After the Village of Lytton literally burned to the ground in June of last year, the incoming mayor has a lot of questions as she prepares to take office.

Lytton is facing much more than an average village of its size, with a major rebuild of almost the entire community.

Mayor-elect Denise O’Connor, was asked on the NL Morning News, how she’ll start the process of getting the village back to normal.

“I’ve been thinking about that for months and months now. One of the biggest issues we’ve had is the lack of communication and so, we don’t really know what’s going on,” she said.

“We don’t know what the different roles are, different organizations that are involved and so one of the first things I have to do, getting in there, is learning and finding out, gathering information, it’s huge. I’m going to have to hit the ground running doing that, in fact I already have some meetings set up this week to just try to sort out in our own heads where do we start.”

O’Connor says there are a lot of outside influences at play like the Federal Government and the Province, particularly Emergency Management BC.

“You know, it’s almost a year-and-a-half coming up and the clean up has not been finished. Why? Why has it taken this long? Lots of questions for EMBC, they’ve kind of took the helm over, I believe,” she said.

“We just have so many questions.”

One of those questions – she says – is what has been done with any money from the provincial and federal governments that has already come in, with

“The federal Government, I understand that, the current council doesn’t even know the parameters of how to use it yet. It’s very general but yeah, that’s going to be another piece of information gathering and finding out is what money is there? What is left? What has it been spent on so far? Those kinds of things,” she said.

O’Connor, who is replacing Jan Polderman who did not seek reelection, says she hasn’t had to field difficult questions from residents like when they will be able to return home.

“It’s such small community. I have lived in Lytton all my life. I had my career here, I lost my home here, I know the people, the friends and neighbours and I’ve kept in touch with them since the fire,” she said. “Everyone has the same concern.”

“The promise I made to them was I’m going to get in there and do what I can. I didn’t make any big promises.”

O’Connor says she’s had support of not only citizens of the village but from many surrounding communities as well.

As for any also went to call on both the provincial and federal governments to not forget about Lytton.

“We’re small but we are here and we’re going to move forward soon,” she said. “I hope we’re going to see the town cleaned up and we can start rebuilding.”