At the shire's statutory meeting Cr Meyer was re-elected to the position, and councillors Jodie Pretlove was re-elected as deputy mayor.

Cr Meyer has now served as a councillor for 26 years, including eight previous terms as mayor.

Despite his long experience in the role, Cr Meyer said he was still excited to have the top job.

"It is a privilege and an honour. There is always a bit of excitement when you are representing your local community at that level," he said.

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He said the past year has presented a unique challenge for the shire - having to navigate online meetings and work around COVID-19 restrictions.

"It was fairly constrained, because not being able to meet together as often as you would like to, it creates a different atmosphere to what local government has always been," he said.

"Local government decisions have always tended to be made by consensus and made with people sitting around a table, working out what is best for everybody."

Frequent technological hiccups during council business was also a source of anxiety.

"The last year has been frustrating when you do things online and technology is unreliable. You constantly have breaks and everything else like that," he said.

"It has been an entirely different atmosphere and hopefully it won't be too long before we can go back to what we can consider to be normal."

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In acknowledgement of his service to local government, Cr Meyer has received Victorian Councillor Service Awards and the Mayor Emeritus Award from the Municipal Association of Victoria.

In 2020, Cr Meyer was appointed a member of the Order of Australia for his service to local government and the West Wimmera community.

Looking to the future, Cr Meyer said the shire had many projects in the pipeline, some of which were delayed due to the COVID-19 pandemic.

"There are projects that had been running from before COVID that we were working on towards completion," he said.

"Even some of those, like the Edenhope Hall, are reasonably complete, but because of the restrictions we have not been able to have an official opening.

"Just little things like that we need to be able to tidy up. Going forward, we have the big project at Goroke that has been delayed for quite a while due to building materials not being available.

"That was held up but is well underway now so we look forward to getting that completed."

He said the council also looked forward to the return of travel between Victoria and South Australia, with tourism one of the drivers of jobs and growth in the region.

"For our situation we do look forward to a more easy flow of traffic and movement between Victoria and South Australia," he said.

"The south east of South Australia is a very popular spot for people from these regions, so people will be looking forward to moving freely to go where they need to get to.

"Hopefully it works the other way too, because our towns are reliant on a fair bit of passing traffic. If we can get people coming the other way I hope all the businesses will reap that benefit."

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