The dynasty, if you will, is over. For more than three decades, the double-barreled Halsey-Brandt has been carved onto the name plate of at least one Richmond city councillor or mayor.
Come Nov. 15, there will be none, after Evelina Halsey-Brandt — the wife of former MLA, mayor and councillor Greg Halsey-Brandt — calls it a career after 19 years at city hall.
Whether you agreed with Evelina’s impassioned arguments or not — and there were many who didn’t — it was hard not to respect her dedication to her vision for Richmond.
She did her homework on the issues being debated — which is more than can be said for one or two of her colleagues, past and present — and she was most definitely a straight-talker who invariably zoomed in on the point, again, unlike some others.
It’s those traits that served her well on council, undoubtedly ingratiating herself to city hall staff, who knew where they stood with her, and to reporters covering the city hall beat, grateful for not having to listen to a politician talking in circles for hours on end.
Halsey-Brandt is a name a generation of Richmondites have come to expect to see on the municipal ballot paper.
It’s a name that has been ticked once, twice or thrice by voters, depending on how many have run.
Civic politics being what it is, presumably some of those boxes were marked thanks to habit or name recognition. In which case, it’s the voters who’ll have to do their homework prior to Nov. 15.
