Cedar Grove View

Park Ridge Connector petition wording

2012-01-26T10:30:00.000+10:00

The following is the exact wording of the petition presented at yesterday's Ordinary Meeting of council by Cr Phil Pidgeon acting on behalf of those signatories to the petition.

Subject: Park Ridge Connector Road (Browns Plains to Granger Rd Munruben)
We, the undersigned hereby respectfully request the Logan City Council:
To declare there is no viable corridor on the grounds that
(a) There has been inadequate community consultation,
(b) Detailed flora, fauna and environmental assessment has not been completed by Logan City Council or the State Government.
(c) There are at least two state declared bioregional corridors are threatened by this road proposal—Karawatha to to Flinders Peak Corridor and Jerry’s Downfall/Cambers Creek/Flesser Reserve.
(d) The proposed Park Ridge Connector Road is socially destructive and will divide existing urban and rural residential communities.
We request the immediate the immediate removal of this proposed road.
Chief Petitioner: Anne Page

A whole lot about nothing on Tuesday

2012-01-25T21:12:00.000+10:00

Before I start regailing you with my impressions of the Ordinary Meeting I need to remind you that Local Government is on the end of a conundrum that could be costly to us all. It might not and only be costly to a few! I'm thinking of the people who are proposing to stand as candidates for election as divisional councillors and, particularly, such as Hajnal Black.

Today, if you didn't notice, the Premier of Queensland announced that the State Government elections will be held on 24 March. She said that, as a consequence, the local government elections will be delayed until sometime in April or May. Everyone involved will be put at some expense because of that, some who are uninvolved will also take some sort of financial hit.

One of the good things is that our council's angst about being caught with a funding crisis for the Allconnex Water take-over should be overcome because the Parliament will have an additional week to get to and pass the Bill that will apportion costs of the disassociation of Allconnex mainly to the Gold Coast City Council, as was the original agreement.

There were, initially, 32 members of the public at the meeting, as time went on a few more came and a group left. The group was the eight-or-so people with PRC logos on their t-shirts. They came to hear what councillors were going to say about the Park Ridge Connector road that is proposed to extend the Gateway through to, maybe, Granger Road. I spoke to some who were waiting for their friends outside the building and they seemed to be in a good mood and alive to the facts of the situation.

The meeting started eight minutes late for no particular reason. They gave Black Leave of Absence. There was a short Christian prayer, the listed Condolences were supplemented by verbal ones from Pidgeon, Able, Clarke and Grant. The Minutes were confirmed and there was no business arising. Clarke, Pidgeon and Black added to the Congratulations and they moved forward to the receipt of the Committee Reports.

The City Roads Infrastructure report was divided with IN3 and IN4 delayed while the rest were rubber-stamped without comment. Cr Grant offered a Conflict of Interest (CoI) for IN3 and said he would stay but not take part in any debate or vote. Cr Bradley thanked her colleagues for deciding to defer this matter. She gave a longish rundown on how the way the Brisbane City Council was going about its restructuring of the area about Rochdale and Priestdale Roads on the common boundary. I guessed the fact that we had six journalist/reporters at the meeting was a factor in the length of her speech—which was loud and clear for this meeting. The reporter's benches are diagonally far across the room from her seat.

For Item IN4, Park Ridge Connector presentation, Cr Able offered that he thought he had a CoI but he now had legal advice that he could stay. They were about to begin to amend the previously agreed recommendations when Cr Black raised a Point of Information where he said that he was pointing out that Cr Smith, through his wife's employment by the Department of Transport and Main Roads, had a CoI. Smith protested, the mayor closed it off and a vote was taken to amend the item. Black stood to demand a division and the Mayor readily called each councillor for a Yea or Nay.

The count was the same as had been announced.

The Environment & Sustainability committee's report was voted in a moment. The Animals & City Standards committee's AS7, vegetation clearing on a West Mt Cotton Road property, was the reason for Lutton to announce a CoI and walk from the meeting while Black said he had a CoI but would stay—and vote.

I'm beginning to be suspicious about some councillor's statement of Conflicts. I'm slowly coming to the conclusion that certain statements are less than truthful in that they are trying to show a much greater involvement in community interests and the statements are there to act as a platform for later claiming that the person has very wide interests in community affairs—documented in council Minutes.

The Planning & Development committee opened all Items except PD10 and PD5. Cr Black wanted to amend the recommendations for Item PD11, about paid parking in shopping centres. He said that the Village Shopping Centre in Beenleigh was charging $55 per hour after two hours of free parking. After a lot of argument and talking the Mayor on the advice of the CEO rules Black's motion out of order because the Village Shopping Centre is not a Shopping Centre as addressed by the Agenda Item.

There followed a series of laughable incidences where Black and Hackwood accused each other of being less than truthful about paid parking in Beenleigh and there were moves to remove Paid and insert Free Parking and the was an amount of laughing going round the gallery. Black and Lutton tried to sort their claims to having been the person responsible for bringing the parking issues to the committee for resolution. There were so many people laughing quietly that I almost missed the PRC people walking out of the meeting. I'm sure that they were unimpressed.

The mayor tried to sort the issues and stumbled over paid when she meant free—or was it the reverse?—and, Bradley, Hackwood and Black all had their final, final say.

For PD5, the telecommunications tower at Bluff Road, the mayor declared a CoI and left the chair for Lutton. This item had been defered at the committee stage and Cr Pidgeon had to get up and tell us how these organisations should look to each other before littering the landscape with more towers. I wondered if he'd cribbed my blog! For PD10, Cr Power offered a CoI and walked out.

The Health, Sport & Community Services committee report was voted into place instantly. The Customer Services, Marketing & Parks would have gone the same way but Black offered a CoI let-out for Item CS2 and then launched into a set speech about how the Jubilee gave us opportunities to rename all sorts of places and things, including Logan Hospital. That bought Dalley to her feet in protest that it wasn't the council's hospital to rename!

The Governance, Finance & Economic Development committee was opened except for GF16, the Greenbank Commercial Joint Venture, for which Smith declared a conflict. Cr Bradley, in regard to GF9, asked when the caretaker mode for councillors would start and the CEO explained that as it got closer to election time the Commission would make a declaration, otherwise nobody knows. Black told her we would know on 11 February. Cr Lutton spoke about Item GB1, Councillors Attendance at Committee, that was to ask the government to have a requirement for councillors to attend all committee meetings.

Readers should note that Item GF11 in the committee Agenda has a very long document from the Tribunal detailing councillors' remuneration.

There was an almost complete shambles to them attempting to construct a Mayoral Report, MR1. You'd say that they started from a position of having no idea what they wanted to do and they began constructing and deconstructing without any ideas in mind either. Councillors on opposite sided of the political stables threw mucking-out debris at each other and they advanced their reputations not one iota. I have more than a page of scribbled, abbreviated, notes of what was said but you don't want to know how bad it got!

Bradley, Able, Smith, Lutton and Pidgeon offered up petitions. I asked Pidgeon for a copy of the wording of his 380-person PRC group's petition but he offered that he had no more copies. The minutes secretary promised me a copy when she could fit in sending it to me.

In General Business Cr Grant gave me a moment of laughter when he asked what would happen if a councillor resigned early. The CEO explained that if it was within six months of the elections the council could decide and if it was decided to install a new councillor the CEO would write to all of the people who stood for election in that division asking if they would be interested in taking up the post. If more than one, there would be a series of lots to eliminate all except one.

Cr Grant then dropped that his only opposition candidate had been Aidan Mclindon and then he was selected, so there was none left! Nothing was said for a couple of minutes while the situation fell into place!

Black was pleased to tell us that Campbell Newman would destroy the ULDA when elected. He wanted action to stop charging for shopping parking anywhere in Beenleigh, he wanted to reiterate Hackwood's earlier statements for paid parking and he could hardly stop himself talking.

Able was dismayed at the garage sale signs. Clarke told us about council's Australia Day events at the three aquatic centres. Power said that the Parks people had done a wonderful job over the Christmas holiday period. Hackwood justified what he had said about paid parking in Beenleigh and accused Black of deliberately confusing issues for people to make wrong judgements and said that he doesn't tell lies. Black took that as a slight and stood to yell across the room. He demanded Hackwood apologise. The mayor told him to sit and then told him again.

