Health sport community customer and corporate services

The Health, Sport and Community Services committee got going on time today. They had a presentation that was based on Griffiths University's and their own review of the Logan Public Health Plan 2003–2008 (LPHP).

The development of the Logan Public Health Plan aims to set the framework for:

· Enhancing integrated and collaborative planning for improved ‘health’ in Logan;
· Implementing effective planning mechanisms, which identify and respond to local public health needs;
· Identifying how services can be better accessed by the community for their health needs; and
·Engaging the community in decision-making on health needs and services.

You can see the paper and the background documents at Item HC5 starting on page 12. The presenting officer was supported by Dr Davey from the university. They said that the evaluation was based on the documents from the inception of the plan to its end. There was a little boast about it except the fact that the city was awarded a WHO prize for its concept and delivery at a conference in Japan. Some of you may remember this linked post.

You may have seen some of the buzz-words for the program—EAT PLAY LIVE WELL LOGAN being the most recognisable. The presenter said that 76% of 92 actions were completed in the plan and 24% achieved significant progress. The only, but to me significant, criticism by them was that the wording of the objectives was vague.

When you put together the fact that the objectives of the plan were vague and that they are telling us that 76% were completed how can we believe that the easy and vague ones were not numbered in that percentage? Were the 24% that they are still trying to achieve, eighteen months later, the least vague objectives and they turned out to be too hard to complete?

We weren't told that because they, the officers and the university, want councillors to believe that the public health plan was a great success and should get funded by the council again in the 2010–2011 financial year with a commitment for the following four years too. Cr Power asked what we got the WHO awards for and was laughed at. Cr Grant pointed to wording on page 18 of the report that he thought should be fixed before next week's meeting.

I would not be ploughing a single cent into the project until it had a lot of work to fix it done. Certainly not a penny-piece of the $3 million they are looking for from various sources.

Item HC1 about the Energise Program was passed without pause. Item HC2 about the KRANK program attracted some questions. In response to one the officer said that KRANK was dreamed up by a group of young people brainstorming names that would be symbolic and ring other's bells. Cr Power wanted to publicise to the youth how much the council was caring for them; so that they would be more grateful, I expect. He then suggested that councillors might like to find a better name for the program!

Item HC3 to change the date for the Safe City Advisory Committee's next meeting to 19 May was rattled off. Item HC4 attracted a number of comments about the provision of a water sports facility. Some councillors had other ideas where the facility could be built. All of them were rather good suggestions and most were non-parochial. In the end the officers went off with a flea in their ears about looking around the city with an open mind.

There was a fairly long, carping, general business for the Sports Facilities Manager. Cr Power, ever the one to chuck in a handgrenade or two, lobbed in the cost of sports facilities to the parents of keen school-age children. He pointed to a $12 fee for a half-hour session of basketball when the lesser players might only be on the court for ten minutes maximum. I though of suggesting that they come to Brushwood Park here where there was a half-court that was free most of the time!

Some councillors have no idea how primitive the conditions are in the outer reaches of the city. It is going to have to change as the Flagstone and Yarrabilba towns get up and running. Most councillors will be facing rearrangement of their divisions in a big way too. It needs reminding some of them that they are going to have to campaign in areas of the city that they have denigrated for so long up till now.

One of the discussions was about the costs to the city of operating swimming pools. This came about, in part, by them being told how much contribution the council made towards the Greenbank School's pool that is used by the public. I'm sure that they are going to see that the support the Jimboomba and Greenbank school pools is cost-effective compared with building and maintaining council's own pools in those areas.

That meeting closed at 9.54 am and the Customer and Corporate Services committee got under way at 10.04. Items CC5, 2 and 1 were done with quickly. Item CC3, about a Volunteers' Day was discussed with some sincerity and councillors were want to support the officers determination to expand the number of volunteers to be thanked from 450 to at least 1500. The mayor, who had turned up to listen, hoped that councillors would volunteer themselves to help and keep down the number being paid to work that day. That suggestion was not wildly supported. And I did not hear, probably on purpose, the few grumbles from the table.

