Where time stands still

Huon Valley Guessing Games: In our lovely valley — like lots of things — time seems to stand still. In Main Street, Huonville, time has been standing stock-still for many moons on the large, round, two-faced clock on Huon Valley Council’s headquarters.

In daylight, on the south face it’s always 11.05am

In dark, on the north face it’s always 3.52am

In dark, on the south face it’s always 11.05pm

So eager is council to let passers-by know that it has found a way to put a stop to time, each day on dark it lights up its timepiece to ensure a 24/7 experience of time suspended.

Travelling south after dark, you’re told its 3.52am; travelling north, that it’s 11.05pm. (For daylight readings, swap the ‘p’ and ‘a’.) A one-faced stopped clock is only correct twice a day, so council is to be congratulated on doubling its productivity by getting the time right four times a day.

Timing also isn’t a Huon Valley Council strong point. It’s not that it doesn’t try; it’s just that the timing council demands — and often dictatorially imposes — is too often at variance with timing that would better suit community needs and aspirations.

Take, for example, Cygnet’s over-sized, drab, hugely expensive new Loongana Park public toilet. Council ended up comfortably meeting its own construction deadline — but for the people of Cygnet, much more sensible council behaviour would have allowed for a decent period for serious public consultation and more careful consideration of the aesthetic aspects of a building that is likely to still dominate the streetscape half-a-century hence.

Worse, Cygnet’s unsightly new plastic-composite monster will need nearly 250,000 visits before the cost to ratepayers for each free pee or poo enjoyed by the public will fall below $1 a visit. Like the Twelfth of Never, that’s a long, long time. (No allowance for maintenance costs has been made in this calculation.)

Timing in Cygnet has also been a problem for a work in progress just south along Mary Street behind the Town Hall. There, since April, a council contractor (to the discomfort of nearby traders) has been hammering away building a $500,000 second Cygnet car park. This, like the toilet block, has questionable design aspects.

The impatience of Mayor Robert Armstrong and Deputy Mayor Mike Wilson over the past year or so has been palpable. They simply couldn’t get on with the car-park project fast enough, and neither was willing to tolerate community interference in their plans. One might even have thought there was a council agenda that no one else was privy to.

The problem certainly wasn’t the availability of the $300,000 the State Government had promised towards the project: both Deputy Premier Bryan Green and Infrastructure Minister David O’Byrne made it clear the money would not disappear just because it was the end of a financial year — as the mayor incorrectly asserted before the end of FY2011-12, and again this financial year.

Since first conceived, the car-park project has been littered with more red herrings and questionable council utterances than this writer has time to enumerate. But he does remember how a serious public consultation process was undermined.

Despite a recommendation last year from the now formally defunct Cygnet Township Committee for a priority Level 5 public consultation on the project (Cygnet’s most significant this century), Deputy Mayor Wilson — who once assured me of his passionate commitment to the welfare of our lovely valley (which I share with him) — successfully moved to short-circuit the consultation process by reducing it to a meaningless Level 3 (which virtually excludes community participation).

Council did make one small concession to public pressure after its car-park vision was published last year by heeding strong objections — mainly from public-transport users, especially parents of students — against putting a bus shelter in the proposed car park. (Dark alleys and bus manoeuvrability ranked highly among the objections, but some still cynically think it was more likely that council was told its design incorporating a bus shelter in the car park would not meet planning standards.) Whatever the reason, council dropped the bus shelter from its drawings.

But now — as the bulldozers, graders, concrete trucks and other construction equipment thunder on towards completion — talk about town has it that a bus shelter in the car park may yet come to pass. Ambiguous notes about bus shelters in the minutes approved at the Cygnet TDC’s final formal meeting on June 18 do nothing to dilute such talk.

Should the talk prove true, the mind boggles at the thought of buses safely and smoothly navigating the less-than-six-metres-wide, two-way access road opening onto Mary Street just south of Cygnet’s small supermarket. Unless, of course, council decides to fiddle further with its approved master plan and make access and egress a one-way operation! If that should prove the case, the mind boggles even more at the thought of how a one-way system could be made to work, presumably by using the narrow laneway between the Old Bank and the new shops to the north of the butchery.

More to the point — if rumour proves fact — is that such changes would represent yet another display of council contempt for those who care about what Cygnet looks like and how it functions. One trader not impressed by council’s car-park design, spent hundreds of dollars commissioning an alternative design from Inspiring Place, the group that masterminded Cygnet’s council-approved 2010 Township Development Plan.

