The Beagle Editor,
Thank you for highlighting the circus of Council policy consultation; and the current inability of the new Councillors to seize the opportunity for improving it by simple actions when it was offered to them on a silver plate by presenters from the community this week.
They chose to agree with the counter proposals from GM Dale at her “in-Confidence” briefing to them before the meeting (the GM’s usual method for subverting community impending presentations which do not reflect well on Council).
The Council protocol that presentations must be lodged in writing by midday the day before a public Council meeting is often used by the GM to prepare counter arguments to Councillors. This frequently contains threats of complex legal, financial and administrative costs from the GM together with a demand that they reject the proposed action.
The GM is very clever and most Councillors are so intimidated they take the side of the GM and her senior managers, thank them and do what they are told! The election of a new Council had filled us all with hope that the bad old days of the former Council were behind us.
Given that the Mayor was rolled at the first meeting by the GM over public access proposal and, at the last meeting, by getting the Councillors to side with her against sensible proposals by the community to make two public policy consultation documents up to date and in plain English, the GM demonstrated she still has them wrapped around her little finger.
Peter Cormick’s recent letter to the Beagle defending the current Councillor’s inability to support simple and sensible suggestions from the community is unfortunate. His argument that policy documents can go out to the community which are out of date, factually incorrect and, as in the Creative Arts Policy, filled with errors and long-winded, incomprehensible gibberish which the community should fix - is clearly nonsense.
If we followed his logic and Council’s example, we do not need, for example, to sort our household rubbish and put it in bins; we can just dump it on the street and hope the community sorts it out.
If Councillors wish to seriously fix the problems with Eurobodalla Council they need to keep their promise made at the Tuross candidates Forum last year to obtain an independent review of Council’s management and its processes. This will give them the tools to address the real issues. If they don’t they will keep getting manipulated by senior Council management and the circus will continue to the detriment of the community.
Frank Ross
Moruya
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NOTE: Comments were TRIALED - in the end it failed as humans will be humans and it turned into a pile of merde; only contributed to by just a handful who did little to add to the conversation of the issue at hand. Anyone who would like to contribute an opinion are encouraged to send in a Letter to the Editor where it might be considered for publication
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