There was a discussion of the Mayor's Christmas Carols event last year and its success. The officers wanted to continue to hold it at Logan Brothers on the second Saturday from 2010 onward. Someone pointed out that that clashed with another event so it was decided, for this year, to hold the carols in Friday 17 December between 6 pm and 9.30 pm. You can see a summary of the funding at CC4 and it is expected to escalate each year. And that ended the meeting at 10.39 am.

I'm not able to get to Thursday's meeting, but you will be able to grab the agenda by 8.30 am.

The scale of the problems

The Waste Services manager's reports, Items EP5 and EP6 and the general business, were dealt with in the Environment, parks and Waste Management committee meeting in a few minutes. Both Power and Black were wanting to know where their reports were at. The answer for Power was: Next meeting round, and for Black: Still awaiting data. Cr Bradley asked where we were at with the waste collections tenders. These are the ones that might promise another bin and a higher fee. She was told that the officers were still working on the tendered documents, they had gone back to some tenderers to get more information and were making progress.

Then Item EP1 was thrown away in seconds. Item EP2, about sand mining, a report asked for eighteen months ago, was of some interest still. Cr Hackwood asked how some of the listed areas could affect the river catchments and he was told that the councillors had asked for a report about all sand mining areas. The officer said that it was not worth doing further work on the issue.

Item EP4, about the use of exotic animals for entertaining people, otherwise known as circuses, ended up being a non-issue when councillors were told that regulation of exotic animals was by the federal government. The councillors could resist the letters from concerned residents of the fair state of Queensland. In fact Black was keen to go further and stated, a number of times, that it was a left-wing nanny-state attack on our way of life, and we should see it as the thin end of the wedge towards preventing such as horse riding.

Ban was concerned to add that they were intent, next, on stopping the show society having horses, and so on.

Item EP3, a presentation on the Sate's Draft SEQ Koala Policy. Mr Ted Fensom had been waiting with me for this presentation and I think that both of us were disappointed with what we heard. The issue is that the state government's minions have put together a draft policy that will have to be actioned by the local governments of SE Queensland and their policies are unworkable. To this end Mr Jim McDonnell, the cognisant manager, is trying to get changes made to allow local governments to manage their resources in a cost-effective way.

Do read the report, from page 12 of the agenda linked above.

To a question about the mapping the manager said that their maps were about 82% accurate and that they expected the maps were good enough for 100% of the task to be performed—to a snort in my ear from my companion. The manager also said that felling certain types of trees in future would be a serious crime, no matter where the trees were in the SouthEast.

During general business Cr Ban asked for an update report on the Flinders-Greenbank-Karawatha corridor MoU.

The rest of the meeting was anti-climactic, councillors slowly left the meeting until only six were left holding the fort. Items were passed as they were recommended. The petition and report for ethnic markets at Waller Park was passed with the recommendation that they be allowed on the first and third Saturday of the month, except 7th August, from 6 March to 18 December 2010.

During Item EP7, with the Parks Manager, Cr Power was trying hard to get into an argument about the cost of replacement plants for those either stolen, worn or droughted to death. The issue was the astronomic cost of water for the livelihood of the plants. You can read the figure for yourself on page 180 in the agenda. Astronomic!

So endeth Monday.

This morning's Animals and City Standards meeting started without me—I had a pass for a doctor's appointment—and I entered the meeting room at 9.35 am when the first meeting was still under way! One of the two items dealt with was starred as a read and dash on. So the first item, about staffing resources, had taken most of the 65 minutes to deal with. I can only think that the councillors thought that the officers had got the situation as wrong as I think they have.

If they are going to properly do the animal control and management job, that is facing them, they are going to need another three staff more than predicted. I think that they're going to find that timber products were better than what they plan for animal stalls and there are other holes in the plans. The report starts on page 2 and runs to page 8. I'm sure that the animal managers amongst you will see what a mess is being made.

