CHRISTINE Grills was elected the new Mayor of West Devon in a short ceremony at the council's Okehampton office on Tuesday.
Mrs Grills, the Liberal Democrat councillor for Bere Ferrers, takes over from Margaret Garton, Buckland Monachorum's independent councillor.
Robin Pike, the member for Tamarside, was elected as Mrs Grills' deputy.
Mrs Grills said her main aim was to serve West Devon to the best of her abilities.
'I'm going to try to maintain the high standard set by previous mayors and I hope the whole of the council can work together to achieve even better results than we did this year,' she said.
'The council came sixth in a performance survey by the Independent on Sunday newspaper, I hope we can improve on that next year, but the problem all the time is the sparsity factor — in West Devon we don't get as much money from the Government as we would like so we are always working to a very tight budget.'
Mrs Grills said her own concerns centred around public transport.
'I would like to see rural areas getting a better service. It is improving, but I feel if they want people to use public transport there is room for improvement,' she said.
For example, from her own ward of Bere Ferrers, the first bus to Tavistock in the morning leaves at 9.10am and the last bus back leaves Tavistock at 3.50pm.
'Not much good for people working in Tavistock,' said Mrs Grills. 'If there was a better service it would encourage people to use it more.'
Mrs Grills and her husband are farmers. Norman is a Bere Ferrers man 'born and bred'. Mrs Grills came to the area in 1962. She is the mother of two sons — Stephen, a vet in Oxfordshire and father to Mrs Grills' grandson Benjamin Stephen, and Andrew, a council official in Cardiff.
The mayor's charity this year will be the Macmillan Cancer Relief.