Too little, too far away

Huon Valley Guessing Games Mayor Robert Armstrong is painting a bleak picture for those hoping for disabled-access improvements in the valley.

Deep Bay disability-access campaigner Marianne Bekkema got a letter last month from Armstrong telling her that anyone who can’t climb stairs will probably have to wait until the third decade of this 21st century to be able to use a lift up to the Cygnet Town Hall Supper Room.

The mayor’s July 24 letter was in response to Bekkema’s questions at council’s July 18 meeting about access to the upper floors of the Cygnet and Huonville town halls.

Armstrong’s letter is more evidence of the contempt council holds for the wishes of a large portion of the Cygnet community. It is a contempt reflected in the deft brushing aside by council of two hugely supported petitions raised in Cygnet in the past two years.

And, if debate at a recent council meeting is to be taken seriously, now even the five annual “town forums” — ostensibly held to gauge public opinion yet tightly stage-managed to short-circuit controversial issues — are under fire from certain councillors.

(Possibly a reflection of council’s desire to keep the lid on controversy — and its transparently obvious behind-the-scenes meddling in township committee happenings — one member of a township committee a few weeks ago suggested that it was important that controversial issues not be raised at township forums. Was this because council’s powers-that-be are afraid of controversy at public meetings? Controversial issues, the township committee member indicated, should be directed to council headquarters. You don’t imagine that would be to allow council to engineer spoiling tactics to nip popular public dissent in the bud, would it?)

At a recent meeting, councillors opined that expenditure of about $1700 (the total cost in 2011) to stage all five forums was too much to waste on engaging with the community. This from councillors who backed the spending of a quarter-of-a-million dollars on a new toilet block that Cygnet didn’t need. The old one, with refurbishment, would have continued to do its job just fine — and we would have still had those lovely murals painted in the early 1990s by students of the local Catholic and state primary schools.

Bekkema, after questioning council about the cost of, and construction time for, the lift installed last year at the Huonville council chambers, then drew attention to the need for disability access to the Supper Room at Cygnet.

The mayor’s July 24 letter to Bekkema reads, in part: “ . . . total cost of the [Huon Town Hall lift] was $81,348 (excluding GST) . . . Council is aware of the difficulties in accessing the Supper room at the Cygnet Town Hall and to that end has allocated funds for that purpose in its 10-Year New Asset Program.”

That is as near as good news his letter gets. Now the bad: “Funds of $100,000 have been earmarked in the 2021/22 Financial Year [my emphasis], which will enable the installation of a lift in the Cygnet Town Hall.”

Now slightly better news: “. . . it is possible that this funding allocation is brought forward at some stage”.

The mayor’s letter waffles on about an “Access Advisory Committee to assist with the development of an Access Strategy . . . [that] will identify projects and programs needed to improve access across the entire valley”.

There is no doubt, Armstrong assures Bekkema, that “the Cygnet Town Hall, Palais Theatre and the Geeveston Forest and Heritage Centre will all be identified as key projects”. Considering the price of the new lift at council’s Huonville HQ last year, it will be lucky if $100,000 in the 2020s will be enough to build even one new lift anywhere in the valley.

Then comes a laughably ironic line in the letter from the mayor who presided over the catastrophic loss of $4 million of ratepayers’ money — equivalent to about two-thirds of council’s annual rate take at the time the loss came to light in late 2008. (That lost $4 million — the result of reckless investment in high-risk funds — plus the interest it would have accrued through cautious investing, would have paid for all the valley’s disability-access needs in the years since.)

“As you know,” the mayor writes, “the council has a modest budget and a wide range of projects to be progressed. The prioritisation and scheduling of these projects is difficult.”

This from a council that brushed aside more than 700 signatures appealing for Cygnet’s Loongana Park public toilet block to be refurbished (at council’s own estimate of about $110,000) and doggedly pressed on with its plans for a new block at more than twice refurbishment cost.

Council has now demolished the Loongana toilet block and is in the process of building a concentration camp-style toilet block (ironically branded “historical”) at a cost that almost certainly will not be less than $250,000. Council has already admitted that, even before the demolition of the old block began, it had already spent about $35,000 on simply planning for the replacement facility.

Even if allowance were made for an underestimation of the $110,000 refurbishment costing, if council had responded positively to the huge community petition for the retention of the old toilet block, there would have been a spare $100,000 in council’s current budget — an amount that would have comfortably paid for a lift to the Supper Room. — Bob Hawkins

Note: I’m sorry to hear of the passing of Huon Valley’s deputy mayor, Gary Doyle. He was a longtime representative of the people of the Dover district and always a calm voice in council debate. Whenever he was acting mayor, or in the chair when council was acting as a planning authority, he always conducted himself in a fair and impartial manner.

The job of deputy mayor is likely to be offered to the man Gary Doyle took the job from in last October’s election, Bruce Heron, who almost certainly would have received an adequate share of the Doyle preferences. However, should Heron choose to turn down the job, next in line would be Rosalie Woodruff, the other deputy-mayoral candidate last October.