Bradley promoted Robbie McEwan, the cyclist, as a symbol for Logan. Lutton wished everyone a belated Happy New Year and the Mayor spoke about the Energex situation and about how wonderful the SES people are. She closed the meeting at 11.51 am.

Short Ordinary Meeting expected Tuesday

2012-01-23T11:39:00.000+10:00

The Ordinary Meeting tomorrow has a straightforward List of Items, without additions, and I would expect that they will not waste much time galloping through the agenda.

If I remember rightly there will be two or three recommendations that they had decided might need review after the committee stages. You'd expect that the committee chairperson would introduce the amendments after proposing the the recommendations were tabled for discussion. Normally there is little discussion and the amendments are moved, seconded and voted into place before the public gallery has caught its breath.

It means that the meeting is likely to be over by about 11 am.

I know that they have the right, within the Local Government (Operations) Act to run their meetings how they like, but running them so that the public is either misinformed or uninformed is as silly as possible in the face of their We want to keep the public informed mantra.

What bothers me even more is that the governance people have revised the Standing Orders, the rules for running their meetings, at least twice in the last twelve months without allowing the public to make any contribution or feedback. And they know that I have expressed a wish to contribute to the revision of those Standing Orders. There is much more than just recognition of the rights of the public to be informed in my thoughts.

I missed another meeting today

2012-01-19T19:10:00.000+10:00

It probably wasn't such a big deal to miss the meeting but I missed a treatment too because I was not good enough to go with it. Wasted my whole day!

The Governance, Finance & Economic Development committee meeting should have started at 8.30 am today and we have already seen some councillors unable to bring themselves to be there by that time. As the elections get closer I'll be offering who makes the effort and who, very often, doesn't.

This meeting is the powerhouse for the council, as an administration, and it is chaired by Cr Smith with a lot of energy and skill. It is one that I least like to miss because of the amount of information that can be gleaned during the meeting and for the opportunity to speak to the top-level executives of the council. I'm lucky that I have been able to create those mutual-trust relationships and I can tell you that we have some of the best executives you'll find in the State—but not all of them.

Item GF1, the Organisational Services Monthly Report for November, is worth perusing every meeting. In this one it tells us that the council's (paper) records have been transferred to storage and that were now fully digital. It is good to see that everyone in Queensland is cooperating to bring our geospatial information (GIS) up-to-date. I've been commenting since about 1998 that what was at the disposal of councils was far less than adequate and often lead to serious misjudgements and planning glitches.

Another thing that I noticed in the report is that the Microsoft Office upgrade has been completed. I have to say that I do not really think that has been done competently at all. I'm looking at the meeting Agenda document on my screen where the heading for the document says it is a council letterhead! I know it is picky, but templates with incorrect names like that mean that no one in the word processing part of council has any real idea how to organise and set up template documents that are traceable into the future. The upgrade has not been completed, just botched into place!

Another item is Building Entry Security upgrade ongoing. It seems to me that people using a building constantly have the least idea about its security. They expect to be able to get into and move about the building without any trouble. If they do, occasionally, have difficulty it is often overcome by rerouting oneself to overcome the problem. It is the occasional and infrequent visitors who really notice the security lapses, and the members of the public who go into the main administration building know where the unreliabilities and problems really are.

Rates income is down by almost three-quarters of a million dollars. You'd expect that sort of thing in this environment and you might also expect that council has a plan to overcome the problem, or tell us why not. I hope that someone asked today. There are draconian means of repairing the situation and subtle and effective means, but this last needs careful and long-term planning. Too often we seem to be seeing the former means, especially with people's homes.

Page 16 onwards lists the Community Benefit Fund grants made to the end of November. Mayor's first and each Division in turn. I'm surprised that our councillor has spent almost $3500 on horsey people and $200 completely outside of the division. She has just over $5000 of the $20 thousand left after only five months of expenditure.

I also noticed the typing mistakes and rude corrections throughout the tables! Not very good. Maybe because it was a kiss-and-run thing no one cared?

Item GF2, Australian Constitutional Recognition Update, tells us that we have contributed $26,307 to LGAQ for their (our?) constitutional recognition of councils campaign. There will be another tranche to pay later this year.

Item GF3 is about the Allconnex take-over campaign, a presentation by the CEO. You'd expect that there was not a lot of joy in Mr Rose's story. The required legislation is still not passed in parliament and the last I heard was that the Opposition was not promising to help. Campbell Newman sucks! He could cause a serious blowout to our rates in years to come. Maybe some LNP diehards could remind him of his obligations to ratepayers too?

Item GF4 is a government mandated monthly report, for November, about council's finances. It runs from page 47 to page 64 and is intended for easy reading. Item GF5 is the same for December only in outline only, just one page.

Item GF6, a sundry debt for almost $7000 seems to be uncollectible. Rather than try harder we will let it go! You'll notice an amount of incompetent typing on the bullet-point line starting "In February 2011… was still and in mate and…."

We jump to page 84 and GF9, the caretaker arrangements for the elections. It is hardly two pages and I'll leave you to read it for yourselves. Item GF10, changes to the provisions for Register of Interests that some might call the Hajnal Black amendments. We will end up seeing all of the register for each councillor on council's web site. We will not have the situation where a councillor might get away with an inadequate entry because it was too much trouble for people to go look at the, previously, semi-secret registers. And we should not read of a person in court saying that the prosecution took so many years to establish and bring a case!

The approved forms are from page 90 to 103.

The next item, GF11, is about councillor remuneration. It shows that there is going to be only three scales of salary because the old payment for chairpersons is deleted. The scales are on page 105 and the full determination document starts on page 107 to 170. In our council I believe the removal of the chairperson's additional payment is unfair because they do work very hard, well, most of them. And there would hardly be a time when every one did not do much more than a non-chair councillor does. How effective they all are is, as always, variable. Chairpersons are elected to their positions, after the election, by their colleagues. With the extra salary it was a position to attain, but hardly that now. I am just concerned that if the good ones don't step into the positions we will get the ratbags who think nothing of trying to rule committees for their own benefit and aggrandisement.

The other problem is that the election of chairpersons is a secret from the public.

Item GF12 is about Greenbank Rural Fire Brigade's short-term funding problem for the fit-out of it's new location. It would be a pity if the councillors were less than sympathetic. Item GF14 is about the Divisional Infrastructure Capital Improvements Program. This is the big fund where councillors have $650 thousand to spend in the financial year, each year, and you'll see that much of the money goes on roads, drainage and parks. The division 11 pages are from 184 to 185.

Item GF17 is a report about the Strategy Performance and Leadership Team. It is usually a kiss-and-run item but normally has little gems of information about what is going on there. Maybe it is the pre-Xmas, maybe I'm becoming jaundiced but there is not a lot there this time. I expect that the meeting closed by about 10.30 am.

Too much tosh during a meeting today

2012-01-18T19:28:00.000+10:00

Two meetings today, the first was well-regulated. The Health, Sport & Community Services committee meeting commenced at 8.32 after one councillor finally made it into the room and started talking to a staffer he could have walked past. I guess that when you think you're a Romeo it is hard to set that idea aside.

The meeting had five of seven Items asterisked as kiss-and-run things and there was never going to be much in it. But for whatever reasons, below, it did last almost an hour.

As normal the library branch reports were slapped out of the court and there were few questions about HC3, BBolder and Older, a program for the Baby Boomers who are well on the way to retirement and boredom, was exposed to the meeting and Cr Able couldn't wait to tell us that he thought it was a fantastic program. There's a fifty-two page background paper that may be worth reading starting on page 21, the Executive Summary on pages 24 and 25 may be all that councillors read. I found the typeface that had been used for the background grated on me, but people with poorer eyesight might find is suitable.

As a Netizen I have to say that I often wonder where libraries are going. The increasing use of such small reading appliances, like the Kindle, seems to indicate that we're gong to read books downloaded from big publisher's web sites, much like younger people get music onto their phones or players. In earlier days I've talked to our senior librarians about why they are not stocking and holding more reference books, in my case engineering standards. I know that our libraries are more constantly full of people using the free Internet services there, rather than reading or borrowing books.

A library full of largely only English books seems to me to not meet the needs of those who speak the other 175 languages spoken in our city!

During General Business for the librarian Cr Able questioned her about behaviour in the libraries and she admitted to a past-problem with Marsden library. Now cleared up. You wouldn't have known from the monthly reports, would you?

