Read my lips... A-c-c-o-u-n-t-a-b-i-l-i-t-y

It is lamentable that new Council President Tony Pratico, despite having been on Council for several years, does not appear to understand fundamental concepts of governance, such as conflicts of interest.

For as long as I can remember and as recently as April 11, he has consistently taken part in debates and voted on motions concerning the management of Yornup Hall, despite the obvious conflict raised by his membership of both the Yornup Hall Management Committee and the private group which was allowed to run the hall and its finances, the Yornup Hall Committee.  In one case, he was the only councillor to vote against a motion that the CEO should check whether the arrangements regarding the hall were legal. (It turned out they were not.)

But a strange thing happened at the most recent Council meeting on April 24...  Mr Pratico declared this conflict of interest.  Cr Hodson, who is also on the Management Committee, declared his interest and the Shire CEO's executive assistant, Mrs Norris also declared an interest as a member of the private committee.

So what brought on this sudden burst of propriety?

I suspect it may have has something to do with me lodging an official complaint a couple of weeks ago about Mr Pratico's failure to declare his conflicts on this issue.

Check out his record below...

Failure to declare an impartiality interest  (three instances)  Council meeting 25/2/2010.

Mr Pratico took part in the debate and voted against the following motion:

Item: C.06/0210  That the instrument of Appointment for the Yornup Hall Management Committee be withdrawn.

Mr Pratico took part in debate and voted in favour of the following amendment:  That point 3 of C.24/0210 be deleted. (Censure of the Management Committee chairman)

Mr Pratico took part in debate and voted against C.24/0210  (Noting the Management Committee had breached its Instrument of Appointment)

At the time, he was a member of committee in question, the Yornup Hall Management Committee.

Failure to declare an impartiality interest.   Council meeting 24/6/2010

Mr Pratico took part in debate and voted against C.13/0610  That Council defer consideration of a request (from the Yornup Hall Committee) to replace jarrah weatherboards on the hall until Council received  and considered financial statements from the Yornup Hall Management Committee.

At the time, he was a member of both the Yornup Hall Committee and the Yornup Hall Management Committee.

Failure to declare an impartiality interest. (two instances) Council meeting 25/11/2010

Mr Pratico took part in the debate and voted against the following motion:

Item C.03/1110 (Part 1) That all budgeted expenditure on upgrades and improvements to the Yornup Hall and surrounds be suspended until it can be established that this publicly-owned asset is being managed in a way which allows proper scrutiny and provides accountability.

Mr Pratico also took part in debate and voted against the following motion:

C.03/1110 (Part 2)  That the CEO seek advice and provide a report to Council on the legality of the current arrangements in regard to management of this publicly owned asset and retention of hall hire fees by a private group, being the Yornup Hall Committee.

At the time he was chairman of the Yornup Hall Management Committee and a member of the Yornup Hall Committee.

   Failure to declare an impartiality interest.  Council meeting  28/2/2013

Cr Pratico voted in favour of the following motion:

Item C.02/0213  That Council request the CEO to investigate and report back to the April 2013 standing committee meeting on the possibility of leasing the Yornup Hall to the Yornup Hall (Community) Committee and consequential disbanding of the Yornup Hall Management Committee.

At the time he was a member of both the Yornup Hall Management Committee and the private Yornup Hall Committee.

 Failure to declare an impartiality interest.  Standing Committee meeting  11/4/2013

Cr Pratico took part in debate and voted in favour of Amendment and Substantive Motion dealing with  proposal to lease hall to Yornup Hall Committee - Item SC.05/0413

At the time, he was a member of both the Yornup Hall Management Committee and the private Yornup Hall Committee.

What's another word for misleading?

The plain truth: for many years our Shire Council allowed thousands of dollars collected from the hiring out of the Yornup hall -- a public asset -- to go into the bank account of a private group of citizens, including Shire CEO Tim Clynch’s in-laws, to spend as they saw fit.

It was done illegally.  This has been confirmed by the Department of Local Government and acknowledged recently by Mr Clynch.

 

During my time on Council I tried several times to end the cosy arrangements regarding the Yornup Hall, but was thwarted by Mr Clynch, who repeatedly told the other councillors (and Department of Local Government officers) that everything was proper and the hall hire money was “retained” not by the private group, but by the Council-appointed Yornup Hall Management Committee.

 

I was a journalist for 20 years and I can tell you folks, this is scandalous.

 

So how does the Mr Clynch keep his job?  By pretending nothing happened, inventing his own alternative reality - a world in which he did nothing wrong.

