City of Melville - Local Politics 101: Listen to ratepayers

Letter to City of Melville Councillors from the Hon. George Gear

Councillors,

Another ratepayer initiated meeting was held on the 26 April and there are more resolutions for you to consider when the council meets on the 15 May 2018.

The one thing we can guarantee is that the Chief Executive Officer and his administration (CEO) will recommend that you merely ‘note’ the Elector’s meeting resolutions and do nothing more with them. 

That is in the CEO’s interests, but it is not in yours or the residents and ratepayers interest.

Let me tell you why.

A starting point in this is to step back and understand why the City of Melville is under an Authorised Inquiry with the Department of Local Government investigating why there are so many complaints against the Council and the City’s administration.

Unlike Federal and State politicians, local government councillors are part time, many with full time jobs.

The level of support given to full time State and Federal politicians includes a research capability from the parliamentary library, three full time staff members, access to advisors in Minister’s offices, as well as briefings from government departments. 

Local councillors by contrast have to rely almost exclusively on the executive branch of the city to undertake the information gathering role for them.   This places an extra responsibility on the CEO to get it right.

The City’s Bowls Strategy Report, instigated by the CEO is, in my view, a classic case of where the CEO have not only failed to supply accurate and comprehensive information on which to make a decision, which involves spending millions of dollars of ratepayers’ money, they have actively or carelessly done the opposite.

Let me prove it to you.

You know by now that the City’s lawn Bowls Strategy Report based all of its conclusions only on a small segment of the lawn bowling activities,  pennant bowls which is in decline all around Australia and comprises only 22.7% of all the bowling activity at the Melville Bowling Club. 

The Bowls Strategy Report also highlighted colocation even though, with fully paid for facilities this is not an issue. This was just padding in a very light weight report.

Here are some other important factors which weren’t considered but should have been.

1. All other forms of bowls, where there is real growth were not considered. The truth is that at the Melville Bowling Club membership is growing as are the number of games being played.
2. The social and community roles that the bowling club plays in the Melville community. Over a 1,000 people a month attend local functions at the club. It is where the community goes when it has a celebration such as a birthday or anniversary or on a loved one passing. This has been going on for about 60 years. It’s where the memories of thousands of locals are and this is important to them.
3. Councillors weren’t told that the Melville Bowling Club is fully financially sustainable from its own activities. It pays all its bills on time and has $320,000 in the bank. You were told the exact opposite. You were told it was unsustainable based on a pennant bowls, number of greens ratio which has nothing to do with the real world.
4. The traffic implications of shifting the Melville Bowling Club was not even considered. Canning Highway adjacent to the Melville Bowling Club is the 4thbusiest road in WA. Moving the traffic from the western end of Tompkins Park to the eastern end will make local traffic on Dunkley Avenue a nightmare with congestion and exacerbate the already difficult entry on to Canning Highway.
5. The financial impact on the existing tenants of Tompkins Park the Palmyra Rugby Club and the Melville Cricket Club were not even considered. The simple fact is that this whole exercise has been undertaken without having all of the stakeholders together in the one location at the one time. This is just appalling governance.

All of these factors should have been included in the briefing notes when you, the Council, as the Elected representatives of the people, made the decisions to shift the Melville and Mt Pleasant bowling clubs.

You may have read an article by the Minister for Sport the Hon. Mick Murray in the West Australian recently where he told of the Bowls Club in Bayswater which was actually unsustainable. With the support of the city it has reinvented itself and broadened its activities and is now fully sustainable. In Melville, the local bowling club is fully sustainable and you are going to bulldoze it. How lucky are the bowlers in Bayswater to have a group of councillors who want to build their community rather than destroying it?

So, what the executive have planned and had passed by you is the destruction of a very important community asset to replace it with the proposed Wave Park. To do this we are going to lease out enough priceless riverside open space to fit 2 Optus stadiums on it. 

Where are the values of this Council? Where does the community fit in? 

The “carrot”, if you can call it that is the rent that the Wave Park, chosen once again by the CEO, will pay the council $700,000 per annum for up to 50 years. If you believe that you would also believe in the tooth fairy. The simple truth is that with the fierce local opposition and being a very high-risk investment it may never get built.

The CEO however are not worried about this because their recommendation means that even if the Wave Park is not built the relocation, paid for by ratepayers, will go ahead anyway.

So, this where we are headed.

