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| Junction Court- Photo by Graham French from the Power Fm website |
At the CBD Action meeting - the property owners wanted Council to suspend its current planned capital works - like the upgrade of the Nowra Pool, Basketball stadium and the Ulladulla Civic Centre and to re prioritise the projects important to the CBD group.
The Action group also inferred that it was Councils responsibility to implement the graffiti program although I did submit to them a paper giving suggestions for a way forward. Seems that perhaps the CBD ratepayers are not willing to help themselves-I hope not as it was positive to hear that some private sites had been identified for murals. Council has a role to play and perhaps submitting a funding submission to the Attorney Generals anti graffiti program is part of that commitment.
Thankfully Clr Gemma Tribe was able to guide this bunch to a much more palatable motion than the original version that was offered up- moved by Paul Dean and seconded by Lance Sewell.
What I find most irritating about these types of meetings is the following.
This small minority of ratepayers are considered by the neo-liberals to be of far greater importance than the majority of ratepayers in the Shoalhaven. They seem completely oblivious to the fact that council should be working for the 'greatest good' and that if Council does so that the flow on will benefit their own long term viability. The sycophantic approach to this group of rate payers by some is galling to watch as they completely ignore broad ranging community consultation on the other hand.
The most recent meeting was help Monday 3 December- Clr John Wells was appointed chair and Councillors Gash, Tribe, Wells, Findley and Guile attended.
Community members of CBD Action are mostly from the Nowra CBD ratepayers group and in attendance were Stephen Nall, Paul Dean, David Goodman, Peter Price, Lee Carmichael, Lance Sewell, Scott Baxter and Mark Crowther- there are a few other members who were unable to attend.
The CBD ratepayers have a few major issues which they seem to think rank far higher than the issues of the rest of the city. They are concerned that there rates are too high, they want increased all day parking by way of a multi million multi storey car park. The want additional services to the CBD including cleaning and refreshed street scaping and of course the never ending need for all to remove graffiti.
Prior to the election the CBD ratepayers invited mayoral candidates to give their position on the above items and because I had the hide to disagree with their position they booed and laughed at me, but that didn't stop me from telling them what they didn't want to hear.
Council is doing its bit and keeping its properties graffiti free - but it has trouble compelling private property holders to do the same.
I don't believe that the CBD ratepayers should be getting a rate cut that will eventually affect the residential ratepayers of the city. The increased rates that they pay goes mostly towards advertising the business that occupy the CBD properties, campaigns to increase tourist visitation and increased services in the CBD-that includes frequent cleaning of toilets and high quality finishes to the main street footpaths and projects like junction court. All of these additional services make the CBD a more desirable place to rent at high end cost.
1 comment:
This comes as no surprise at all - in fact it makes me quite furious.
Council failed in its first attempt to set the group up so that it was representative of the community - News Flash - forget your stakeholders (or handpick who you want) and might as well forget the "action". I mean where are community members that are not CBD Ratepayers, etc? Where are the shoppers? Where are the disabled? Where are the teenagers? We need a variety of people to come up with innovative solutions and to be part of the solution - it doesn't all revolve around the long term financial plan.
Then to make matters worse, the new Council, merged two groups into the one group and seemingly threw in a bit of this and that in the scope = SCARY - and who's deciding the "action" for Nowra and its surrounds? - people that originally were there for the one singular item of car parking? That's not representative of the community.
Council was quick to call for a Report into Savings of amalgamations of Committee's, but where's the costs, from getting the makeup of this group wrong in that it does not represent a good cross section of the community? That's right, noone seems to look at that.
If Council, or perhaps Team Gash, are so intent on operating on a "Team" approach, perhaps they should "pull their finger out", and construct a "can do" team made up of a real mix of community members; until that date it will definitely be the "tail that wags the dog".
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