Is near enough really good enough?

David O’Byrne: Keen to “ensure that the best options for the township of Cygnet are being delivered”

Huon Valley Guessing Games

When valid arguments lie thin on the ground, bullshit becomes a last-resort defence when confronted with clear-thinking and good sense. Great droppings of it will be served up tonight (Wednesday March 20) when councillors consider a staff report on a petition requesting that council’s proposed car park be “consistent with the council-approved Revised Cygnet Township Plan 2010”.

Huon Valley Guessing Games When valid arguments lie thin on the ground, bullshit becomes a last-resort defence when confronted with clear-thinking and good sense. Great droppings of it will be served up tonight (Wednesday March 20) when councillors consider a staff report on a petition requesting that council’s proposed car park be “consistent with the council-approved Revised Cygnet Township Plan 2010”.

The staff recommendation — despite apparent entreaties to the Huon Valley Council to do the right thing from departmental staff of Infrastructure Minister David O’Byrne — is for council to charge ever onward with its ill-conceived, poorly planned and barely consulted car park project behind Cygnet Town Hall. And it’s hard to imagine any member of Mayor Robert Armstrong’s controlling bloc of six disagreeing with the recommendation.

The petition was received by council at its February meeting, thus requiring a staff report within a month. The main recommendation before council tonight reads (my comments in square brackets):

b) No action be taken on the petition . . . lodged with council 18 February as:

— The council has made its decision in relation to the car park design following extensive consideration. [That’s possibly true: consideration but not consultation.]

— The design has been subject to a consultation process. [Only true to the extent that council denied the highest priority consultation process (Level 5) requested of it by the council-appointed Cygnet Township Committee. The council’s approved Level 3 consultative process amounted to virtually no consultation at all.]

— A planning permit has been issued for the council approved design. [That fact is yet another measure of council contempt for the people its job is to serve.]

— Progressing with a new concept plan will incur further cost for the council, potentially to provide uncertainty through a planning approvals process and threatening (sic) the viability of the project and providing (sic) the Cygnet Car Park for the benefit of Cygnet. [That last is the supreme piece of bullshit in a staff report that waffles on about “the issue for consideration is whether the changes may be considered to cause an increasing detriment to any person”.]

So unthought-through was council’s first lash at a car park plan that it included a bus terminal, council having failed to realise that there was no way such a design could get either the approval of planning authorities or of the public (business commuters, public transport-reliant pensioners, and parents of children who would have to use a bus stop tucked away behind the Town Hall); or of how difficult it would be for buses to access the terminal via a tight access at the southern end of the township’s main thoroughfare (Mary Street).

Council, the folly of its ways having been pointed out to it, reacted surprisingly swiftly by canning the bus-terminal bit of its plan. But press on it did with a car park design that has become a symbol of the mayor’s team’s contempt for the township plan.

It is a contempt exemplified by Cr Mike Wilson’s successful motion last year to deny the people of Cygnet a chance to air their views via a top-level consultation process.

Further contempt was evident early this year in council’s rejection — on a technicality — of the first “car park” petition, which also requested council to modify its plan so that the project would be in harmony with the township plan.

Another example of council contempt is that stakeholders directly involved in the car park project have not been properly consulted. (Council insists that they have, but now, many months after the project was first mooted, there are stakeholders who still say they still have had no sensible communication with council.) And then there are the compulsory land acquisitions council is believed to be attempting to accommodate the new car park. No one seems to know what stage they are at.

What is evident is that council is in one hell of a hurry to push the project through. Contracts have been called even though it is not yet clear whether council will have legal authority to go on to the private land that is affected.

In the 2011-12 financial year, Mayor Armstrong insisted that the largely State Government-financed project had to be completed, or at least under way, by June 30 last year (2012). If it wasn’t, the government would take it back. That proved not to be a factual assertion. The state money was still there to be used after the end of FY 2011-12.

The mayor, in the second half of last year, again warned that the money had to be spent by June 30, 2013 — or the government would take it away. So far there has been no indication from the Labor State Government that it would withdraw the money should the project not be advanced by June 30. Why on earth would a government in such deep poo with the electorate want to offend even more voters than it has already? I think the mayor was crying wolf — again.

Interestingly, the staff report’s rejection of the petition makes no mention anywhere that funding for the project would be in jeopardy if the project is not well advanced by June 30 next — which leaves one wondering whether council already knows that the funding will not be withdrawn.

More to the point is an issue referred to in a March 12 letter from Minister O’Byrne to a Cygnet elector concerned about council’s behaviour over the car park project. In it, he indicates that the money his government is to provide ($300,000) is in response to a council “need for the car parking facility as part of the development of the Cygnet Township Plan 2010”.

The letter states: “As part of their responsibility for implementing the project, the council indicated that the project had been discussed with key stakeholders, including the community . . . and that strong support was provided.” Someone’s been pulling the wool over the minister’s eyes.