The Melville and the Mt Pleasant bowling clubs are shoehorned in to the smaller function centre at the rear of the Tompkins park complex at a cost to ratepayers of $ 9.4 million, inclusive of  a grant of $ 0.7 million from the WA taxpayers. The Melville Bowling Club is bulldozed and is a barren landscape with all the debris the demolition leaves behind and there is no $700,000 income to offset the ratepayers’ money that has been spent.

Now you have to think that’s bad but it gets a whole lot worse.

You see the City of Melville has told the Palmyra Rugby Club and the Melville Cricket Club that they will be no worse as a result of the bowling clubs moving in to the function centre.

What the Sporting Club executives didn’t know, and neither did I until the morning of the public meeting on the 26thof April at 10 am, was that their existing Tompkins Park function centre is the lifeblood of both clubs; it earns them $600,000 a year.

Now the City has to make this up which means ratepayers who have already paid to shift a fully sustainable bowling club on incomplete and biased information now have to increase their rates by $600,000 a year to replace the money the clubs were earning in the room where the fully sustainable bowling club has been moved.

This cannot be allowed to happen. It is a financial catastrophe. We are in this mess for two reasons.

The first is that the CEO has not done its job properly. It has based its whole business case on the shrinking component of the small segment of the pennant bowling activity to make its case to shift the bowling clubs. They didn’t take a holistic view; I have outlined the areas they missed.  Crucially they missed the ticking financial bomb in the functions room and the promises they made to not disadvantage the sporting clubs.

The second reason is that a number of Councillors always vote to accept the recommendations of the CEO.    This ‘cabal’ bloc voting has been going on for a long time. It’s time the bloc voting Councillors understood that by their actions they are shifting the decision-making process from the elected Councillors to the non- elected CEO.  It really is the tail wagging the dog.

Councillors, you now have a chance to shift control back from the CEO to Council,  where it actually belongs.

The 26th April 2017 Special meeting of Electors passed a number of resolutions.  One of them is to stop all spending on moving the bowling clubs until the Department of Local Government’s Authorised Inquiry into the City of Melville is fully resolved;    a prudent move which, on the recommendation of the CEO, has already been rejected by your all once.  

My recommendation to you is to do the job you were elected to do and listen to the residents and ratepayers.

There is an old saying in politics: that just when you are sick of talking about an issue, the public are just starting to listen.  I am sick of talking about this issue.  My hope is that you are just starting to listen to what I, and hundreds of other residents and ratepayers, have been saying for more than 2 years. 

When the CEO recommends that you “Note” the motions passed by the Electors at the 26 April meeting, as they likely will, simply don’t accept it.   Councillors, let’s not forget that the CEO is actually an employee of Council and should be doing what you tell him, not the other way around.

Let’s hear a debate where the residents and ratepayers voice is heard.  

Be like Bayswater.  Help community groups to grow rather than destroy important community centres.   You’ll feel better about yourselves and the community will thank you.

But don’t stop there.  There is also a motion passed by ratepayers to rescind the motion to shift the Melville and Mt Pleasant bowling clubs.

This so called “do nothing” option, that the CEO criticised in the briefing notes for the October 2016 Council meeting where the decision to shift the bowling clubs, was made was only made because the CEO lacked the imagination to think of something constructive.

Taking a leaf out of a progressive and inclusive Bayswater Council’s book the recommendation would have looked like this.

Have genuine discussions with local groups in the Melville and Mt Pleasant bowling club areas to see if we can broaden the activities at these bowling clubs.  Bayswater showed it can be done.  Melville can do it also.

Now this is a U turn on what has transpired but so what, Governments do it all the time.  The State Government recently backed off on proposals involving Perth Modern School and the School of the Air.   Just last week the Federal Government announced it had reversed its position on increasing the Medicare levy to fund the NDIS scheme.  On page 8 of today’s West the headline reads “Treasurer to backflip on pension cut.”

So, reversing your decision is not a big issue.   

What it takes is leadership and the person to do this is the Mayor. The question is does Mayor Russell Aubrey have it in him. This is not showing weakness it’s actually showing strength.

My recommendation to the Mayor is to do a mea culpa on the Tompkins Park issue. 

The residents and ratepayer’s opinion of the Mayor and Council generally will improve overnight, complaints will drop dramatically because you will be doing what the residents and ratepayers want and need.

After all isn’t that why you’re there?

Hon. George Gear, 2 May 2018

see the City of Melville Residents and Ratepayers Association (Inc.) on facebook at:    https://www.facebook.com/MelvilleResidentsRatepayersAssoc/

reprinted with permission from Hon. George Gear, with some minor edits.