 

I went along to the last Council meeting and asked him about the misleading statements he had made.  Here is an excerpt from the Council minutes:

Question 1. The Department of Local Government has found that duties that were supposed to be carried out by the Yornup Hall Management Committee,including retaining hall hire income, has in fact been carried out by a private group – the Yornup Hall Committee. Did you, the CEO, mislead councillors and others, when on several occasions in recent years, you said in writing that the Management Committee retained the hall hire income?

CEO’s response – No I do not think I misled councillors.

Question 2. Or others?

CEO’s response – No I didn’t.

Question 3. If the Department of Local Government found that the Yornup Hall Management Committee did not retain hall hire income, and if you have said in writing that that was the case, then how do you explain the discrepancy?

(CEO's) response – We will take that question on notice.

 

The CEO has since sent me a written response. In part it says: “I was aware that the hall hire funds were banked in an account under the name of the Yornup Hall Committee. This wasn’t considered to be ultra virus (sic) to the Local Government Act as the minutes of each meeting of the Yornup Hall Management Committee reported on the income received from hall hire since the previous meeting of the Management Committee and expenditure of those funds in the same period. Up until receiving the correspondence from the Department of Local Government, as CEO I was satisfied with that arrangement. The findings of the Department however require changes to be made to those practices.” 

 

Mr Clynch does not answer the question of whether in a situation where a private group keeps the money and simply tells a Council committee what it spent it on, it is misleading to tell people the Council committee “retains” the money.  Instead, he simply outlines a half-assed process to provide some accountability which was only introduced after I started complaining about the Yornup Hall situation in 2009.

 

 That Mr Clynch has made misleading statements in official advice to Council is now established as plain as day, even if he will not admit it.

 

 The question is, what will the councillors do about it?  If the answer is nothing, what should we do about them?

A feeling of emptiness

It seems the people who are running Bridgetown had a big win at the Special Meeting of Electors last Thursday night. I wasn't there, but apparently it was an unedifying spectacle.

The outcome was that Council has been asked by electors to push on with moves to have Zinnecker's House demolished or removed.

So what does "victory" look like to former Shire President Brian Moore, his wife, past and present councillors and their friends?

Victory is an empty, dusty patch of land in the middle town where a nice old house used to stand.

You know you need local government reform when...

Our community has a new leader. The well-known farmer, owner of Çhooks and operator of the ice-cream van, Mr Tony Pratico is now Shire President - an important and influential position.

So I went along to last night's Council meeting and when it came time for questions from the public, I got up and asked him a very simple, but I think pertinent one:  ''What is your vision for the future of Bridgetown-Greenbushes?''

It was met with a stunned silence, and when he recovered his composure the President made this extraordinary statement: "I don't think that is an appropriate question." There was another  pause, until he added: "My vision is to be a part of the decision-making process."

And that was it. That's the guy who is supposed to be charting our course.

Who's running Bridgetown, indeed!

A test for our elected representatives

The Bridgetown-Greenbushes Shire councillors should censure Shire CEO Tim Clynch for his handling of the Yornup Hall issue.

For many years, Mr Clynch condoned and defended a situation in regard to the management of the hall which has now been found by the Department of Local Government to be in breach of the law.

This might be excused as simple mismanagement, but what is worse, Mr Clynch has provided misleading information to Council and others about the arrangements in regard to the hall.

For example, he repeatedly told councillors that the Council’s Yornup Hall Management Committee was collecting revenue from hall hire and expending this on the hall.  We now know that this committee never touched the hall hire revenue. The money was actually being collected and spent (on anything they saw fit) by a group of locals known as the Yornup Hall Committee.

That this group of locals includes members of Mr Clynch’s extended family raises questions around the impartiality of his advice, which must be addressed by Council.

The task for Council of getting to the bottom of this affair will be made harder because its new President, Tony Pratico is deeply involved in the issue.

Mr Pratico is a member of both the Council committee which is supposed to run the hall and the private group which actually runs the hall. Mr Pratico voted several times against motions I put to forward during my term as a councillor which were aimed at ending the curious Yornup hall arrangements. He did not once declare an impartiality interest.

If the other councillors do nothing about this emerging scandal, they will stand accused of a failure to insist on even minimum standards of governance and accountability for the public assets in their care.

Who will defend the indefensible?

The shoddy, makeshift little edifice which is our current Council has begun to crumble.

As outlined here earlier, the Council has devolved into a group of people who do not much more than routinely follow directions, rubber stamping the decisions of Shire CEO Tim Clynch.

But to paraphrase a famous movie, it may turn out he’s not the messiah, but just a naughty boy!

