Huon Valley Guessing Games About a year ago, Huon Valley Council (HVC) lapsed into a condition symptomatic of terminal decay. In the months since, staff have departed, services have been cut back or abandoned, forward planning seems to have lapsed, consultation and communication with the public has become a sadder joke than ever . . .
Glenn Doyle
It all started in September-October last with a senior-management implosion. Then-general manager Glenn Doyle and community services manager Marcia Waller both stood down as a result of Waller lodging charges that she had been bullied and harassed by Doyle. Simone Watson, infrastructure services manager, stood in as acting general manager, a job she is still doing.
On March 28 last, council announced that Doyle had chosen to resign despite having been “cleared of the allegations” by an “independent investigation” (it seems a lawyer was selected by council to examine the Waller complaint). In a council media release, Mayor Robert Armstrong said council had accepted the resignation “with disappointment”; and Doyle was reported to have said that he welcomed the internal inquiry’s findings, that he had “felt privileged to have served the council, and honoured to have worked with such a dedicated team of staff”. Nevertheless, he had decided to “explore other opportunities”. (Doyle now works for Hobart City Council.)
The acting general manager’s report to council’s August 21 ordinary meeting, simply lists Marcia Waller as a “departure”. There is no explanation as to when she left or whether she resigned (whereas, in the same report, the departures of Mike Norman, manager corporate services, and Mick Rodwell, engineer infrastructure services, are recorded as “retirements”). With no other information forthcoming, it can only be assumed that Waller resigned.
Both Doyle and Waller are understood to have been on full pay until their employment ended (as they should have been). I’m still searching council documents to get a rough idea of the cost to ratepayers of this senior management imbroglio — final payouts, salaries paid throughout their stand-down periods, hiring of legal services for the “independent investigation” of Waller’s charges, and a variety of other costs — but I’m fairly certain I’m wasting my time. A notional estimate of at least half a million is probably on the conservative side.
Why, it might be asked, would council privately hire a lawyer to look into a council dispute that was already being handled by Workplace Standards (WS)? And whatever happened to that WS investigation? Has it been allowed to lapse simply because the plaintiff and defendant are no longer in council employ?
These are matters into which the public rarely gets an insight. Sure, most of the fine detail should remain confidential, but the beginnings and terminations of such actions should be publicly available. After all, these are servants of the public we are talking about. It behoves Mayor Armstrong to at least try to explain why council has taken such an extraordinarily long time to sort out this management mess. One has to hope that an announcement of a new substantive GM is imminent.
Since council’s assurance in a May 1 media release that it “regards the recruitment of a general manager as a critical process and will ensure that an effective, fair and transparent process is undertaken”, there has been no further communication that I am aware of between council and the public as to the progress of the GM selection process.
The voters of the Huon Valley will be reassured to know, however, that, once again, an “external adviser has been appointed to assist the committee”. In the selection of Glenn Doyle in 2009, at least the name of the external adviser was known — former Hobart city Council general manager Brent Armstrong. This time the identity of the external adviser seems not to have been made public. So much, yet again, for “transparency”!
At what stage the GM selection process is at remains a mystery. Is it down to a long list? A short list? Has a decision been made? Who would know? Who would even expect to know given HVC’s proven track record as a highly secretive organisation?
Council has not indicated how many applications were received for the selection process. (I seem to remember talk of a starting list of candidates between 20 and 30 for the job Doyle got in 2009.) Given council’s history and reputation, and events of the past year, I can only imagine brave, naive, or irrepressibly ambitious people would throw their caps in the ring — which is a pity, because this is a council that desperately needs an injection of quality outside talent.
Quite reasonably, candidates (except for the winner) would expect not to be identified. From within council, one would imagine applications, if any, from only Watson and Matthew Grimsey (described as “executive manager regulatory & development services” in the council-officer list on the seats in the public gallery at council’s August meeting).