Most interestingly, O’Byrne says: “I am not in a position to advise them [council] to change the project scope. Having said that, officers of [O’Byrne’s department] have been in contact with the council and made them aware of the concerns being raised suggesting that they review the issues and ensure that the best options for the township of Cygnet are being delivered in line with the original intent of funding provided.”

This suggests O’Byrne (who holds the seat of Franklin, which includes Cygnet) expects council to act in harmony with the spirit in which the state money was provided.

Note that O’Byrne’s letter is dated March 12, only eight days before this evening’s meeting. In light of the staff recommendation, there’s little reason to hope that councillors will take any note of the minister’s request that “they review the issues and ensure that the best options . . . are delivered . . .”

What council will consider this evening is a full-steam-ahead recommendation that involves not even a tiny change in the plan approved earlier this year. All the signs are that it will be yet another occasion when council will demonstrate that it really doesn’t give a bugger what the people think.

As an indication of the determination of certain members of the community to press council to act responsibly, one of the directly involved stakeholders privately commissioned Inspiring Place (designer of the Cygnet Township Plan) to come up with an alternative car park plan that would be consistent with the township plan.

Inspiring Place responded with a design that fits harmoniously with the township plan. And, as bonuses for Cygnet, it provides substantially more parking spaces than council’s plan; it takes into consideration water run-off (which council’s plan doesn’t); it pays attention to aesthetic aspects of the project (which council’s plan doesn’t); it is not littered with raised concrete over-engineering (which council’s plan is); and, perhaps best of all in these straitened times, it would cost less to implement than council’s plan.

But none of this is likely to wash with a council whose record is of a “near enough is good enough” philosophy. And what a huge loss of face council would suffer should it admit that someone else had come up with a better plan!

Other supporters of a properly considered car park (and no one in Cygnet denies the need for one, including this writer) have been rallying to raise money to cover the costs of the commissioning of the Inspiring Place design. (It is hoped the person who commissioned it will soon be recompensed.)

At a recent parliamentary hearing, the profligate Huon Valley Council was bleating, via its mayor, about how much it would lose if the forests agreement goes through. Armstrong said council stood to lose about $100,000 a year in rates, and that it was looking for cuts in NRM (Natural Resource Management) and youth services in the event a $100,000 spending cut had to be made in the council budget.

Armstrong and his budgeteers, instead, ought to be looking at halving council’s costs (more than $200,000 a year) for the road sweeper that tackles only gutters, and then — as one elector said at the Cygnet township forum last November — just blows the dirt somewhere else rather than picking it up.

They might also be thinking about the $70,000-plus council is in the process of spending on more playground equipment for Cygnet’s Burtons Reserve. Already there is more than adequate (mostly under-utilised) play equipment for children in the reserve.

Armstrong also might look back on the quarter-of-a-million dollars his council splurged last year on a replacement Cygnet toilet block (a hideous, over-powering structure that now mars the Mary Street landscape) when $100,000 or so would have revitalised the now-demolished structure that fitted well into the park-scape and featured the artwork of early 1990s primary school children.

The Huon Valley clearly isn’t the only local government area with a less-than-sensitive council; and a council that doesn’t seem to know how to match the spirit of State Government giving with appropriate local government spending.

Up in the northeast, Joy Yulumara of Binalong Bay took the Break O’Day Council to task in a letter to the Mercury (March 16). She wrote: “How can the Labor State Government justify funding the Break O’Day Council the sum of $130,000 to disfigure the beautiful rock foreshore of the northern point of Boat Harbour Point, Binalong Bay, with an aluminium/steel viewing platform and associated infrastructure?

“Over 100 local ratepayers and 170 visitors signed petitions against this outrageous and unnecessary structure. Further to this, council recently paid consultants a large sum to implement a foreshore plan. The consultants put an alternative site to a community meeting which met with approval.”

Yulumara summed up: “There is a strong case for government to withdraw this funding unless it’s used in line with community wishes and government coastal management policy.”

Doesn’t sound too much different from what is happening down here in Cygnet, where council, once again, is on the nose. A lot of people in Cygnet have long been aware that council is frequently contemptuous of local ideas; and that it has a tendency to shoot from the hip rather than take measured aim.

A Cygnet fence-sitter on matters political observed to me recently that he had detected that the mayor’s men were becoming worried that their vice-like grip on control of affairs in the Huon Valley was loosening; and he said their increasingly contemptuous attitude towards public opinion was a symptom of this fear. I think he is wrong — but I wish he were right. — Bob Hawkins

(This article, written in a hurry after downloading council’s meeting papers, is in a way a tribute to Bruce Pidler of the Old Bank, Cygnet, the access to which will be affected by the car park project. Bruce, an indefatigable researcher, was determined that the car park project would be “done right”. If it wasn’t, he told a friend, he would “take council all the way to the High Court”. On another occasion, he said council would get its way on the car park project “over my dead body”. Bruce died of a heart attack, at 55, in December. All those who want Cygnet to retain its charm yet still keep up with the times and maintain its efficiency lost a great warrior in the cause for the betterment of the town with the passing of Bruce Pidler.)