Item HC4, the Community Services branch monthly report for November was gone in a moment as was Item HC5, State of Australia Cities Conference Report—a minimalist thing that probably didn't deserve an outing here. I keep wondering how long it will be before the Strategies and Outcomes manager will take his scythe to the reporting system. Bring them onto a web site, where we can all see them and ask questions, and get the dross out of the committee system. There are enough iPads in the committee rooms for councillors to have the web-site reports in front of them if there is a need to discuss anything that raises anyone's ire—and not just a councillor's interest.

During General Business for the Community Services manager Cr Clarke asked questions about the Logan West Community facilities and that on an on and on—diverging to Jamie Oliver's Ministry of Food program touring Australia. I understood from the conversation that the truck will be at the Logan Central Library from 11 am on Friday and that people are invited for lunch. Cr Able asked what people would learn to cook—water or eggs! During the next break I told him that he doesn't watch enough TV to understand the world any more.

Item HC6, Major Facilities and Venues monthly report broke down into minor carping about delayed projects. Cr Power was keen to tell everyone that he had advocated council run the swimming pools and not contractors. Nobody rose to the bait. In the following General Business Cr Bradley asked about a screening system at a Springwood pool where everyone knew that it was designed for Islamic women.

It turns out that last May, while the councillors were asleep maybe, they approved a scheme to help women with body-image issues, or perceived issues, to avail themselves of more that normal privacy while using the pool to help get fit. One of the employees at the pool, noticing the early group to use the service, decided that it was an all-Muslim plot to be privileged.

The manager said that he had found the culprit and made suitable adjustments to the person's attitude.

The usual insensitive councillor wanted to know where the money for the project came from, where the screening would go and offered an opinion as to who might have put the story about. Cr Clarke said what all councillors should have known, that the program was for all women.

At the end of the GB the chair made a statement about the scurrilous stuff going on about the Food Program. He said it was not the Mayor grabbing the program out of his hands, it was the Marketing team. Oh, won't it be good to have councillors concentrate on working for the community instead of themselves!

Item HC7, Logan Sharps Management Strategy 2012–2014, was endorsed in a flash. The meeting closed at 9.25 am.

The Customer Services, Marketing & Parks committee meeting started by kissing-off CS1, the Customer Services monthly report for November & December. The only thing in the agenda that worked right.

During CS2, Diamond Jubilee Celebrations 2012, Cr Black offered that he is an executive committee member of the Monarchist League Inc and he launched into a very long list of suggested activities that might be considered by the city. He wanted to add to the resolutions already in the paper and have the council endorse the Monarchist League's objectives for the event. Ultimately that degenerated into a field day of cross-table comments by everyone.

There's normally a speaking limit for councillors that is too often ignored. I wondered why no one pulled him up at a later stage when he had already had two shots at saying his piece. Cr Pidgeon finally offered his opinions about the timeliness of bringing this Item forward and proposed it be deferred. Cr Black offered his motions and found that no one would second them. There was a motion, seconded, to defer the item and Black wanted to claim that there were not enough Yea votes for that. About 35 minutes of wasted time that might have been managed by limiting councillors to taking their turn, by limiting their speaking time and by allowing only one speaking turn.

During the next General Business Cr Dalley bought up the front-page headline in the Logan West Leader this morning. The chair asked the manager what he knew about it—his photo is on that page—and he was able to convince everybody it was not his work, partly because is is a very old photo from when he was an MP. I had not seen the article and was a bit lost as to its importance but some councillors were annoyed.

As that died down the chairperson injected another issue where TV Channel 9, in detailing the loutish behaviour at Sunnybank, offered that it was likely louts from Logan! She wanted the Marketing Manager to rectify that problem too. Cr Bradley wanted better Disaster Management information on the web site and more timely Waste Management information there as well.

In CS3 I noticed that the number of burials in December had gone up significantly. When the meeting closed for Item CS5 I left to come home. It was about 10.22 am.

Efficient meeting procedures shown off today

2012-01-17T22:34:00.000+10:00

Yes, they really got their act together today. Sure, there was a little contretemps between a couple of councillors but the two meetings went through with councillors seeming to have, at least, read their agendas.

The Animals & City Standards committee meeting was a short affair anyway. Eight Items, only two of which had any substance. Even the last, closed, Item was handled quickly and smoothly when someone suggested that they could resolve its recommendations without closing it to the public. The meeting started at 8.30 and and finished at 8.57.

But before I race off into that world I want to take you back to yesterday when they had the City Roads Infrastructure committee meeting. You'll remember that I proposed that they would not have a need to run one of the Items, IN4, because there would be no progress with the item. But they did have a delegation from Main Roads and the item was kept open for the public, with the permission of the deputation as well as the councillors.

I understand that there were strong words from both parties and that the public there learned a number of things that were not common knowledge. Maybe someone who was there can make a comment about this part of the meeting? I may be able to get a decent briefing from someone too.

Back to Animals, the chair, Cr Able, made encouraging remarks about the number of animals registered. However, I think that the number of animals that are being caught in the city areas are an object lesson that the animal controls in Logan City are not working. It is more than a year since the new Act came into being and there is a continuing need for city clean-up.

I would be interested to see realistic figures about how many animals were found loose in the rural and rural residential areas compared with the built-up area's cat and dog-catching. We pay rates on the basis that we are big consumers of costs to maintain our low-density lifestyles—and it doesn't cost council that much!

I suppose that council makes more out of auctioned cars, found in the city, than from about out here too, Item AS3?

Item AS4, Magistrate's Penalty Decision of 19 December 2011—LCC vs Mark Blakeway, shows that Mr Blakeway was fined $10 thousand for the two offences and another $10 thousand for council's costs in bringing the prosecution.

As I expected the new City Standards Manager wanted to read out much of her Item AS5 monthly report. I hope that Cr Able can take her in hand and tell her that they are supposed to read the reports! She writes them. One of the things a good manager should know in local government is that the less you tell them the fewer questions are asked!

Item AS6, Update on the Health Legislation Amendment Bill 2011, now the Health Legislation Amendment Act 2011, that all indications show does not yet have a commencement date, is talked-up mightily in this report. I'm really quite shocked that there are so many quotes from MLAs at parliament.

Yes, there is a chart starting on page 30 comparing new and existing schemes but there should have been another comparing what council said it wanted with what it got, too! But nobody made that comment. But why get up-tight? It was only a For Information report.

Item AS7 is not what I thought that it might be and there is a process initiated to get another landowner to do the right think about chopping down trees. The initial facts show that it might be expensive for the landowner. You could guess that the total might come close to the maximum $166+ thousand fine for that sort of clearing.

The Planning & Development committee meeting started at 9.03 am and ran through its Items with considerable alacrity. During PD1, Cr Able asked a question about multi-unit application objections that the officer could not answer off his cuff and he will get back to Able with an answer. Item PD2 about resolved court appeals was not questioned. Nothing was said about the Material Change of Use—Public Worship—Ahmadiyya Muslim Association of Australia Item at PD3 and that was resolved.

Item PD4, MCU for Intensive Agriculture at Greenbank was kissed-off too.

Cr Black said that he was unhappy that Vodafone was not going to use an existing tower and wanted the Item, PD5, delayed so that officers could look into it. I believe that they were surprised when Black told them there was already a competitor's tower nearby. The officer tried to point out that the new mono-pole towers were not an eyesore like the old lattice ones and that the emissions were controlled by internationally recognised standards but Black, bless his cotton socks, told them he knew those things. He was just concerned that they were going to erect another tower when one already existed! His colleagues agreed and the sent the officer off with a flea in his ear to look further. Meanwhile the MCU would be deferred.

There's a new State government charging regime for development being done by ULDA that is going to cost new home owners a bit more for their houses—I don't believe anyone knows how much more a bit is! Cr Able, at Item PD6, could only get them to say it would be more—without saying even what more than and such non-comparisons are useless! Item PD7, another monthly report was resolved without pause. After morning tea Items PD8 and PD9 were disposed just as quickly.

During the discussion of Item PD10, Discount of Infrastructure Charges, it came out that this was a long-running saga where everyone had agreed with the discounting back in 2007 but because of continued movement of staff, of government policies and of the weather the whole thing was shuffled under the table. They decided to go with the recommendations, which seemed to me to be the best solution.

