Today marked a year since I started working at the Expositor.

It’s been a busy one (aren’t they all), marked by my getting to know this city, its members of council and learning about the recurring issues that define Brantford. I look forward to future years. This blog has been a different way of commenting, opining and analyzing some of the municipal issues that have crossed my desk.

Regular readers of this space and my Twitter feed would know that my intention from day one was to eventually move to Brantford and that process has begun. I’ve listed my current home and am awaiting its sale to choose my next abode here in the Telephone City.

Thanks to those who’ve welcomed me and helped along the way.

Welcome to this space— one where I hope to be providing some additional opinion and analysis to supplement the Expositor’s municipal coverage.

As is explained elsewhere around this post, this space provides another avenue to read, learn, discuss and disagree (in a civil manner) about municipal politics in Brantford and Brant County.

If we haven’t met yet, I’ve come to the Expositor newsroom in August after an almost eight-year stint at our sister paper down Highway 403, the Sentinel-Review in Woodstock. I started at the S-R as its education and agriculture reporter, later swapping agriculture for the municipal politics beat in 2006. I covered the City of Woodstock and County of Oxford in addition to town and township coverage when needed.

I took an eight-month leave of absence from the S-R in 2010-11 to pursue a Canadian Journalism Fellowship at Massey College in the University of Toronto, during which time I audited courses on initial-teacher education at the Ontario Institute for Studies in Education as well as on urban form at the Cities Centre and smartphone application design within the computer science and engineering department.

In 2009, I started Dundas & Reeve, a municipal politics blog for the S-R. In just a little over two years I posted 260 posts to that site, drawing over 20,000 visitors to a space where they could interact with the issues of the day and the person writing about them.

I enjoyed that so much, that’s what I hope to do with this space too. Thanks for stopping by and I look forward to writing, reading your comments and interacting.