Since Watson stepped in as acting general manager, day-to-day running of council appears to have ticked along fairly routinely: roadside edges have been trimmed, potholes have been filled, bridges have been repaired or replaced, general maintenance of council property and fixtures has been attended to . . . you know, all the things councils are supposed to do.
And, it appears, most or all conventional management responsibilities have been met: the annual and financial reports have been produced; a budget has been cobbled together; the usual half-baked minutes of committee meetings have been compiled; the usual jumble of data for this and that has been assembled; full-colour jargonised tourism and business-development documents (with pie-in-the-sky wishes and projections) have been produced; building and development applications have been processed . . .
After that lot, there simply has to be a BUT somewhere! And the “but” is? That Huon Valley Council — which in the three years of Glenn Doyle’s management had been slapped into fairly good shape, brought up to date and been given a vitality no one I’ve spoken to can remember since its formation in 1993 — has been performing like a dead man walking, the emaciation ever more evident as Mayor Armstrong and his men have slashed hither and yon in what they insist was necessary pruning to keep the budget in balance.
When the budget papers were presented, the mayor was able to crow that the rate rise had been contained to a reasonable level. What council hasn’t been crowing about is its consequently shrunken role as a servant of the community. But it’s foolish of me to ponder the loss of services that are vital to the environmental sustainability of the valley, or which are of assistance to less-privileged or handicapped members of the community.
A symptom of the malaise of council is its website. It’s not easy to navigate and it is desperately in need of a thorough editing and updating.
For example, township advisory committees (and, I believe, township forums) were rendered extinct by the Armstrong bloc of six on June 30 (it has to be admitted, the committees were fairly useless, anyway, considering the constraints imposed on their duties), but when, on September 3, I had a look under “your council” and clicked on “committees”, there they all were — the Cygnet, Dover, Franklin, Geeveston and Huonville committees — each with their responsibilities spelt out.
And when I put “Marcia Waller” into the search box at http://www.huonvalley.tas.gov.au/page.aspx?u=782, I was told I could contact “Manager Community Services Marcia Waller” on (03) 6264 0300, or via her email address!
It’s not unreasonable that Watson has done no more than hold a steady course through the chaos of the past year. That’s what acting managers are supposed to do. What will now be interesting will be whether a new GM can impose her/his authority and get council moving again.
Will the new manager be ready to go along with the makeshift, stopgap tactics of Mayor Armstrong and his Futures Team (or whatever they are calling themselves these days), or, as Doyle did, impose a firm management grip and face up to the social, economic and environmental challenges that council’s controlling members either cannot see or refuse to confront?
Local government in the Huon Valley has made tremendous strides backwards in the past year. Natural-resource management funds and activities have been cut. Youth services have had a big chunk taken out of their budget. Community services, as a department, no longer exists. And council’s five senior managers — Watson, Mark Stanton (corporate services), Matthew Grimsey, Sue McCarter (acting manager, infrastructure services), and Jacquie Brooksbank (family services) — are carrying huge workloads in a council that has largely left unfilled holes created by staff departures.
Out in the community, the biggest project council has undertaken this year — construction of a car park that is not compatible with the Cygnet Township Development Plan — remains incomplete, even though Watson, as acting GM, confidently predicted in June, at the final meeting of the local township committee, that it would be completed on schedule by June 30.
That car park is still not officially ready for use (although some sneaky motorists are using it by slipping in through a back entrance), and township talk is rife of not-yet-sorted property-title realignments; entrances/exits being too tight (especially for buses); a mystery water main causing a problem for one small-business person . . .
There’s even talk that TasWater — the authority formed this year after the brief, three-region, council-owned water-authorities’ experiment proved a financial and/or bureaucratic disaster — is suing one of its owners. You’ve guessed it: it’s Huon Valley Council, for granting a development application without considering the implications of the presence of the water main. (Did council even know it was there?) Perhaps TasWater and HVC will be willing to put the public into the picture as to whether there is any substance to this street talk — and, if so, what it is all about.