Paid parking, Item PD11, saw a few swords crossed as Black and Hackwood wanted to joist from opposite sides of the table. Those who know tell me that Black has made an unkind cut into Hackwood's back by supporting a competing candidate against Hackwood.

Cr Able started by speaking very strongly against limiting parking in such a way as to charge for it. He said that it was scandalous but without offering any particular reason other than his considered opinion. Hackwood gave an example of what was going on in Beenleigh where the combined rail and shopping carpark was choked with commuters at the train end and not very many shoppers at the other end. He said that there were moves to take the express stop from Beenleigh to Holmview. Cr Smith offered what was happening at Chermside as another example. He said they needed to think before banning paid parking. Lutton said that they needed to control the situation and that the Planning Scheme could lend itself to the needs of management. There are examples in the agenda from page 251 to 253 that could be developed.

Just about everybody had their say, some at least three times, and they ultimately decided to add to the resolution that a Working Party be formed to pursue a range of possible options and report to a future meeting. Working parties are normally made up of officers and councillors and there are no records of who said what from them. In this case a good idea.

Items PD12 and PD13 are about Liveable Cities Program and they were both kissed off in a flash. Both of these items are reports to the committee of actions taken during the holidays by the Mayor under her executive powers.

The meeting was then closed for discussion of Item PD14, New Planning Scheme First State Interest Check, and everyone trouped outside. Those who know the usual result, a long wait and then a nothing resolution, left for other pastures, as did yours truly.

Thursday's Governance, Finance & Economic Development committee meeting has a 17-Item agenda, nothing much outstanding except that there is an explanation of the new councillors' remuneration. I will not be at that meeting.

Roads and the environment

2012-01-16T19:31:00.000+10:00

I had a problem today, probably not the only one for a while, and didn't get to the council meetings this morning. Sorry, I'll try to do much better in future.

The first meeting today was the City Roads Infrastructure committee meeting. You can download the agenda from that link or just read my rambling about what I can read and glean from it. You will see that three of the five Items are closed to the public, so this will be a very short section.

Normally, when I'm at a meeting, I can deduce something of what they were dealing with as regards a closed agenda item because of the way they construct the resolution for it. Otherwise we get no clues until next Tuesday's Ordinary Meeting! I won't be guessing these three until next week.

Item IN1, Roads & Drainage Infrastructure Monthly Report for November is an eye-opener in its way. The first table in the report shows that only 34% of the capital works expenditure had been achieved by the end of the month. That, from the dollar figures, is $4 million short of the target. However, we have to recognise that roading work is very weather sensitive and we have had a number of rainy periods leading to the end of November, when normally it is the traditional dry period.

The other thing to realise is that roads funding seems to be easier to carry over into the new budget year in July just because of that weather factor. If you want to see what is happening on local roads go to Appendix 4 on page 17 for the list and the completion dates.

In Item IN2, Maintenance of Road Signs in New Subdivisions, there is a summary of legal advice provided by council's legal advisers, starting on page 26, and it might be worth reading what it says because many people do not understand, but remember that this is a specific case where the question answered is about new developments.

Item IN5, the Bicycle Advisory Committee report, will have been adopted.

In the Environment & Sustainability committee meeting the main interest will be in Item ES5, 2012 Environments Program—Call for Applications, shows that council will soon be starting its program. There is a list of newspaper advertising dates in the item.

Otherwise the agenda shows that council will run a World Environment Day poster competition for schools, Item ES3, and they will have a LEAF Day on 3 June 2012, ES6. The other is a Good News Week report, ES4, about 2010/2011 Logan and Albert River Clean-up Program. The main thing to glean from that is that DERM is helping fund it.

On Wednesday the Health, Sport & Community Services committee meeting commences at 8.30 am. The list of Items shows that it is hardly a substantial meeting and there is only one that is not a potential kiss-and-run thing. Item HC7, Logan Community Sharps Management Strategy 2012–2014.

The Customer Services, Marketing & Parks committee meeting has five Items, one, CS5, is closed and about acquisition of a road in Marsden. Two are routine reports and the others are about Diamond Jubilee Celebrations 2012 and the Landscape Maintenance Arrangements for council roads. This, last, Item is likely in response to Cr Power's tantrum last year. If it is, I'm pleased that the Parks Manager has gone out of her way to include all of the roads!

Tuesday morning's Lists

2012-01-15T18:19:00.000+10:00

The Animals & City Standards committee meeting, on Tuesday, 17 January at 8.30 am, has eight Items on the List, six are asterisked as being kiss-and-run Items. Three of the items are about land use. Item AS4*, Magistrate's Penalty Decision of 19 December 2011—LCC vs Mark Blakeway, has been a long-running saga. For those inclined to not follow the council's directions when altering the shape of their land, it might be worth looking at this result.

Item AS7, is about vegetation clearing at Cornubia and may not cause much concern if Cr Power doesn't turn up. Item AS8, 54 Macaranga Street, Marsden—Illegal Land Use, is closed to the public, coded as a potential legal action for the closure, and that might take an amount of discussion before councillors are convinced that they have a case.

Whatever people say about councillors, as individuals, I think that in these sorts of cases the majority, depending on who is missing of course, are likely to take considerable time over these decisions. In open sessions, where this sort of thing has been discussed in the past, they usually demonstrate that they need convincing and that the officers have a tight case before authorising and action. You would also be able to see from the paperwork that has been presented to them, back then, that officers keep a very accurate record of the correspondence and conversations.

I can see that this closure is unusual. I can only believe that the new City Standards manager is feeling her way and I hope that a councillor or two will remember that it is unusual to exclude the public on such public-interest cases. I believe that the education value for us all is much more important than the secrecy that closing the discussion to the public might appear to help councillors cover-up what they said about the issues.

And some have a great need to improve their community standing and openness, real soon now!

The Planning & Development committee meeting, that will start at 9 am or ten minutes after the previous meeting, has a relatively long list of Items, 14 of them. One is slated to be closed and four are kiss-and-run items.

Item PD3, a Material Change of Use—Public Worship—Ahmadiyya Muslim Association of Australia, 1-21 Neville Road, Stockleigh, is likely to draw a small crowd. It is also likely to draw some amazingly insensitive comments from a couple of councillors who might otherwise be vocal supporters of minority religions in this country.

Item PD4, Intensive Agriculture MCU at Greenbank, might also see a lot of cross-table antagonism at the meeting. It will be interesting to see how many brave councillors are going to decide for the good of the city and how many will go with their electoral prospects.

Item PD5, Telecommunications Facilities (Tower) on Old Bluff Road, looks like it is the beginning of Vodafone's decision to install about five towers to the north and south of Beaudesert to improve their coverage, which was adversely commented about by the TIO last year. Too bad it won't help those of us in homes facing the north with the ridges to the south and east!

There's a really good reason why Australian State governments went completely wrong with telecomms regulation. We get the industry putting up, each, their own towers where other governments require them to share the tower-space with each other. It makes for less clutter in the environment and a lot better siting for coverage. However, it does mean that local governments need to ensure that the tower sites are further from densely peopled areas—even if it is only on top of the tallest buildings.

There are a couple of Items relating to Town Planning Instrument amendments. In fact the last item, PD14, that is closed, is also for a Ministerial check of new scheme's first State Interest Check.

There is an Item about paid parking at shopping centres and two Items about the Liveable Cities Program. And that is about it. A solid morning's work.

Committee meetings round starts Monday

2012-01-13T19:53:00.000+10:00

On Monday, 16 January the new round of committee meetings starts with the City Roads Infrastructure committee. The meeting starts at 10 am in the Logan Room on the third floor of the older part of the Administration building at 150 Wembley Road. There are carparks off both Wembley and Jacaranda Roads.

The Environment & Sustainability committee follows the first, either ten minutes after it finishes, or at the earliest at 11 am.

For the first meeting there are five Items. One is a starred report which means they are likely to pass it into oblivion in about 20 seconds. The next three, listed, Items are all closed to the public and we will only be invited back for the resolutions which must be voted on in public. Not necessarily displayed to the public for a reasonable amount of time, you understand, just voted in public.

