Which sort of brings us to the answer to the question of who is Sandra Hazlehurst, and how did she get here. In simple, she loves the fruit and produce of her region. Making sure that's what Hastings remains known for is a somewhat consuming passion.
She's fifth-generation Hastings and this passion goes back a long way. She helped her parents in the family business Warren's Bakery, next to the Old Post Office in Russell St. Her great-great-grandfather had the first bakery in Havelock North.
As a former Hastings Girls High School student on her OE in England, she missed the fresh produce of Hawke's Bay, dearly. And after her return at the age of 26, she and her sister bought a fruit and vegetable shop next to the old State Theatre in the year GST arrived, 1986, and started Peaches Fruit Shop.
The first day's takings of $150 would barely help pay the mortgage — nor compare with the current city assets of $1.9 billion. But fresh food diversification was soon making its mark and she was hooked into a CBD commitment which continues to this day, having along the way chaired the Hastings City Business Association, and with her husband started the business Central Building Surveyors.
With the business association she worked for two years in a contract with the district council promoting Hastings to bring new business to the area, with a resolve based on the devastation she had seen in the wake of the closure of the Whakatu meatworks in 1986.
Starting a business in town at the same time, she knew the importance to the city of the works and the jobs.
"It was a huge shock. We saw a lot of closures in the city. It took a long time for the city to recover."
In 2010 she decided to stand for election to the council. She has had three main roles: chairing a district development committee, being deputy and acting mayor, and now the job with the robe and chains.
She says that working with the CBD one of the first jobs was to make people confident they were safe in the area, introducing events, and the City Assist programme, one of the first of its type in New Zealand, and developing the nearby skate park, which she says took skateboards off the CBD streets.
She came into the latest role with the restrengthening and reinstatement of the Opera House, closed in 2013 as an earthquake risk, in progress. She can't wait until September next year to see it in work again, as a part of a new Municipal Theatre arts precinct.
"Protecting it for the next 100 years will be one of the highlights in my time as Mayor," she says, it being taken as read that restoring the district's confidence in its drinkable water supply remains the absolute priority, both fixing it and communicating to the people what is happening.
She says she never took leadership roles in her younger days, but there is a Girl Guiding background, which saw her graduate to the status of assistant commissioner.
How long she'll be doing it is not yet clear.
But, having just been through sessions posing for the artwork where she will be immortalised in the council chambers, alongside the frame of Mr Yule, she says: "I don't think I'll be doing it in 15 years."