Item AS3 was about a new food-business scoring and inspection system. They deliberated and decided as recommended with Power recording his Nay vote. Who knows why?

The following general business took almost 30 minutes too. Cr Black started the rot by complaining about the way that councils, particularly Gold Coast City Council, were dealing with election signs. He was in full flight about the High Court's decisions and the LNP's needs for informing the electorates during elections.

There were complaints about the council's rough way of completing earthworks on a private property. The commonsense solution was determined to be to get the senior people and the landowner together with the councillor to work out a solution. At the cost of the ratepayer!

Then the same councillor was detailing a situation where a belligerent resident, living in a shed, was annoying the neighbours and making trouble that would only see himself being evicted. I'm afraid to say that I know of about a dozen disabled, elderly and debilitated men and women living in the semi-rural areas, here, much like the street-dwellers do in the city centre. It seems to me that the plight of just one person can bring such unwanted council attention that denigrates the lifestyle of all of the others, to the detriment of them all and the rest of us too.

My advice is to let such people alone.

The issue of Out of the Box's container-homes came up too. The DCEO said that his managers would give the development a once-over—whatever that means.

It seems that so far they are abiding by the GCCC approval. Black asked what would happen if a private certifier gives a certification that is found to be deficient later. It seems that the certifier might get some stick from his certification authority, but the certificate would not normally be voided.

Some interesting statistics and ideas

Before I start with the report of today's meetings I'll give you a couple of graphs taken from The Economist that are worth looking at to see where we, in Australia,stand relative to others in the world.

The first one is the cost of a common drug to purchasers—

The next is about comparative budget balances, country to country, against the year 2000 and this current year—

This morning we were entertained to an excellent presentation on road safety and a new program for the city by Mr Mark Kerle from Main Roads. He came with a fairly large delegation of six, but we were told that they were members of Logan's Safe City Advisory Committee. Mark is one of those few presenters who can rattle off what he wants to say at the same time as he is putting data on the screen that he doesn't need, to tell his story, but which supports what he is saying by other words and means.

His presentation was to introduce Councillors to the new Safe Roads4Logan project. The idea was put to council as a result of the Safe City Advisory meeting of 27 August last year and introduced and adopted by council at the City Roads Infrastructure meeting of 7 September 2009. I expect that most of you will not have saved the agenda for the latter, but my comments are here.

You won't be surprised to find that I missed the importance of the idea too!

This presentation for Item IN9 gave some councillors a surprise in that Mark was early-on showing how much some of the general ideas about road safety were wrong. In fact you can see one graph illustrating this on page 62 of the agenda that shows we were at a similar level of fatalities on the road in 1997 as we were back in 1960.

We were told that 72% of road fatalities were of male drivers, some 28% of females are killed travelling with a male driver. Mark said that we should be telling young women to threaten the male driver that she was going to puke in his car if he didn't slow down!

That was the sort of innovation we should be looking for.

He said that where Browns Plains Road joins with Chambers Flat Road at the roundabout and then went on to Kingston Road there were more people killed at the lights between the roundabout and Kingston Road than at the roundabout. The reason being that the relative speeds of the vehicles was higher at the lights because some vehicles were stopped.

Most roundabout accidents are between cars moving at similar speeds in much the same direction.

He pointed out that the accident rate in Logan (the old Logan, by the way) in the years 2003 to 2007 was a steady 5.2 per 100,000 vehicles. The State's target for 2011 is 5.6 per 100,000 so were were going Ok at the moment, maybe. But he thought that local government, and the community, should be more involved with road safety.

There were, between 2003 and 2007, 851 motorcyclists treated in Logan Hospital for injuries. He supplied costs for those treatments but I missed the details.

Cr Pidgeon said that his wife was so annoyed by motorcyclists driving along the road between lanes of cars waiting at the lights. Mark said, in reply, that there are no records of such actions causing accidents.

