The Examiner's Joe Colbrook and Aaron Smith discuss local government news from north-east Tasmania for May 2025.
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00:00Hello and welcome to the fifth edition of the examiner's council chat. I am regional reporter
00:05Aaron Smith and this right next to me is Joe Colbrook, City of Launceston reporter. How you
00:10been mate? I've been fantastic. How have you been, given you've been off most of the month?
00:14Not too bad. I mean, there's a couple of days where I was acting up in a different role and
00:18also a few more days clinging to the sides of various mountains, but no, glad to be back.
00:23We should jump straight into it because it is a pretty packed month as far as council news goes.
00:27We've got a pretty major bit of news from the West Tamar Council. They've recently come back to the
00:33state government after they were seeking feedback for the second Tamar River Bridge in April this year
00:39and they have asked them to rule out one of the five proposed alignments for the new bridge. It's
00:46the purple route up on your screen now and that would run between Newnham and North Riverside,
00:51but the local government's concerned that it's going to go basically directly through the Windsor
00:56community precinct. Obviously their council chambers, major sporting and recreation facility
01:01and would be a pretty large cost on them. There's three other routes that run between Riverside and
01:09Invermay instead. The issue here is that the northernmost of the three looks to be pretty
01:15majorly affecting the Riverside golf club. It may also require some demolition of housing around the
01:20area and that leaves the last route as the council's preference, which also bridges Riverside and Newnham.
01:27It kind of curves up, hits a more northern point of the West Tamar Highway and as a result doesn't
01:34really affect any infrastructure. The only downsides to it is that it would affect the local kind of
01:41landslip area and require a bit of land conversion and does sit a little bit close to the Tamar Island
01:46wetlands, which is obviously a wildlife sanctuary. A bit sensitive, wouldn't do well with cars passing
01:52it and that sort of thing, more than there are already. The main point that the council wanted to
01:56make is actually mentioned in the state government's own business case, which in the report, and I quote
02:02here, says, while there are benefits of a new river Tamar crossing, the economic analysis shows that at
02:08this stage, the costs outweigh the readily available monetized benefits. So the council's essentially come back
02:13to them and gone, you know, your own report says it's not a financially viable solution and instead
02:21wants the money put into its own sewerage and stormwater network, which is quite a major priority
02:25for the council. We went to Minister for Infrastructure Kerry Vincent, who essentially just thanked the
02:31council for their response and said that they were not going to fund any kind of stormwater works.
02:36It's not really a state government proposal. Right, right. And speaking of paying off,
02:41we've got some more Albert Hall news for you. The grand reopening of that hall is approaching soon.
02:47The council reckons the work will be done by October and hot on the heels of that is the start
02:54of the renovations to the Princess Theatre and Earl Arts Centre. That's a $30 million project. We've
03:00already got $12.7 million in federal funding, which is quite handy. But part of the issue there is
03:08while the theatre is being renovated, Theatre North, who basically manage the Princess Theatre
03:13and Earl Arts Centre, will move operations into the Albert Hall. And under their new agreement with
03:21the council, the council has agreed to pay up to $100,000 per quarter over the next two years.
03:28And this is just straight compensation. It's basically because the Albert Hall, while the council is
03:36optimistic, it will be used as a function centre and that sort of thing. It can only really host about
03:42half of the usual run of theatre shows in Launceston. So you kind of understand why they've done this.
03:50I mean, Launceston does have a reputation as a bit of a performing arts powerhouse, you know,
03:55with a theatre city. And I generally are on the side of public money should be spent for the benefit
04:02of the public, doing things like subsidising the arts and that sort of thing. But on the face of it,
04:08up to $800,000 is a lot of money to be spending on this project, which has already cost quite a bit
04:14more than was anticipated. Also on the finances and where the council is spending your ratepayers money,
04:22it's the, well, May was the last proper month before the Launceston council passes its budget
04:26for the next financial year. And it's a bit of a mixed bag, really, in terms of financial report.
04:33There have been some savings. As of the end of April, the deficit the council was running was about
04:41$1.2 million, which is $400,000 less than the deficit that they'd budgeted. But there's been
04:50a bit of commentary from council officers and the like that it's unlikely that this savings in the
04:57budget could be brought forward, say, into next year's budget and offset some of the 6.7% rates
05:03increase. I mean, part of that is because the council is quite desperate to spend some of the money that
05:10hasn't actually been unspent. There's $1.7 million at last count in unspent wages because the council's
05:17just had difficulties filling some of these roles. And their head finance guy, Nathan Williams, said
05:24things were, this is a direct quote, certainly heading in the right direction, given that staff
05:30turnover rate was the lowest since COVID, but it's still not great from a service delivery standpoint,
05:36you know, making sure that the council can meet the needs and wants of the community.
05:41And when it comes to major developments, we've seen significant news up in Georgetown over the last
05:47month. They are promising to break ground on their aquatic health and wellbeing centre as soon as
05:52possible after an appeal against the project was dismissed by a tribunal. This has been a long
05:57running issue for the council, dating back to when they first received federal government funding,
06:02where due to delays, they had to kind of, I guess, reassess what they were going to promise and what
06:07they're going to deliver on. Under the original proposal, the centre was going to include an outdoor
06:12pool. And then after their funding came in, I think inflation caused costs to rise, everything else,
06:19they decided to drop that part of the proposal for the time being, you know, deliver an indoor centre
06:24while they can, and then build that outdoor pool later. Issue is that starting in last year,
06:30the community found out that the new centre was going to be built on top of the existing pool,
06:34you know, demolishing the current centre, leaving the community without a pool for at least 12
06:39months, but more likely a bit longer than that. It's been an ongoing issue throughout council
06:44meetings this year. It's gotten quite heated on numerous occasions and several community members
06:50lodged an appeal against the project back in March through TASCAT, which delayed the council's
06:56plans by about another month. Ultimately, this was dropped after senior TASCAT member Samuel Thompson
07:04dismissed four of the appeal's seven grounds for being frivolous, misconceived and lacking in substance.
