The Beagle Editor,
The Eurobodalla Shire Council is responsible and answerable to it’s residents and ratepayers. In recent times the Council has been significantly publicly criticised over several matters. The most recent being a Draft Report presented to councillors about Councillors Meeting Code of Practice. The Code of Meeting Practice requires mandatory elements under the direction of the State Government to meeting procedure requirements. However councillors, by resolution of the council, can add their own additional process requirements to satisfy the expectations of the community. The elements of Live Streaming recording of the public forum, community access and input of the agenda and non agenda items can be included as additions to the Council Meeting processes at the discretion of councillors, and should be. To date the state government has not had a problem with that being the case in the Eurobodalla. Neither should they. The Local Council is local peoples business.
However the current General Manager seems to have a problem with such liberal and non-mandatory notions wanting instead to just include only what the State Government requires. "Bugger the area's residents and ratepayers" seems to be the attitude of the present General Manager, as was more or less implied on a 2EC radio interview this morning. It was good to hear Councillor Mayne apparently supporting the live stream recording of the whole meeting process. But his will be just one vote to retain out of nine councilors. The General Manager really needs to butt out and be happy to be directed by the community on the matter as the elected councillors should too.
Allan Brown
Catalina