There is a need for people to look for the cheapest solutions. In the case of one street that was used for rat-running he had advised the residents to park their trailers, boats and other vehicles on the roadside making a chicane of the road. The rat-running stopped when there was a stationary queue of vehicles through the short-cut.

The practice of calling the police when a speedster went past your home was not a good use of police resources. But having a resident sat on the side of the road or on their block taking a record of registration numbers would be. He talked about the use of data by people. Often raw data could be interpreted by the local community much better than by the officials. At the moment he thought that data was not made available when it was collected or that it was referred to the wrong officials.

His action plan is to—

1.  Set in place the action plan for Safe Roads4Logan 

2.  Market the partnership 

3.  Develop the resources package 

Cr Lutton closed the presentation by saying that councillors will now be aware of where to not waste money on outdated road calming.

Item IN1 about a heavy construction equipment exhibition in Munich that was being promoted to councillors and staff in local government by Komatsu Australia. The background paper on page 4 is hard to read on the copy we download but it includes stops in Bangkok and India to look at their plants, with a reminder that Munich is a tourist attraction at the time of the expo. Grant and Power spoke strongly against anyone going. The Chair, Cr Hackwood, said that staff, the only ones going, needed the visit because they will see stuff that will be here in Oz in three years time and it could save the ratepayers a lot of money to be aware of new equipment and ideas that far ahead.

Crs Black and Pidgeon rattled on about the lack, still, of a proper travel policy—there are business-class and economy-class costs quoted at considerable discount from the rates you and I can get. In the end there were only three votes for the trip. Cr Hackwood warned the assembly that he would remember when they were looking for conference places for themselves later.

Item IN5, Teviot Downs Estate drainage, was cause of some yapping about the BSC's lack of foresight. There is particular concern about two properties on Red Gum Road. Cr Pidgeon said that the matter was best referred to a P&D meeting tomorrow, and it was.

In Item IN6, Capital Roadworks Drainage program, there is a list of the monies being spent by divisions. This is one of those background papers that detail the spending activities of our councillors. Division 11 experienced a $52 thousand hit.

The remaining Items were supported in their recommendations. In General Business there was a complaint that staff were not accepting constituents complaints and passing them around until the complainant was left on hold. Another councillor was upset that Brisbane City Council's emergency phones were unanswered over the weekend when people had emergencies.

In the first case the recommendation was to call through Customer Service where a proper record of the phone call is made, and the referred-department is held responsible. In the second case the SES, on 132 500, should be the first emergency number to call.

There were a couple of other questions, but the chairman broke in and said that the questions were of a nature that councillors should be making them through the email system, immediately, and not bringing them to committee GB where city-wide problems are the main ones to be addressed.

Wednesday looks toward two simple and short meetings

Both the Health, Sport and Community Services committee meeting and the Customer and Corporate Services committee meeting look to be walks is the park too. The first has five agenda items and the second has four. One in each is starred as a read-only item and there will be a presentation in the first that will ruminate on the 2003–2008 Logan Health Plan.

There will also be some discussion about future delivery options for the KRANK holiday programs. Those of you who have teenagers who took advantage of the program will be looking towards its continuation I'm sure. Yes, it does cost us a bit, both in staff time and in money to subsidise the things that happen. But it is a hell of a lot better than having young people at a loss for something to do during the summer holidays.

I know that I've said this before, but it is worth repeating, too many families have to have the adults working, usually at the same time, during the day. This leaves youngsters without supervision. Hardly the thing to do with active teens.

The other program in the first committee is the Energise program that set out to introduce adults to training and activities that they may know they need, but do not have the where-with-all to do for themselves. I took advantage of that program during the last year and I will recommend it to all of you if it gets up this year. There was about 20 evening or weekend-day sessions of about two and a half or three hours. The usual presenter is a great and helpful bloke. One couldn't have hoped for a better trainer.