07:09God hasn't minced words there. I mean, that's legal speak for, please don't waste my time.
07:15He was kind enough to give them time to find more specific evidence ahead of the May 23 hearing date,
07:22which has now passed, and they have since abandoned their case, allowing the council to begin the next
07:27phase of the project. So under their current plan, they're going to deliver the indoor centre.
07:32Then once that's done, enter stage two, which is going to be a children's splash pad and play area,
07:37and then we'll go on to stage three, which is going to be the outdoor pool. But critically,
07:41as the mayor will tell you, both stage two and three aren't funded and there's no timeline set for
07:47them. So is it going to be in two years? Is it going to be in five? We don't know at this stage.
07:51I'm guessing they're hamstrung by clauses in the fund original funding agreement, right? They've
07:55got to get something done. Yeah, that's the concern. They want to use the funding while they
08:00have it, rather than waste too much time and lose it altogether. Especially for a council the size of
08:04Georgetown, where that's a significant amount of funding coming in. And finishing off when it comes
08:09to regional councils for the month, we've had an independent review into the Northern Midlands
08:13Council that's just been released. It found overwhelming evidence of the breakdown in relationships
08:18between councillors and what I found quite pressing, a sense of dread amongst many of the staff.
08:25This follows on from ongoing tensions with the council since the last election in 2022.
08:30We've seen many code of conduct complaints, allegations of bullying and harassment. The
08:36mayor and the general manager attempted to sue one of the councillors over defamation,
08:41essentially over emails. He sent them social media posts he made. That was unsuccessful,
08:46because they used council monies to do it. And this all led to, in June last year, they liaised with
08:53the acting director of local government to assign an independent advisor to review the council's
08:57processes. This involves some pretty municipal boring stuff, but also this ongoing tension. And
09:06the report found that it was undoubtedly affecting the operations of council, staff morale and wellbeing.
09:12So when it comes to councillors, we saw issues of unequal treatment being raised. But the senior staff
09:19interviews I found even more dire in that council employees cited continual personal attacks from
09:25certain councillors as a leading factor in their quote, sense of dread, with someone feeling almost scared to open emails.
09:31And I'll leave this on the last point here, which is that while the Northern Midlands staff turnover rate is below average,
09:38compared to other Tasmanian councils, we have seen a significant increase in recent years.
09:42So we had 8% as of 2021, 11.5 in 22, 20.8 in 23, and that rose all the way to 25% last year.
09:52Gosh, that's quite substantial really. It's tripled. Among many other things, the main recommendation of the report
10:00was to develop a respectful relationships policy and a comprehensive work health and safety framework,
10:06as well as encouraging councillors and the mayor to basically do some mediation processes to try
10:12and hash things out and operate better as a local government.
10:15Anyway, to round out the Launceston news from me, it might be a little bit premature for them to say,
10:22I told you so. But I think some councillors are probably feeling, maybe not smug, but
10:31standing by their opposition to a change to the Launceston council's meeting schedule,
10:36which they passed late last year. For those people who aren't paying attention to the council diary,
10:42quite like I am, that was a decision to cut the meeting schedule from once every fortnight to once
10:49every three weeks, which has essentially reduced the number of meetings by one third. However,
10:55if you compare this, like from January to May this year to January to May in 2024, not only has the
11:05average meeting length increased, which is to be expected if you're having fewer meetings, you know,
11:10each individual meeting will take longer. But the overall amount of time that councillors are spending
11:16in meetings has blown out from just over 22 hours to about 30 hours. So quite significant,
11:25and obviously you can't compare all agendas, like not all agendas are created equal and that sort of
11:31thing. But it has also meant that meetings are frequently run longer than 5pm, which has caused
11:37problems for not only the council having to pay staff overtime after that 5pm mark, but also is causing
11:44some issues with councillor attendance in these critical decisions which are towards the end of
11:50the meeting. So people have to leave to go to work or pick up their kids and that sort of thing. So it
11:56has had some implications, I guess, on a functionality point of view. The upshot is though that for, say,
12:04the council staff, they do have more time to prepare for meetings and that sort of thing. If they've got
12:10fewer meetings to actually prepare for, they can spend a bit more time giving more comprehensive
12:14reports and that sort of thing. But also it's a bit, is that efficiency worth this other efficiency?
12:22But we're also seeing meetings starting at 10.30am going forward. And I know Tim Walker, for instance,
12:31is very in favour of that, but he would also really like to see the return to the fortnightly schedule.
12:38And I know some of the councillors are a bit indifferent. They'll take whatever schedule
12:42it is, just as long as it's not monthly. You'd expect not having to prepare for as
12:46many meetings would reduce the amount of time spent in them as a whole, but maybe things will
12:51level out as they get more used to this new procedure. Yeah. Yeah. And as I said,
12:54it's probably a bit too early for people to say, I told you so, given it hasn't had the full year,
12:59but it's an interesting development for sure. Well, that's all the time we have for today. We will
13:03see you next month for the sixth edition of the Examiner's Council Chats. See you then.