Some readers might wonder what my bleat is about. The explanation is that while the public is excluded from the meeting room the councillors can construct complicated and lengthy resolutions in sections that, occasionally, have complex and obscure wording—anything up to 30 lines of text on a screen that only lists about 15 lines of the resolution. Some chairpersons think that when all of the members of the public are in the room, but have not yet reached their chairs, they can begin voting and that vote is sometimes completed before every person is yet seated—you can ask yourself how do I manage to record the resolution, or even the gist of it, and how do I see who voted and who didn't even bother to indicate a vote?

I'm telling you what happens, and it happens because those same councillors all represent you and I. It shows, because none say anything to their chairperson colleagues about having more civic-consciousness about their management of the committee—that they will let lip-service chairmanship continue.

A few chairpersons have improved their chairmanship over the, almost, four years they have been doing the job. Two chairpersons have made very great advances in their practise of chairmanship. But I'll be giving you a summary of those councillor attributes closer to the election.

Back to the meeting, the last Item IN5, Logan Bicycle Advisory Committee report is not starred but isn't likely to take long.

Item IN2, Road Signs in new Subdivisions, is closed because it will embarrass the council to have the discussion in public. Likely to be short. Item IN3, about Road Planning in Division 1, is closed because the Sustainability Planning Act (SPA) allows almost anything to be closed to the public for no other reason than it comes under the SPA. This sort of closure has only been challenged once, in a Planning & Development committee meeting, about Item PD8, in the last four years.

Item IN4, about the Park Ridge Connector delegation's report to council, will be a report from Main Roads people about the feedback from the public. I have a sneaky idea that there will be another delay in the delegation's report because of another Ministerial delay to the closing date for feedback. An open-and-shut Item you might say.

The following committee's six Items have four starred as kiss-and-run decisions. These sorts of Items are those where the recommendation from the officer making the report is that it is For Information or similar words. Not to be confused with For Consideration where some real resolution will have to be assembled and debated—even if it is to do nothing. However, for interest items sometimes cause questions to be asked, especially if the report is difficult or contentious. Cr Grant is one committee member that can see where there is more dust than bull in this sort of report. But, I have to say, the E&S officers are good report writers and have a tough senior manager to answer to.

I expect that the second meeting will finish about or before 12.30 pm.

Item ES5, 2012 Envirogrants Program—Call for Applicants, is self-explanatory and of interest to all environmental and associated groups. This is not the call, it is just the decision of councillors to endorse the conceived plan from the officers.

The Richard Casement internship

2012-01-13T16:52:00.000+10:00

I've become and on-off reader of The Economist as it has become a pay-for Internet service and the magazine is so expensive on an annual basis. But I do take their RSS feeds and there are often interesting individual items. On a monthly-limited basis I can read some of those for nothing.

One that crops up annually is The Richard Casement internship. The following are the details. I know some journalists read this blog. Have a go!

We invite applications for the 2012 Richard Casement internship. We are looking for a would-be journalist to spend three months of the summer working on the newspaper in London, writing about science and technology. Our aim is more to discover writing talent in a science student or scientist than scientific aptitude in a budding journalist. Applicants should write a letter introducing themselves and an original article of about 600 words that they think would be suitable for publication in the Science and Technology section. They should be prepared to come for an interview in London or New York, at their own expense. A small stipend will be paid to the successful candidate. Applications must reach us by February 3rd. These should be sent to: casement2012@economist.com

Hajnal case adjourned to next month

2012-01-12T20:24:00.000+10:00

Yesterday the Courier-Mail had this to say about a hearing in the Beenleigh Magistrate's Court on that day. The case was adjourned until 29 February.

I'm indebted to an activist for passing that information to me. Another, who was at the court, offers these comments for your additional information—

Hajnal Black was in court yesterday fighting allegations brought against her by the State Government. The allegations are in regard to bank accounts, property interest and transactions that were not disclosed to Logan City Council as required by law. Hajnal was defending herself against the charges.

Hajnal prides herself on being a Barrister and has defended her credentials with great vigour when questioned in Council meetings. She has also talked about representing people in the past. Given the way in which she sometimes conducts herself in Council meetings, when she is there, I went along to the court and was expecting to see a fired-up Hajnal with very good legal arguments. However it was just the opposite.

From early-on during the hearing two things became very clear. One was she appeared to have no defence to the allegations brought against her and the other was she should not have represented herself.

Hajnal was unable to argue points of law, which frustrated the judge. She appeared flustered, nervous and was incredibly ill-prepared. At one time she argued the point that she was not supplied copies of emails that the prosecution may or may not present to court during the trial. When the judge asked who these emails were between, she replied that she was one of the parties to whom the emails were sent from or to.

It was painful to watch the judge remind her of the bleeding obvious. Which was, surely, if Mrs Black was the recipient or sender of such emails then Mrs Black could simply search her own files for them. One of many times Hajnal’s head fell low and papers were shuffled.

At one point the judge had to raise his voice and tell Hajnal to be quiet. I started to wonder if Hajnal’s credentials are nothing more than sitting through a dozen episodes of Judge Judy. Hanjal’s husband, Sean, made a brief appearance. During one of Hajnal’s poor arguments, which was not going in her favour, Sean Black calmly stood up and took a few steps towards the judge. After about 30 seconds the Judge asked him to leave or sit down. Sean explained that due to his wife being flustered she had forgotten something important that he wanted to remind her of.

This time, in a more threatening voice, the Judge said, “Sit down or get out”.

With the help of the judge and the prosecution she did, however, get a few week's adjournment. Hajnal seemed to be pushing for a date after council elections, possibly because, if convicted, I believe she would be unable to stand.

I suspect the prosecution did not oppose the adjournment as they claimed their case is very strong and they do not want to give Hajnal Black the benefit of being able to say she did not have enough time to prepare for the trial.

The whole experience was painful to watch but at the same time a bit sad. This is a self-proclaimed power-couple of politics whose political careers appear to be going very quickly down the toilet. President Nixon once said, “When the president does it, that means it is not illegal”. I can’t help but think these two have the same attitude.

Link to Keep the Scenic Rim Scenic

2012-01-12T19:54:00.000+10:00

The Keep the Scenic Rim Scenic blog is appealing to people in the region for individuals to help shut out CSG exploration in the Kerry area.

I would be there if I could.

Rant about what Mayor does

2011-12-30T19:34:00.000+10:00

There was a Letter to the Editor in Wednesday, 28 December's edition of the Jimboomba Times—page 27—that needs a little correcting comment. The writer questioned the mayor's attendance record at council committee meetings.

The duties of councillors are no longer just as per the whim of each individual councillor like they were before 1993. A time when a councillor could tell an employee of the council to do whatever was within or outside that employee's job description. A time when the senior employee of many councils was called the Shire, or Town, Clerk.

No, the duties of a councillor, since 1993 and now, are laid down in the Local Government Act 2009 at §12 on page 26 of the act. The following is that section—
§12 Responsibilities of councillors

(1) All councillors of a local government have the same responsibilities, but the mayor has some extra responsibilities.
(2) A councillor must represent the current and future interests of the residents of the local government area.
(3) All councillors have the following responsibilities—
(a) ensuring the local government—
(i) discharges its responsibilities under this Act; and
(ii) achieves its corporate and community plans; and
(iii) complies with all laws that apply to local governments;
(b) providing high quality leadership to the local government and the community;
(c) participating in council meetings, policy development, and decision making, for the benefit of the local government area;
(d) being accountable to the community for the local government’s performance.
(4) The mayor has the following extra responsibilities—
(a) leading and managing meetings of the local government at which the mayor is the chairperson, including managing the conduct of the participants at the meetings;
(b) proposing the adoption of the local government’s budget;
(c) liaising with the chief executive officer on behalf of the other councillors;
(d) leading, managing, and providing strategic direction to, the chief executive officer in order to achieve the high quality administration of the local government;
(e) directing the chief executive officer, in accordance with the local government’s policies;
(f) conducting a performance appraisal of the chief executive officer, at least annually, in the way that is decided by the local government (including as a member of a committee, for example);
(g) ensuring that the local government promptly provides the Minister with the information about the local government area, or the local government, that is requested by the Minister;
(h) being a member of each standing committee of the local government;
(i) representing the local government at ceremonial or civic functions.
(5) A councillor who is not the mayor may perform the mayor’s extra responsibilities only if the mayor delegates the responsibility to the councillor.
(6) When performing a responsibility, a councillor must serve the overall public interest of the whole local government area.