Concerned citizens have long been alarmed by the arrogant and dismissive conduct of both senior staff and councillors towards those they are supposed to represent.

In the past few weeks, councillor Sue Moscarda has quit and left town for personal reasons. Now President Brian Moore has pulled the pin, for no apparent reason.

I wonder whether it has anything to do with the Department of Local Government’s investigation into the  unusual arrangements concerning the Yornup Hall…?

Followers of Council meetings and this blog will know I have tried long and hard inside and outside of Council to convince my former colleagues it is wrong to hand over public assets like this hall to a select group of private citizens.  A majority of councillors didn’t believe me, because Mr Clynch said I was wrong and there was nothing to worry about.  Now the Department has concluded I was correct -- that the arrangements were not legal and I believe some fairly serious slaps on wrists have been delivered.

At the recent annual meeting of electors, I successfully moved that Council consider the following motion: That in order to restore proper and legal governance over the Yornup Hall, remove the appearance of favouritism and provide accountability for funds raised by the renting of this hall, Council removes the authority for and disbands the Yornup Hall Management Committee, and henceforth manages the Yornup hall the same way it manages every other hall in the Shire.

But Council will soon vote on a “face-saving” alternative recommendation from Mr Clynch that the hall be leased to its current “de-facto”owners, a group which includes Mr Clynch’s in-laws and Deputy President Tony Pratico.

Will any councillors be brave enough to stand up to Messers Clynch and Pratico and say enough is enough?  And what, if any, action will councillors take over the fact that they and every other ratepayer and citizen of the Shire has for 10 years been deliberately misled about the arrangements concerning the hall’s use and denied proper accountability for the money raised from its hiring out?

Maybe the answer to that question was just a bit too hard for Mr Moore, since in this case he couldn’t simply handball the question to the CEO, as he did with almost every other query since becoming President.

Long road to propriety

There is an old saying; “You can’t be a little bit pregnant”.

 In the same way, when it comes to management of public assets and public funds, things  can only be proper or improper, legal or illegal.

 

 I know we live in the country, but the days of “special” arrangements for certain people are supposed to be over, no matter how good and well-intentioned those people are, or how long they’ve been around. 

 What I’m saying is that any arrangement the Shire Council makes in relation to property belonging to ratepayers can’t be  just sort-of ok, not really an issue, near-enough is good-enough.  All the Shire’s arrangements concerning public assets and public money should be absolutely scrupulous and legal.

 

 Over the past five years, I have repeatedly and consistently complained to  the CEO and councillors that arrangements in regard to the management and hiring out of the Yornup Hall are 1. Improper , 2. Possibly illegal and  3. In breach of basic standards of good governance. I’ve even written letters to the newspaper about it!

 

 Unlike all the other halls and public assets in the Shire, the Yornup hall has its own Management Committee which has full delegated powers of the Shire Council. That, in itself, would be unusual, but not improper. The problem is that for many years this Yornup Hall Management Committee did nothing and rarely met.  It was simply a front for another committee of ordinary citizens with no legal authority or powers which called itself the Yornup Hall Committee.  The properly constituted committee simply allowed/s the private committee to have a free run of the hall and, incredibly, to lease the hall out to others for profit. What the committee did/does with this money was entirely its own business. It has its own bank account. None of the money raised from the hiring of the hall went/goes back to the Yornup Hall Management Committee (which has no bank account) or the Shire, yet the Shire continued/s to take responsibility for maintenance and upgrades to the hall.

 

What happened was a sneaky, unofficial “privatisation” of the hall to a few insiders, with the ratepayers still picking up the bills.

 

 All of my protests were dismissed by the CEO and several attempts  I made to redress the situation by moving to abolish the Yornup Hall Management Committee were rejected by a majority of councillors. My efforts to bring proper governance to the situation were deeply resented by the members of the Yornup Hall Committee, including Deputy Shire President Tony Pratico.  These people will tell you I am a wicked person with no redeeming qualities.

 

 Last year, I wrote to the Department of Local Government and suggested that the arrangements regarding the hall were in breach of Section 3.58 of the Local Government Act.

 

 This week I received a letter from the Department which vindicated my stand.

 

 “The Department… has identified that the Shire may have failed to comply with its requirements in relation to delegations to committees under the Local Government Act,” it said. 

 

“It is the Department’s view that a number of functions delegated to the Management Committee are being undertaken by the Yornup Hall Committee.”

 

 The letter thanked me for bringing my concerns to their attention and promised they would raise the matter with the CEO.

 

I trust they will get a better hearing than I did.