marrying the love of her life.

“Our wedding is going to be a community wedding, in the Beerwah District Hall, where it’s open invitation to the community to attend then we’ll have a private function at the Beerwah RSL.”

Then it’s off for a honeymoon in Vanuatu before she gets back to business as the representative for division 1 of the Sunshine Coast Regional Council.

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