Councillor reveals “secret” SRV talks

By Tim Howard Clarence Valley

councillors and staff workshopped a special rates variation at a “secret meeting” at the end of 2023 a councillor has revealed.

Cr Bill Day said council staff called a “secret” council workshop on November 9 last year to float the idea of an “environmental levy” to fund community concerns about environmental issues.

But Cr Day believed the matter was clearly a way for the council to raise money as it was contemplated large scale borrowings for projects including the Regional Aquatic Centre and the Treelands Drive Community Centre.

Mayor Peter Johnstone has downplayed concerns about Cr Day’s issues, saying workshops were a regular feature of life in the council and nothing came of the matter raised.

“Workshops can be called by councillors, but this was called by staff,” Cr Day said. “It was called by staff to discuss a rate variation in time for an application to be made to IPART to approve before the budget discussions for this coming financial year.

“It would have required a council meeting in January if were to have happened.”

Cr Day said the subject of the meeting had been kept quiet because it would have caused outrage in the community.

“I didn’t even know what the subject was when I was on my way to the workshop,” he said.

“It was called a hot topic and we hold hot topics quite regularly and I went along and was quite amazed when it was about a special rates variation.”

The timing of the meeting also caused Cr Day and some other councillors, consternation.

“I usually don’t get angry. I usually manage to remain calm, but I was quite, let me say, quite upset.

“I spoke about how if the next council wanted to do anything as silly as this, they should take it on themselves.

“For a council approaching caretake mode to bring on something like this was not acceptable to me.”

Cr Day said the staff proposal clearly laid out how this SRV would be used to fund spending on environmental projects.

But Cr Day said it was quite easy to draw a link to the funding issues arising from borrowing for the projects.

“On the surface they laid out quite a case put forward by council staff for environmental matters, but obviously council’s capacity to do things without a levy are impacted by borrowings.”

Cr Day said the proposed SRV was also an indication the council would need to get used to functioning without the high level of grant funding that came after from the period of fires, flood and Cover.

“As we have found with the aquatic centre, grants are drying up very quickly,” he said.

Cr Day said he decided to raise the SRV proposal because the people were beginning to come forward as candidates for the next council election in

September.

He noted that in previous elections some council candidates made political capital pre-election promising to not support an SRV only to change their minds when elected.

He linked this issue to his support for the rescission motion to reconsider a pay rise for the council general manager made at an extraordinary council meeting last Thursday,

“It’s called transparency,” he said. “I believe too much is done in secrecy by councils.”

He said ratepayers needed to ask questions of candidates prior to the election about their attitudes to an SRV and not to assume it was dead and buried.

The mayor said he recalled the meeting, but did not place the same significance on it.

“We discuss a lot of things at briefings and so on,” he said. “It was one of the things in the strategic plan that local people wanted more to done for the environment.

“One possible way of

Minister $315,008. The Deputy Premier of NSW was paid $350,329.

“In 2023 they (the State Government) put a freeze on all the salaries, but the NSW Deputy Premier is paid approximately what the general manager of the Clarence Valley Council is paid.”

Cr Day was also concerned the Mayoral Minute appeared to make the general manager responsible for success of the entire council operation.

“It would be quite bizarre if a council employing nearly 500 staff couldn’t achieve anything,” Cr Day said.

“And there are negatives as well as positives. The community deserves to be shown the full picture.” doing that would be to have some type of special rate variation or something like that to raise money that could be spent on the environment.

“The possibility was mentioned to councillors, but that was only one way of doing things and it wasn’t proceeded with.”

Cr Day and the mayor differed on their recollections of the tenor of the meeting..

“We had a bit of a discussion about the way these things would be funded, but certainly don’t remember anyone saying anything inappropriate,” he said.

The Mayor also agreed with Cr Day that it would have been inappropriate for an outgoing council to saddle a new council with an SRV.