Lastly Item HC4 looks at establishing a rowing and water sports facility on the Logan River. I will wait for the item with baited breath.

The second committee meeting has nothing o recommend it. It can hardly last more than a few minutes either.

New Zealand seven-aside team lose semi-final to Samoa

Year on year the Fijians and New Zealanders have been fighting for supremacy in the Rugby Seven-aside world. For those of you who have not seen seven-aside rugby it is really a game for small groups of kids from small schools and was invented in NZ so that country schools, such as I went to, with anything less than 80 kids, could play a competitive game of rugby and on a quarter of the space.

But like 50-over and Twenty20 cricket, adult Seven-aside rugby was invented for the public. It is played as much by the spectators as the players. People go to the games in such coulourfull costumes that the game often seems to be more in the stands than on the paddock.

Sevens is played on a full-size rugby field with, as you'd expect, seven players aside. These are the tall strong blokes of rugby. More the tactical thinkers than the tough bruisers of 13- or 15-aside games. Players who deliberately run back toward their own dead-ball line than advance to the goal—if it breaks up the symmetry of the defence.

Last year the South Africans dealt a serious blow to the NZ side by beating them in the last game of the last round by one point. For both Fiji and NZ it was back to the drawing-board. The link above takes you to the Wellington match results, except for the final, and the South Africans are almost at the bottom of the standings after the third round this year.

This is the sort of thing that developers do much of the time too. They risk their money on a project and do their very best at providing a property that people will flock to and buy-up for a generous outlay that makes a profit for the developer. You can expect a developer that buys land at $2000 per acre (4047 m²) will be wanting to sell that on to you or I at more than $100,000 for a large block of, 800 to 1000 m².

Between buying the land and selling the last of it—the least desirable block—they will have had their money invested, not in the bank or share market earning interest or dividends, but in the land, the fees that the local government charges. Also the trust account that sequesters money so that the local body can build linking roads, supply water and carry off sewage. They will have to build, on their own land, access roads, install curb and channeling and local utility services like power, telephone and water. There will have been two separate sets of surveyors on the land. There may be council delays. They may not be able, on the ground, to realise what they planned and the buying public might not want to buy there just yet.

On top of that there is always the intransigence of councils. That can take many forms but, in the past, it largely took the form of a group of elected members not being willing to pass a development application that seemed to be on constituents minds close to an election.

The cost of taking a council to court over a development application, and losing, is hardly worth thinking about. And that is also why it costs ratepayers many hundred of thousands of dollars to defend, and lose, court cases where developers win.

The Planning and Development committee Index this week shows examples of the sorts of things that can lead to developers losing their shirt. Not that anybody will, it just provides examples of the sort of things that could get you broke in a hurry.

Item PD4, Development Assessment appeals update, to be considered in secret. will update the councillors about our present legal situation. We won't ever see that item made over to be open to the public, the way that council works at the moment, and we can only get a vague idea by looking at council's financial reports in the Annual Report that usually appears at least six months after the end of the financial year.

I'm hoping that the council will see that the new attitude of the government means that they have to account more certainly for making available confidential after it has served its purpose. That there will be a publicly listed schedule of confidential items and date when we should expect each of them to become available for us to read

There are only six P&D items this week. One is a throw-away and three are confidential. Item PD4 I have mentioned. Item PD1 is about updating the Flagstone plans and PD2 is an appeal that councillors will have to note. I guess that it will be their really last chance to rethink their rejection of the developer's plans, or parts of them.

Item PD5, Combined application for Material Change of Use (rural to residential low density) and reconfiguring a lot (5 into 108 lots) that is going in at Bluff & Millstream Roads, Veresdale.

Item PD6 is a request from the YMCA to get a reduction in fees that they have to pay to council for some previously granted development. I don't believe that, as yet, there is any proper policy for this sort of thing and that is probably why it is coming to council.

Earlier in the day we will have had Cr Able shepherding the Animals and City Standards committee agenda through the fifteen minutes, or so, of the presentation.