Excuse the extra gaps between some lines in the extract above. It is easier for me to leave them than attempt to close them up.

At subsection (4)(a)—leading and managing meetings of the local government at which the mayor is the chairperson, including managing the conduct of the participants at the meetings;—the mayor is the chairperson only of the Ordinary Meeting in our council.

At subsection (4)(b)—proposing the adoption of the local government’s budget;—this was included in the 2009 update of the act partly because some councillors wanted to blame budget errors or irrationality on the person who proposed the budget for the current year. This makes it obvious to councillors that proposing the budget is a procedural matter that the mayor has no choice about.

At subsection (4)(h)—being a member of each standing committee of the local government;—the statement was included because in some administrations the mayor had been omitted from the membership-list of all committees and was excluded from the committee meetings. This was considered undesirable by many and I believe that our council made representations to the State government to that effect.

At subsection (4)(i)—representing the local government at ceremonial or civic functions.—you can find the major reason that a mayor cannot attend every committee meeting. In a city the size of Logan the calls on a mayor for ceremonial and civic functions is a major call, and not just during office hours either.

Finally, and an unstated duty, is the way that a mayor represents the local government at external standing committees that manage the business of such groups as the SEQ Council of Mayors (CoM) where the regional conduct of government is decided. I know that, in the past, I have written about the way such business is conducted in closed session, but they are necessary vehicles for the conduct of coordinated action as may be needed. There are other such coordinating committees, some, like the flood committees, are created as needed and often take up much time for those mayors who are lucky enough to not be fully engaged with the emergency.

Finally, I want to say that I have seen our mayor at many committee meetings where she has spent less than the minimum time, in the rules, to be considered to be at the meeting. But it was an important part of that meeting she attended. I have seen her staff come to a committee meeting, that she is attending, and call her back to whatever it is that she is needed to attend to. I can tell you that I have been on the end of her big stick a couple of times and that I'm not writing this because she is a favourite of mine, but I do believe that she represents the city to the best of her ability and her non-attendance at committee meetings is not an issue of dereliction of duty.

Further extension to PRC feedback closing date

2011-12-12T20:29:00.000+10:00

The Minister for Main Roads confirmed today that the submission period for the Park Ridge Connector Corridor has been extended until December 31 2011. Thanks for your interest in this project and the submissions received to date. Please note that all current submissions have been logged.

Please address your correspondence to the Park Ridge Connector project or phone number 1800 799 824 for help.

Bromelton Draft Structure Plan

2011-12-12T20:20:00.000+10:00

Readers may be interested in the media release from the Scenic Rim Regional Council. This structure plan will provide for road and rail links that will be of interest to all of us living to the north of the planning area. Many of us will need to be aware of what that means to us. I have no comment at this stage—

A NEW FUTURE ON THE HORIZON FOR BROMELTON
6 December 2011

Council has today received Ministerial approval to release the Draft Structure Plan and Beaudesert Shire Planning Scheme 2007 (Planning Scheme) Amendment Package for public comment the Bromelton industrial area, heralding a new era of growth for south east Queensland.

Mayor John Brent said the approval would shape the region’s prosperous future by leading for new jobs and economic Development.

Bromelton is the largest privately owned industrial park in Australia. This is the first stage of what will be a major development for the nation.

Mayor Brent said the Draft Structure Plan will shape the region’s future for years to come.

“The Draft Bromelton Structure Plan will provide the local community with a long term vision and clear understanding of the development potential for the Bromelton area during the next forty years,” Cr Brent said.

“It covers nearly 3,000 hectares and outlines proposed land uses, transport network options and environmental values for the area.”

The Draft Bromelton Structure Plan outlines the region’s importance as a location for future industrial development.

“The State Government in recognising this fact, designated the Bromelton State Development Area (Bromelton SDA) in 2008 highlighting the significance of this area in terms of growth and development,” Cr Brent said.

“In developing the Draft Bromelton Structure Plan, Council has reinforced its understanding of the significance of the area,” he said.

Council invites the local community to provide comment on the Draft Structure Plan, as well as feedback on subsequent amendments that have been made to the Beaudesert Shire Planning Scheme 2007.

“It is important that interested members of the community review the Draft Bromelton Structure Plan and Planning Scheme amendments and submit any feedback and comments they may have by the closing date,” Cr Brent said.

“This will ensure the Final Structure Plan is as comprehensive as possible,” he said.

Written submissions on the Draft Bromelton Structure Plan must be received by Council before COB on Friday, 10 February, 2012. All submissions received will be reviewed and considered in the Final Structure Plan.

A copy of the Draft Bromelton Structure Plan can be downloaded from the Council website (www.scenicrim.qld.gov.au) from December 12 or a hardcopy or CD can be purchased by phoning 5540 5111 (during business hours).

The Draft Structure Plan is also available from December 12 for review at Council libraries in Boonah, Beaudesert, Tamborine Mountain and at Council’s Customer Service Centres in Beaudesert, Boonah and Tamborine Mountain.

Council will also be holding a number of information sessions where the community will be able to view and discuss the Draft Bromelton Structure Plan and proposed Planning Scheme amendments with the project team, ask questions and provide feedback. The information sessions will be held at The Centre, 82 Brisbane Street, on:

Saturday 14 January 2012, 10am–2pm
Thursday 2 February 2012, 4–8pm

Media Release Ends

Ordinary meeting brings year to end

2011-12-10T19:44:00.000+10:00

Last Tuesday's Ordinary Meeting of council got under way at 10.03 am, which is near-enough to on time. There were 11 people in the gallery and the Mayor announced that Crs Clarke and H Black would be late. I keep having this really bad feeling about councillors who cannot make it to a meeting on time. Especially if it is the only meeting, of the series, that they're going to show-up for!

The usual Prayers, Condolences, Minutes, Business arising, and Congratulations were announced and passed through.

During the processing of the City Roads Infrastructure business Cr Power wanted to vent about the Hyperdome parking—you'd think that he was warning patrons not to go shop there!—Bradley was concerned about Rochedale and Underwood Roads connecting with the Gateway upgrade and Lutton was a little acid about the Bicycle Way near Winnetts Road at Daisy Hill and Loganlea Road. He was commenting to Item IN7, Bicycle Facilities at the Loganlea Interchange Upgrade of Pacific Highway, and said it was, "a case of speaking best practice but not achieving it". He added that the cycleway just ends at bad points on the road, and that Main Roads has had the problems pointed out—but offered no solutions.

You have to say that these sorts of comments are for the benefit of the journalists sitting-in for this meeting, the only one they will go to. It's probably too late to make any sort of impression for publication this year.

Moving on, the Environment & Sustainability recommendations were up for confirmation next. Cr Bradley, in speaking to her meeting recommendations took some time to say how the council was opposed to the Coal Seam Gas industry in general and Arrow Energy in particular. She also detailed concerns about other issues in her committee. Crs S Black, Pidgeon and the Mayor were keen to add to the vilification of Arrow too. I was somewhat sad that we'd done away with the pillory so long ago now.

For Item ES5, Flinders Karawatha Corridor, Cr Dalley declared a Conflict of Interest (CoI) because the corridor bounds one side of her property and decided to stay and vote. The recommendation that council support the creation of the corridor was adopted unanimously.

To introduce the Animals & City Standards recommendations Cr Able had a long speech telling us that they are going to write to Uncle Tom Cobley and All about the effect of the Animals (Datsun Cogs) Act 2008, Item AS2, that will send us all to hell—if we're lucky.

One thing I was surprised about was Item GB1, Acknowledgement of the Animal & Pest Services Branch, by this committee. There was nothing to acknowledge the others, City Standards nor any other branch, and I wonder if it is just Cr Able in his dotage, guiding a bit of frippery from his colleagues, or is there something more sinister in this?

What were the rest of them thinking?

The Planning & Development recommendations were modified by an amendment to Item PD2, Development Assessment Resolved Appeals, and we were told it was a minor amendment that the councillors had in front of them. Cr Dalley said that they had already had positive and generous feedback from Coles and Woolworths about Item GB3, a Standard Design for Shopping Cart Bays (Stalls). I can think of many, not that far away, that could be improved by a redesign.

