SAVE OUR SERVICES WOLLONGONG Securing Our Future Exhibition of financial options and key planning strategies 11 December – 5 February 2014 Submission Save Our Services Wollongong firstly draws Council’s attention to the resolutions of the community rally held outside Council’s offices at 41 Burelli Street, Wollongong, on 9 December 2013. More than 100 members of the Wollongong community attended this rally and unanimously made the following resolutions - 1. This meeting urges Council to • Commission an independent external professional review of Council finances and assess the financial sustainability of WCC against various Australian measures of financial sustainability in local government; • Identify service levels and standards that best meet the needs and expectations of the community involving relevant stakeholders; • Strive to be a leading local government entity in achieving exceptional results and setting benchmarks in local government; • Produce an efficient and effective organisation that is outcome driven; • Maximise opportunities to increase revenue, including entrepreneurial activities: • Explore strategic partnerships, shared services and alliances with other councils, government bodies and private enterprise; • Explore a greater regional approach to service delivery, shared services and resources; • Identify ‘opportunities to engage with other levels of government’ to address unnecessary constraints, cost shifting, over-regulation, and a fairer distribution of funding; and • Provide ‘a foundation for continuous improvement beyond the timeframe of the Service Review’. 2. This meeting also requests Wollongong Council to hold a series of public meetings (one in each ward) to explain: • How Council got into this budget mess • What the implications are of the proposed recommendations in the citizen’s panel report • What items are being targeted in each ward, the cost savings of these items and how the affected items will function in the new structure And asks that the community be given a minimum of 28 days after these public meetings to respond to the information presented. These resolutions of the community have not, to date, been acted upon by Council. In particular, Council has not commissioned an independent professional review of its finances and identified service levels and standards that best meet the needs and expectations of the community, and Council has not held any public meetings to enable the community to hear and bring Council to account. Save Our Service Wollongong accordingly rejects all three options Council has presented in its “exhibition”. They are artificial, limited, constructs and the result of Council’s deeply flawed ‘Financial Sustainability Review’ and it’s so-called, now discredited, ‘Citizen’s Panel’. Council gave the community just two weeks to consider this Citizen’s Panel’s report (“Little information on service cuts and fee hikes but YOU’VE GOT TWO WEEKS”, Illawarra Mercury. 7 November 2013). Council then presented what it calls an exhibition at the beginning of the Christmas and New Year summer holiday period, and closes it barely a week after many people returned to work. The fact that Council has refused to engage more meaningfully with the community highlights our argument that Council has already predetermined the outcome of this process which Council’s General Manager and Lord Mayor initiated in May last year. Council has refused to scrutinise, or have scrutinised, it’s financial management, some would argue financial mismanagement, and the major expensive projects it has embarked upon after grossly underestimating their true financial cost. Why? Council questions the future viability of such modest facilities as, for example, Unanderra Library and our local playgrounds, parks, and community facilities, but does not question the viability and cost of more than $20 million on the Mall, when the community was told it would cost only $10 million, and now brazenly plans to spend millions more on the ‘Grand Pacific Walk’, again while hiding, wittingly or otherwise, the true cost from us. Council’s priorities seem to centre on Destination Wollongong and promoting the city as a tourist attraction, and not on providing services to the community. Why else are the future of community services and facilities being questioned while new more expensive projects are not? In this sense the debate needs to be reframed. Council presents it, we suggest deliberately, as a choice between services and an extra special rate rise or the saving of ratepayers’ money by cutting services, thereby presenting those services as the reason for a rise in the rates we pay. But where is the money going, and why? That is the question that Council has failed to answer and continues to steadfastly avoid. The community wants to see thorough and transparent reviews of Council’s entire business, project management and service levels, undertaken in conjunction with effected stakeholders by a thorough, open, comparative analysis and process. Council needs to change its priorities in 2014. It’s time it put the community first. And the community, with increasing impatience, expects its elected councillors, nearly all found severely wanting in this regard so far, to do that rather than, however blindingly we suspect, follow the corporate line Council has adopted to date.
Posted on: Tue, 04 Feb 2014 04:22:29 +0000
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