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.

 

Interesting survey results

The Council has been given the results of a recent Community Engagement Survey, so it will be interesting to see if they pay any attention to the expressed wishes of the people they represent.

On a satisfaction rating of  1 to 10 the Council scored barely a pass mark at 5.9.  When you consider council employees and their friends and family would have been highly motivated to fill out a survey form, this is an ordinary result.

When respondants were asked the question: What is your greatest wish for the Shire, one of the strong responses was "Improve Shire processes". Hear, hear! Another was "Maintain heritage buildings..." Zinneckars House springs to mind.

A Wishing Tree exercise yielded Number 1 wish as "Getting Trucks off the main street'', so lets see if the by-pass comes back onto the agenda anytime soon.

Asked to rate and rank a list of 44 possible spending and planning initiatives put forward by Council staff, respondents ranked improvements to the Shire offices as 42nd, but its too late for that message to get through, because they have already budgeted to spend around $200,000 making themselves more comfortable this year.

Re-activation of planning for that heavy-haulage deviation around town was ranked 6th most important.

Asked to rate their satisfaction with 44 different Council Services, respondents put public toilets, parks and the visitor centre at the top, with town roads down at 15th and rural road maintenance at 22nd.

Issues which residents thought important, but with which they were highly dissatisfied were Council's long-term planning, financial management and community engagement.  A wake-up call if ever there was one!

Egos set to explode at library launch

As completion of the Council's new $4 million 'state-of-the-art' library in Steere St draws near, I prepare to cringe at the spectacle of President Brian Moore, CEO Tim Clynch and other 'prominent' councillors puffing and preening at what will no doubt be a gala opening.

For Mr Moore - who has given no direction or leadership to the Shire in five years as President, just endless pious platitudes about volunteers - it will be something to hang his hat on. "I built that library," he will tell his admirers.

The truth is he and fellow councillors did nothing more than nod their heads and agree with every single suggestion spoon-fed to them by Mr Clynch, accepting without question the  "need" for a new library which is six or seven times the size of the current one.

 At one point, while I was a councillor, I managed to convince them to put a limit on its size (and cost) at four times the existing library space (surely enough to do the job, I argued), but this resolution was later revoked on the CEO's advice. An adequate library appropriate to the size of our community was not going to be spectacular enough to satisfy the need for an attention-grabbing monument.

When the new library is unveiled, it might make us all swell with civic pride and will no doubt provide a valuable community resource.

But ask yourselves why the rates keep going up every year, well in excess of the rate of inflation, while $2 million of ratepayers funds is spent on this vanity project.  And don't forget an extra hundred thousand a year will have to be spent on running and maintaining it.

 

Tough job, but someone has to do it...

Councillors and senior staff should be thanking the so-called 'noisy minority' of Bridgetown for giving them an issue (Zinnecker's House) to deal with.

Otherwise, they would have trouble justifying their existence.

October's Council meeting ran for a full half-hour, including questions from the public and dealt mainly with renaming some roads and a meaningless submission on the State's new draft forest management plan.  They simply dismissed a petition signed by hundreds of local  residents, which urged them to retain Zinnecker's, without even discussing it.

If you consider the councillors are paid roughly $350 for each meeting they attend, that is a good hourly rate! And you can't tell me there is a lot of preparation involved in simply accepting all but one of the officer recommendations without debate.

After half an hour of raising their hands to vote in unison, the councillors (and staff) must have been famished. Just as well there was a lavish ratepayer-funded meal and alcoholic drinks awaiting them when it was finally over.