Two great hoaxes …

Huon Valley Guessing Games: Two great hoaxes Huon Valley Council has perpetrated on ratepayers and other valley residents have been the establishment of “township committees” and its “Consultation and Communication Strategy”.

That these are little more than euphemistic gestures to open and fair local government was, yet again, starkly evident at council’s May 16 meeting.

In a single vote, Mayor Robert Armstrong and three of his political cohort simultaneously trashed the ostensible raison d’etre for the township committees (which Armstrong, when it suits his purpose, asserts are reflectors of the community view) and exposed council’s consultation strategy for the highfalutin verbiage that it is.

They did this by passing, 4-3, a motion from Cr Mike Wilson for a Level 3 consultation on the proposed car park/bus terminal behind the Town Hall. Wilson’s motion replaced a staff report recommendation that council approve the Cygnet Township Committee’s unanimous recommendation for a top-priority consultation (Level 5) for what the committee clearly regards as a development of great significance. No one I have spoken to in Cygnet is able to recall a development of such significance in the township since the turn of the century. One of the arguments Wilson and his backers offered for a lower level of consultation was that Level 5 would delay the scheme. Given the complexities facing council over this development, this is a spurious argument.

(For the record, Armstrong and Wilson were supported by Deputy Mayor Gary Doyle and Cr Tony Duggan. Those who voted against were Crs Bruce Heron, Liz Smith and Rosalie Woodruff. The vote might have been different had Crs Rohan Gudden and Peter Pepper not been absent. While Gudden is a member of the mayor’s political grouping, he occasionally displays an encouraging independence of thought and action; and Pepper, apart from forestry issues, is very much a sharp-as-a-tack independent — he might even be the one councillor who could toss the mayor at the next election, though to do so he would need to forge an unholy alliance with the Greens’ Smith and Woodruff to stack up enough preferences to give himself a chance. Of course, another possibility is that Armstrong will not stand for mayor next year.)

It was no surprise that the motion for a reduced level of consultation came from Wilson. He often displays exasperation when public consultation is the topic. At successive council meetings this year he has argued that council had “consulted and consulted and consulted and consulted” over the decision to demolish the quaint Loongana Park toilet block and replace it with an edifice that, on paper, looks like something out of a World War II concentration camp.

I followed closely the Loongana Park toilet debate — another project of great significance to Cygnet in that it will vastly change the ambience of the streetscape — and was able to detect nothing more than the flimsiest of attempts by council to discover what the people want.

That council brushed aside a petition with signatures of more than 500 valley residents (plus those of more than 200 valley visitors) who wanted the existing toilet block renovated is a measure of its lack of regard for those it is supposed to represent. Council ignored the petition apart from judging it to be invalid because signatories had failed to properly record their details and thus were not identifiable on the electoral roll.

This was yet another amazing display of contempt by a council that presides over a community with one of the highest semi-literacy rates in the state. So, as things stand, council is going to squander $250,000 on a new public toilet when it could renovate the perfectly sound existing one for about $100,000.

Like Wilson, I too feel exasperation — exasperation that such lack of caring (and profligacy) by an insensitive council goes so unmentioned in our so-called valley media that I feel compelled to at least record its behaviour for posterity in the archives of Tasmanian Times.

Council’s two hoaxes are inextricably entwined: ostensibly, both the township committee system and the consultation strategy were developed to do what the strategy’s name suggests — to communicate and connect with community.

The reality is that, when it suits Mayor Armstrong and his councillor allies, they sing the praises of each; and when it doesn’t, the supposed public-spiritedness professed in both the township committee and strategy protocols goes out the window.

Cygnet has been particularly badly hit by this two-faced approach. In recent years, council has at times ridden roughshod over or chosen not to divine the views of people in and around the township.

Among issues badly handled by council: the fate of an iconic eucalypt at the southern entrance to the township (the mayor has never publicly condemned the action of the mystery ring-barker who ensured the tree’s demise at a time when a popular petition to save it was circulating); the abovementioned retention/replacement debate over toilet facilities at Loongana Park; establishment of a medical centre (construction has just started after an inadequate level of public consultation); development of a pocket park on Mary Street at the bottom of a subdivision that will long scar the township’s southern approach (the park is a project that will significantly change the streetscape but, again, no serious grass-roots consultation is being undertaken); bus stops (without consultation, even with public transport users, they have been shifted hither and yon in recent years); and, now, the proposed car park/bus terminal (a project that involves a fraught web of infrastructural, environmental, design, access and title implications).

And an odd note: it seems Kingborough Council is the owner of the narrow laneway between the Town Hall and the next-door butcher shop. How on earth did that come to pass!

A couple of other points about the car park/bus terminal project: one owner of a title that will be involved in the project claims to have had no official communication from council; and the project seems to ignore the current Cygnet Township Plan (a sadly emasculated version of a visionary plan that council refused to endorse in 2004 on grounds of cost).

My betting is that, if council’s plan for the area behind the shops on the eastern side of Mary Street should ever to come to fruition, it will not be for at least two or three years.

The CTC’s scheduled May 29 meeting, mysteriously postponed without explanation at the last minute, will now be held this coming Tuesday (June 5). Committee member Pat Synge has indicated he intends to move that council be asked to reconsider its May 16 decision to reject Level 5 consultation.

It is intriguing to ponder whether the CTC, usually ready to go along with the way the mayor thinks, will hold its nerve and back the Synge motion. It’s certainly showing a lot more spirit and imagination since the mayor gave up his position as chairman a few months back. If it does, it will be even more intriguing to ponder whether Armstrong and his councillor allies will be receptive to the message that such a CTC decision would imply: that councillors are elected to be responsive to the people. The only reasonable way they can be seen to be so is for them to connect with the community via a sincere process of consultation.

MEANWHILE, southwest across the Huon River, Dover Township Committee (DTC) members got so grumpy about council staff at their March 22 ordinary meeting that council ordered a “special meeting” of the committee on April 12.

The April 12 DTC meeting, significantly, was attended by council heavies General Manager Glenn Doyle, Mayor Armstrong and Cr Wilson who, at the May 16 council meeting, added to the intrigue by successfully moving that item 6.3 of the minutes of the March 22 Dover insurrection was worthy of closed-council consideration that very night.

We probably will never know what went on in that closed council session, but the minutes of both Dover meetings make fascinating reading. Surely some of the characteristically docile township committees are not beginning to try to buck the system! Stay tuned.

AND, UP-RIVER at Franklin, another fascinating study of the way council keeps a grip on community thought and action is under way. When the TC rules were rewritten last year (and the word “development” disappeared from the committees’ titles), the implication, as I remember it, was that, when a vacancy on a committee occurred, the next in line of volunteers who had missed out on initial selection to a committee was likely to be invited to fill it.

Early this year, Franklin’s Bob Frost happened to be next in line, and, it seems without fuss, he was allowed to take his seat at the committee table. When another vacancy came up at Franklin recently, the next name on the standby list was that of Shane Johnson, a man well known in Franklin as an imaginative, enterprising, plain-speaking and tireless worker for the community. But this time there was to be no automatic membership of the FTC for the next in line. Johnson’s face, it seems, has no fit with our control-freaky council.

So, what does it do? At its April meeting, it shifts the goalposts and votes in a new policy: advertisements will now call for volunteers to fill committee vacancies.

Johnson tells me he has responded to the advertisement for the Franklin vacancy by yet again volunteering his services. I don’t think he is exactly bubbling with optimism that he will get the nod. But one never knows!