Most of the councillors had a shot at adding their twopence to the P&D melee. I was shocked at one stage to hear Cr Black say, "I'm on Cr Lutton's side!" You could have knocked me down with a feather!

During the introduction of the Health, Sport & Community Services recommendations Cr Pidgeon said there were amendments to Item HC9, Request for Financial Assistance from Radio Logan Inc (Trading as 101FM), to tidy up the wording that had been found wanting.

You'd think that tidying up that had to be moved as an amendment would have been important enough to be explained to the attending public in enough detail to be comprehensible to us. But, no, its a case of We have the right to do it and we will just do it. I think that the Mayor is abandoning her principles by allowing councillors to ride rough-shod over the public's right to know.

The Customer Service, Marketing & Parks recommendations were breezed through. The only hiccup being Item CS6, Landscape Maintenance Arrangements for Beenleigh- Redland Bay Road, Cornubia, when Cr Power made a lengthy speech about the issues and blamed Main Roads for much of the damage to his division's pristine landscape. When he had finished the Mayor asked whether he had written to any of the State members for the area and Power said he had. This particular area is the confluence of the electorates for three MLAs and it is almost impossible to get any sort of politician to help another, not just at State level, but at any level of government.

We just about have to force them to marry to get them to work together, and even that is counterproductive at times, maybe too often.

Suddenly the Mayor woke to the fact that the usual Mother Xmas has been sitting patiently to do her rounds and adjourned the meeting at 11.17 so that the little ceremony could go ahead. Everybody got a little cadeau, I couldn't help noticing that those for councillors were not as little as for the hoi polloi. Maybe it is just the Scrooge in me? I'll have to be more Christmassy for a while now. The meeting resumed at 11.20 am.

With the exception of Items GF5 and GF9 the Governance stuff was adopted in a trice! Item GF9, Mayor's and Councillors' Community Benefit Fund, had Cr Bradley excused for her CoI because of her children. The other saw Cr Smith leave for CoI too. Both were adopted without preamble.

The round-the-table general business was protracted. It started about 11.30 and finished about 45 minutes later. I would give you the highlights, except that there were none to speak of. There was a lot of back-slapping and trumpeting with the Mayor offering encouragement throughout. Cr Power was asking where all the kids were that used to be on the streets at this time of the year and answered his own proposition that they were all inside crouched over gaming machines.

Cr Black moved a request to the Financial Manager for a report of some kind, her other half seconded it and they all Yea'd without pause. Cr Hackwood offered that, "This was teamwork." He also offered that of the three council's he's served this was the best. Bradley told us the trials of being awarded a Company Director's certificate. The Mayor thought that 2012 will be the time for Logan to shine. The meeting closed at 12.14 pm.

Just looking back to last week

2011-12-08T22:42:00.000+10:00

I'm lucky that when I am unable to go to council meetings my friend Betty is there. She's given me her spare notes about the last three meetings last week. In the Health, Sport & Community Services committee they decided at Item HC14, the closed item to discuss a grant to radio 101FM, that they would provide $30 thousand. My issue with this is simply that we don't really know if 101FM has a robust business plan that shows that we will get value for our, about, thirty cents per ratepayer. Why would you think that council would not ask the station for a business pan? Why, if they did, would council not bother to publish that business plan?

Is this a case of just sloppy staff work or a case of we don't care if you don't know?

Item HC5, Immigration, Humanitarian and Refugee Entrant Statistics and Support, suffered the Cr Grant response where, I'm told, he discovered that for all of the length of the report, the material about refugees and immigrants in Logan City is an unknown. When you look at the question asked of the officers—

That the Community Services Manager be requested to prepare a report to a future Health, Sport & Community Services Committee meeting outlining immigration, humanitarian and refugee entrant statistics within Logan City and the provision of relevant funding and support services, from all levels of government

there's little doubt that the report is not helpful.

Item HC12, Beenleigh Arena Management Review, was deferred.

In the Customer Service, Marketing & Parks committee there was considerable back-and-forth about Item CS3, Logan Youth Music Exchange, and Cr Smith was asking for the supporting council policy on international relations. You might remember that this was a junket that Cr Ban managed to bag in the first year after the elections, is it almost four years ago? Smith said that he would not change his position against this item, Crs Dalley and Clarke, the chair, offered variations of the economic and corporate relationships involved and the Deputy CEO rounded it out with the economic gain from international interaction.

These sorts of arguments are always very nebulous. It it almost impossible to pin down any advantage to any party. I have listened to what council intends for three years now, and never have they taken a marketing specialist. So where is the justification?

In the end the report was received, the weakest possible action in favour. You might expect that the up-coming budget for next year will have a cheapskate item for this visit.

Cr Black asked, during General Business for the marketing manager, what council was going to do about the Queen's Diamond Jubilee. A report will be prepared for a future meeting. In further GB for the marketing manager, relating to a cost-neutral council magazine—meaning one with commercial advertising—that would carry council stuff that the newspapers wouldn't publish Cr Pidgeon want it clear that the magazine was to be cost neutral.

I have to say that, where a magazine is produced by a bunch of dilettantes with huge egos and no idea about how to communicate other than by talking down to people, it is a shaky plank to be launching a circular that people will want to read. That advertisers will want to be associated with and that councillors will want to support through the first five years of big outgoings. Let's face it, they already have a crappy web site that could be used for cost neutral publishing!

How many copies of advertising circulars do you see on roadsides in your area, just slowly rotting down in the weather?

Cr Smith was on his high horse about the Main Roads part of the Redland Bay Road and suggested that council erect a sign saying" You are now entering a TMR maintained roadway. It is not the first time that I've heard this sort of complaint and I keep wondering why this committee? City Roads Infrastructure committee is the right one, not the Parks part of this committee.

Governance on Thursday

2011-12-04T15:49:00.000+10:00

I usually have a strong attachment to the Governance, Finance & Economic Development committee meetings. For a start they are about the how and why of our city's being and reason for being. It is how it runs itself and it is about management. It also demands that the committee is run by a good chairperson and Cr Smith is one of the top two.

It really grates with me that some of the other things I'm keen on doing happen on every second Thursday. You might guess that a meeting every third Thursday and an adventure every second Thursday might hardly impinge on each other. Reality is that it gives me only one Governance Thursday every six weeks.

For a variety of reasons I've missed more than each second meeting recently and I'm wondering if I have been doing a good enough job for each of you. No matter, this is my best.

Item GF1, Economic Development and Digital Economy Strategies 2012–2016, is one of those things that are tied up with string of Christmas Present proportions but that is full of buzzwords such that any normal person cannot really say what it is leading towards. You can see the blurb at the bottom of page 3, but I'm becoming more and more doubtful that two independent companies working with council are going to deliver a cohesive and integrated working system. The brochure starts at page 8 and it looks like the sort of thing a salesman would carry, not a council cast-in-iron policy. If the two companies are still producing this sort of stuff, there is a problem somewhere.

Item GF2, Organisational Services Branch Monthly report for October, shows that council is still wrestling with issues bringing back, from Allconnex, the water and sewage systems. An indication of the amount of work this is causing is the following gobbledygook from the report: Disaster Management System Project implementation is on track is continuing on track.

The Community Benefit Fund outgoings, by divisions, starts with the Mayor's on page 58. Division 11 is at page 70 and you will see that our councillor managed to spend $16 thousand of the available $20 thousand by the end of October. Four months! A twelve-month fund!

Item GF3*, a closed item, Update on Certified Agreement Negotiations, is the wages and conditions negotiations for the employed staff. I really do not believe that councillors are entitled to this sort of information ever since 1993 when the Local Government Act of that year shut off councillors access to interfere with the employees' conditions or anything. But management has to keep the little darlings up-to-dated. I cannot understand, though, why the briefing has to be confidential. Such a report should be open to the public. Anything confidential should not be offered to councillors. It is not their bailiwick.

Item GF4, First Budget Amendment 2011–2012, is here. One of the amazing unfavourable impacts on the budget is the overspending, to the tune of $600 thousand, on court appeals by the Development Assessment branch. During the processing of Items, in Planning & Development committee meetings, no information is provided to councillors about the potential cost of the action, nor of the size of the coffer designed to fund such court actions. And you've heard me bleat enough before about the rationality of contracting one of the biggest legal firms in Australia, without any ability by council to supervise the activities of that company.