Tuesday should be a short-meeting day. But you never can tell.

Communication with your council in the freedom of information regime

There is a new article in The Economist that talks about Data and Transparency as in, of government and geeks. The main thrust of the article is that there is an increasing willingness of governments at all levels towards making raw data available to people to analyse for themselves.

This is rather than the older way of only allowing carefully massaged data be fed out without recourse to the original numbers, thus making it impossible for the new analysts to rearrange the numbers in a new sensible fashion that the government may never have thought of itself.

But the thing that struck me was that one of their well-named new systems is an Australian geek-groups application called It's Buggered, Mate.This is what they say—

A competition called “MashupAustralia” has been run by the Government 2.0 Taskforce, a body set up by Mr Rudd to make administration more open. Results include a map of crime in New South Wales, and a tool for sharing data about needed road repairs called “It’s Buggered, Mate”.

I've done a little exercise with It's Buggered Mate for myself. I don't guess that I'll get answers at all, in fact it says that it is still in trial mode, but I have made a complain about a public facility in the area. They need the data to see that the database is handling the complaints properly.

It is really easy to use. The first screen asks for your complaint and the location. Then it asks for a bit more detail on the next screen and you include your email address for them to contact you. Finally there is a good maping system the can find the location you are talking about to let you mark the place you're talking about.

Sounds worth having a shot at. It'd be nice to see it in action. The Right to Information is vital to us all and we need to cooperate with people and organisations trying to get that right used by everybody.

A new series of committee meetings start next week

Monday morning at 8.30 am the City Roads Infrastructure meeting will kick off the new week of committee meetings. The committee has 12 items listed, about eight of which are easily dealt with, and we shouldn't see too much to worry over.

Item IN9 is a presentation about a road safety trauma kit. The title of the item is so badly worded as to defy comprehension of what it is going to be about. We'll know when we see the presentation no doubt.

Item IN10 about the extension of John Paul Drive in Springwood is closed to the public. There will be a set of public recommendations but we may not know what it is about for months yet.

And that is the lot for that committee. The following is the Environment, Parks and Waste Management committee. There are 12 items again, five throw-away ones, two closed items and a presentation. Which leaves four for serious argument and conference.

Item EP3 presentation about Draft SEQ State Koala Policy and Regulatory Provisions, is likely to be interesting to a number of our conservation-minded people and groups. I do hope that some can come to the meeting. Yair, I know how hard it is to have to work, to be on a conservation committee and to get away to attend such meetings. Maybe that is why the elderly retired people in our community are so valuable as a means of being represented at such venues.

It used to be that women with children at school would be the prime-movers and shakers for community groups. But with so many families having to have two wage-earners it seems that most groups have not been able to rely on those women any more. It seems to me that it is essential that communities look more towards their retired members to be the day-time communicators for the groups.

Item EP10 about using Waller Park at Browns Plains as an ethnic communities market-place could be one of those great ideas that grips our city and demonstrates the cultural diversity in harmony that we all need as a leader for the future. With about 140 ethnic groups in the city it could be a fabulous resource.

The remainder of the Indexes are there for you to download and read through. I need material for another day's story so this is as far as I go today.

Copyright cops have a loss

The electronic news today, Internet, radio & TV, have mentioned that iiNet has won the case bought against it by AFACT for copyright infringement.

A written report is here.

There is a lot of talk about cops in the news items. They don't mean the police. Copyright is not a criminal crime, just a civil dispute. You don't get sent to jail, you get fined if found guilty. Just like the Men at Work case reported today. The problem is that the fines can be very steep and you face bankruptcy unless you can pay the fines and damages awarded to the opposing litigant.

The headline link above tells us that we may be the next target for AFACT. That is what has been happening in the US and the UK. It remains to be seen what will happen. The federal government is likely to change the rules too, and to our detriment.

Who comes here and from where

Since I started this blog in 2005 I have often wondered where people came from who were reading my posts. I said reading you understand, not commenting.