Inspiring Place’s offering provided for many more parking spaces while being consistent with the current Cygnet Township Development Plan (which council’s car-park plan is not).

One councillor questioned whether Inspiring Place was expert in car-park design. One might well riposte, is Huon Valley Council expert in car-park design? What we’re getting suggests otherwise.

At the June 18 Cygnet TDC meeting, council’s acting general manager, Simone Watson — who said the car-park project was still on track for a June 30 completion — acknowledged that the road opening onto Mary Street was a “bit tight”.

The list of Cygnet “developments” by council that have ruffled the feathers of those who think about and care for the appearance and functionality of their township is lengthy. A sampling:

• Drivers and pedestrians already have to put up with a poorly designed and over-engineered car park (in front of the Catholic Church buildings), a space that could have been used so much better to enhance the ambience of, and provide a civic focal point for, the heart of Cygnet.

• The aforementioned public toilet block opposite the IGA Supermarket. It would have looked much better in Risdon Prison, suggested a conservative letter-writer to the local Classifieds. Not surprisingly, council never organised an official opening for this contentious monument to poor planning and design.

• At the southern end of the village, the ill-considered seating and tables in the new pocket park below the still raw scar on the escarpment now known as the “Mary Street Subdivision” (but for two very ordinary brick-veneers, still barren three years after the project was started). The odd arrangement of the oiled-celery top benches and tables, as a Cygnet TDC member said, make the pocket park no place for a picnic.

• The inappropriate, too short, mop-top street trees along Mary Street that for years have struggled to survive vandal attack and suffocation because of inadequate sub-strate soils and root space.

• The treacherously slippery-when-wet/frosty footpath pavers along a stretch of Mary Street. After numerous complaints down the years, council eventually put up small signs here and there to warn pedestrians of their peril.

• Over at Burtons Reserve, council is in the process of splurging another $70,000 on playground equipment alongside the already under-used array of play equipment; while in the north-west corner of the park is a recent and puzzling get-fit installation that no one knows how to use (or wants to) because no instructions are to hand.

• And so on . . .

BACK TO THAT NEW CAR PARK: An amazing sequence of events occurred in less than 48 hours between Wednesday April 17 and April 19 this year. Sometime between 7.23 and 7.56pm on Wednesday April 17, council, in closed session, dealt with agenda item “21.017/13 Tender for the Construction of the Cygnet Car Park — TN042”. One would imagine that the winning tenderer for a council project would not be formally advised of its success until office hours next day, Thursday April 18. Then, one would imagine, a legal contract would have to be drawn up for signing. Things must have moved very quickly. On the following day, Friday April 19, work started on the car park with the demolition of an old brick shed in the paddock behind the Town Hall. As I say, it’s all quite amazing just how quickly and efficiently contractors engaged by the Huon Valley Council can get out of the blocks once a job is landed.

Whether there was more than one tenderer, council did not say in a subsequent media release announcing the contract winner. It is reasonable for unsuccessful tenderers’ names to remain confidential, but it would hardly be a breach of confidence for council to acknowledge how many companies had applied to get the job. It was, of course, good news that a local contractor got it.

NOTE ON EDITORIAL BALANCE: The Queen’s Birthday Honours list 2013 contains well-deserved OAMs (Order of Australia Medals) for two Huon Valley identities — Maureen Oates, editor of the Huon Valley News and pillar of the community; and Alan Duggan, patriarch of the Cradoc Duggans and former local government councillor. In the June 12 issue of HVN, Oates gets more than 600 square centimetres of coverage over three pages (including a 168-square centimetre photograph); Duggan gets 120 square centimetres (including an 80-square centimetre photograph).

QUOTE OF THE MONTH: Mayor Robert Armstrong, in a Huon Valley Council media release, on his visit to Glen Huon Primary School’s hydroponic garden — “It’s fantastic for children to be able to learn about how to grow things through being out in the garden and then to see how things grow and how it gets from the ground to the canteen.”

THAT IDLE CLOCK: It’s been a long time between council meetings. The last was on May 15, the next is on Wednesday, June 26, when the general rate will be set. Before its next meeting, perhaps council — in the interests of not continuing to mislead the public and of saving a few more dollars — will set those idle hands at 12-o’clock high (north and south), and stop lighting them up at night. — Bob Hawkins

Main Pic: In daylight on the north face it’s always 3.52pm