Funny you know, when I was a kid, being able to “see through” someone had a completely different connotation to the buzzword “transparency” that came into vogue a decade or so back. What the public were conned into thinking in the last quarter of the 20th century, and early this, was that both government and business, through legislative and regulatory manipulation, would allow them to see more clearly into their workings.
A few concerned voices at the time — as they still are — were pestering for greater “transparency” (in the sense of more honesty) and for access to information they believed the public had a right to. Naturally, while the new “freedom of information (FoI)” rules were being written, the spinmeisters were putting out a barrage of assurances that, in fact, that was indeed happening. But, in truth, through all those years, exactly the opposite was happening: the windows into government and business machinations were being made ever more opaque. What we actually have now, in every state and territory, are “freedom from information” laws and big business everywhere hiding behind “privacy” charters. Don’t be conned by talk of the benefits of the “information highway”. Never has so much information been so unavailable.
The level of secretiveness and corruption in Tasmania is, by and large, small fry in comparison with what happens on the mainland. Let’s face it, Tassie just doesn’t have the dosh for its shenanigans to be that big a deal. What is unique about Tasmania, however, is the arrogancy with which the powerful stare down those who protest at the injustices and irregularities that are transparently bleeding obvious.
Authority simply doesn’t seem to care that we, the great unwashed, have no trust in the integrity of the powers that be. And we, the people — because of our apathy, and because of the dogged resistance of those that run the show to submit to the public confessional — know that very little is likely to change.
Is there corruption? Like beauty, that’s in the mind of the beholder. Suspicion? Plenty. Evidence? Little that can be substantiated. But every now and then an amazing coincidence or manoeuvre occurs that feeds the spawning of, probably usually fanciful, conspiracy scenarios — for example, the manner in which an influential figure who has been caught profiting hugely from insider trading is dealt with.
Secretiveness? Of that there’s evidence aplenty — which is why I’ve been playing ‘Huon Valley Guessing Games’ for Tasmanian Times these past few years; and which brings me back to my own beautiful valley’s council.
Sadly, so few in the community seem to give a damn about how badly served they are by their council. Mostly, they seem to take it for granted. Some even admit that they don’t want to complain because they have an application for something or other with council (or may be lodging one soon). And they don’t mind admitting that they are frightened of prejudicing their chances of approval. Surely such fears are irrational!
So great is valley-wide apathy about the raison d’etre of local government that almost no one turns up to watch their elected representatives plod unimaginatively through each month’s ordinary council meeting. (The mayor’s eyes still roll — is it with frustration or boredom? — when either of the Greens councillors makes what are usually constructive observations.) And the few voters that do attend, almost always take their leave once the item of interest to them has been dealt with.
There’s no doubt in this writer’s mind that the politically apathetic throng that makes up most of the Huon Valley community has the council it deserves. If the tide that has long been allowed to run against sustainable and productive policy and action is to be reversed, council desperately needs vigorous and imaginative management leadership — as well as a new array of faces around the council table.
Among the few who show concern about council’s ineptitude, one told me: “Any new GM is very quickly going to find out that they will have little if any capacity to ‘lead’, as Doyle did . . . the management now in place leaves no room for contribution other than, at best, defence. This means that the structure will only look inwards, and the status quo, as seen and supported by the mayor, will be maintained — until he is replaced, that is.”
Whoever takes over as general manager faces a huge challenge. Glenn Doyle in his brief tenure showed signs of getting the ball of progress rolling. In the past 12 months, that impetus has been lost. Armstrong and his men are now in full control. It is to be hoped that, whoever is the new GM, that person will provide the imagination, and assert the authority, needed to get this dinosaur of a council moving again. — Bob Hawkins
Bob Hawkins is Tasmania’s best local government reporter: HERE are his reports on the Huon Valley … and its governance (or lack of it …)