Some recent refinements to Google systems in various applications have allowed me to refine what I can see about the domain names where readers are coming from. The result, to me, has been interesting.

This is a screenshot of what I have been able to see on the analysis output—

You can see that almost half of the readers come from a Bigpond domain name. The next biggest group come from where there is no particular domain name—this means that they operate through private servers with no commercial entity name.

Next—anticlockwise—are the people with gov.au domains. All of these people are using a government server to get to the blog. That includes federal, state and local governments.

Four percent of the readers come from Google addresses. You'd actually guess that they might just be random search results with a quick glance to see that they didn't want to be here and go somewhere else.

Then there are two that intrigue me the most. One percent of the readers have an Emirates domain. I have no idea, but I can only assume that a couple of Emirates employees are expatriates from this area. Or are they landowners here who work there? I guess that it could be anything really.

The other really has me going, again it accounts for about 2 people probably, but they are using an Energex domain. At first I was innocently wondering who was a local employee goofing off at work but then it came to me that we—the commenters and I—have been a bit critical of Energex last year. I wonder if the someone at Energex is checking on what we say about them.

Oh, wouldn't it be wonderful to know? But, hang on, there are only about 22 people a day reading this series of posts at the moment, so having two a week from Energex is too many to be frightening off! Hey, don't go, we need you.

Welcome to the second month of the new year everybody!

Oh, if you're having trouble looking at the diagram because it is too small on your browser try pressing the Shift and Ctrl keys and then hitting the + (plus) key up by the backspace key (not the one on the number pad). You can do it more than once. To get back to normal size press the Ctrl and - (minus) keys.

Glenlogan Park Master Plan

You can go to either the council web site or the Jimboomba customer service centre to get a copy of the draft master plan for Glenlogan Park.

It is open for your feedback until Friday, 19 March and there is to be an informal chat morning from 10 am till noon at Jimboomba AFL/Cricket clubhouse on Henderson Road on Saturday, 13 February. Such a generous allocation of time considering the scope and scale of the plan!

That is the only opportunity you have to talk to anyone who knows about the draft plan except that you can email Chris Lawrence or call 1300 1LOGAN (1300 156 426) to talk.

There's a long bit of writing in the draft document. The short of it is that they intend to relocate the Pony Club to the area of the park between the Little Athletics field and the Pleasure Drivers area. They think that the two equestrian clubs will work together. They also think that the Little Athletics club could use some of the Pony Club's and Drivers' areas for an athletics cross-country track. You have to read the document carefully to realise that the author has combined the Pony Club's area and the Pleasure Driver's area into one Equestrian Centre!

Many of the clubs members, I suspect, will not think that any combination like that will work. Certainly not as the population expands exponentially. Worse is the thought that any of them will want vehicle parking on their area to serve any other's needs for their larger events. Can you just see the clash of simultaneous events each weekend? Would you allow a myriad of cars to park on your lawn and compact the traversed areas?

The leaflet talks about having the report for a council meeting in April/May for final decision. One wonders how they will get to make a final plan in three weeks to make that April week—Tuesday, 13 April for the P&D meeting—and only another three weeks to the next one in May. It seems like the officers are expecting little contentious feedback to have to unravel and re-plan into their design—or are they are supremely satisfied with the existing master plan and do not expect to have to account for any diverging feedback? Think about it.

The list of FAQs on the second page of the document does not say that they are consulting with us in accordance with the Community Engagement Strategy and Policy documents either. Looking at their two-leaf master plan does not convince me that they are doing the consultation properly either. Mind you—the colour photos are well done.

If you're already, or going to be, a party to a club that is a tenant on Glenlogan Park, you need to be sure that your committee members have a determination to make some feedback by 19 March. It might pay to make sure that your club colleagues and you are doing your own feedback too.

Don't be limited by the attached feedback for either. You can add as many pages as it takes to get all of your thoughts to them.