How many top young lawyers could you hire for $600 thousand?

Item GF5 is a request to offer a charity a rating exemption, I hope that they followed the recommendation to do that. Item GF6, is about council being able to enter into a contract with a supplier that is considered, for various reasons, to be the only one able to do the job. I believe that this is an iPad application and the council, currently, expects to spend $210 thousand for the software. I do hope that they have a very strong handle on the software's copyright! If they did a really good job of specifying the work and the contractor does a great job of writing the program(s) there is a likelihood that council could become very rich supplying the software to other councils. Another Bill Gates?

Item GF7, is a complicatedly justified deal to acquire land on the roadside of the new Yarrabilba estate. Item GF8 is to allow an easement over council land at Slacks Creek by Allconnex. Item GF9, Mayor's and Councillors' Community Benefit Fund, shows that a very large amount of money has been donated to the Beenleigh District Community Development Association Incorporated this year from this tiny fund.

Item GF10 is a report to recommend a report be prepared into the future of the Legislative Oversight Service Delivery Coordination Team. These people were supposed to be riding herd on the amalgamation of the Local Laws from three local governments into one for the city. I have no idea what they discussed about this and subsequently decided, but it was all a pretty pickle! And that's just the new laws that impact on communities. Who knows what is going to crawl out of the woodwork about local laws already made that are for non-community things?

Item GF11 is a proposal to amend a delegation of authority. These things come before council as a check against corruption in council in the way that delegations are done or executed. Item GF12, Divisional Infrastructure and Capital Improvements Program, is the final step in the allocation of $100 thousand to the Jimboomba Park playing field. The earlier outlays for Division 11 are on page 170. The next two Items are mainly internal council-interest matters.

Item GF15, Strategy Leadership and Performance Team monthly for October, tells us which senior officers did what, when, where and, to some extent, why. For once that doesn't appear to be anything amazing. GF16, a closed Item, is the meanderings of the new whole-of-Logan Planning Scheme. Item GF17, is about rebates for community users of council services. This was pointed to recently as being a buggers' muddle and, although the opening paragraph says: The purpose of this report is to recommend a policy position, there is no recommendation. I guess that the officer was not either brave enough or silly enough to offer one.

At Item GF18, council is unwilling to tell us how much it costs for their telecommunications fees. This practice is a Damoclean sword of sorts. You don't really want to tell everybody how much discount you have wrung out of a very large operator of services in Australia. The other blade of the sword is that, by not telling everybody what you're getting for what contract, you have no idea whether you're being ripped off or not. I tend towards the more open solution because I wouldn't trust Telstra in the slightest. But, who am I?

Item GF19 was a presentation of council's credit position. One would naturally expect, with all of the world going down the drain just now, it wouldn't improve. But it shouldn't go down-hill much either!

Item GF20 is about Council's submission to the Bill to disestablish Allconnex and return the council's assets to its bosom. The serious problem with this Bill is, will it ever be passed into law?

And there endeth the fixed part of the committee meeting. I'm sure that there was miles of General Business throughout, although the chair is not tolerant towards councillors asking questions affecting just the one division. I have to say, too, that I have seen how hard it is for you to read a meeting agenda without some help. I'll try to be much more diligent at attending them in future.

Next meeting is Tuesday's Ordinary meeting. It looks like there's more about the Cemeteries Local Law towards the end of the meeting. It may be to introduce a hiatus to be able to contract a service provider.

Wednesday and two more meetings

2011-12-03T20:01:00.000+10:00

I'm back on my feet now so here goes. Wednesday's meetings, the Health, Sport & Community Services committee and the Customer Service, Marketing & Parks committee went ahead without me.

You can save me a lot of writing by reading the Agendas for yourselves. I'm just going to specify the highlights.

Back in May councillors thought it might be an idea to have a literature competition that slowly evolved into a writers competition. But it all got too hard and this report says that there are too many competitions about and getting the judges is not going to be a simple—and cheap—task.

The recommendation was to can the idea and I hope that they did.

Item HC4* is a stab at Logan City’s Cultural Diversity Strategy for 2012-2015. They think that they will have it done by March 2012. I don't exactly understand what the result is going to be, but they will have to be working very hard in December to February to come up with anything but a wonky skeleton. I would have thought that few councillors would have let this kiss-and-run item slide by. I'll be looking for new recommendations in next Tuesday's agenda.

If you look at Item HC6 on page 45 you will see that the Community Services people have overspent their capital expenditure to the tune of $350 thousand already. I wonder how they are managing to support the community now? The report blithely says that the property purchase will be compensated in a budget amendment.

Item HC9, Community Gardens Policy final endorsement, was recommended to be adopted. As usual there's nothing there to acknowledge the hard work some of our community did to ensure success of this initiative.

Item HC14, closed to the public, is likely to have agreed to providing $30 thousand to support Radio 101FM, the emergency service radio for the Logan area.

The Customer Service, Marketing & Parks meeting has nine Items of little consequence. Item CS4, new policy for the use of Council's corporate logo, is a demonstration of this. The whole system has been out of date for about 18 months and only covers certain parts of council's activities. A stitch, even late, is Ok I suppose.

Item CS9, closed to the public, is Logan City Cemetery Management Strategy incorporating Phase One and Phase Two Reports, was to seek Council's approval to establish a company limited by guarantee as a structure to govern and manage future cemetery operations for council. I can see no real issue with them doing that, but I can also see that they are designing a hands-off system that will be something like Allconnex Water. Brutal, money-grabbing and inefficient.

No wonder they won't talk about these issues in public!

Bahrs Scrub Net Developable Area Plan Landowners Concerns

2011-12-03T13:44:00.000+10:00

I received a longish submission about the Bahrs Scrub Net Developable Area Plan Landowners Concerns from a person who asked me to publish it. In this case I have decided to insert it here as it stands because I know that, in a couple of places, repairing it may not be what the writer intends.

You will find the Agenda at the Title-link by going down to the 2011 list and downloading the one for 8 November. The Item is PD8. If you want to download the Agenda immediately, the link in the first sentence above will do that. The previous meeting was on 18 October and the Item was PD9.
--*--*--

On two Logan Council meetings a number of landowners from BSIG (Bahrs Scrub Intrest Group) attended and tried to get answers on 14 questions that were given to Counsillor Sean Black and where, after council officers tried to declare it as confidential, they were still forced to answer a few questions in public. A win for the constituents.

We received recently a letter from Council officer Bruce James, writing that he has sent the Disputed Gassman report now to Derm.

That is 10 months to late too be included (before 28th of January) and even now too late since the Council has adopted the still secret new plan without any input from the landowners except from Stockland who was included in the decision making over our properties which they do not own.

Mr James than gave a written answer to all those questions in the way we can expect from this Council.

I will only bother with one important question since the other are written in the same deliberately confusing methods.

No 1.
Key scientific report, that substantiates the environmental difference in the Bahrs Scrub N-W corner, has been kept from Derm and DLGP on purpose by Council officers. Why?
Mr James responded”
The key scientific report referred to the question was a report commissioned by the Bahrs Scrub Public Interest Group[ and prepared by Gassman Development Perspectives dated January 2011.
The report was received and assessed as a submission (No 43).

The question ask is—why was this report deliberately kept from the DERM and DLGP?

There is no statutory obligation on Council to provide the State Government with a copy of each and every submission received.
Nevertheless, Council did provide the DERM with a summary of those submissions relevant to environmental considerations, including a précis of the issues raised in this report. This was attached to a letter sent to DLGP and DERM on 21 April 2011.

Our conclusion :
Under the Freedom of information Act, we received this particular letter send to DERM on 21 April 2011 and THERE IS NO SUBMISSION NO 43.
Submission 42 is sent by A&A Schell where conveniently the most important parts were left out, being the questioning of the position and the width of the WiMA 2.
Then under submission 42 suddenly continues with a section(3/4 page) that comes out the Gassman report (23 pages) without mentioning it, and tells us nothing. It is so blatant obvious that they tried to hide it for further scrutiny.
You can only conclude that the Councillors allow the officers to run the Council and do whatever they want. The question is why did the council officers want to mismanage and manipulate this development. What were the benefits to them
To do this?
It is important to know that Stockland drew up this development, and made a payment to the Council to do this.

How would you feel if your land is suddenly declared wild life corridor
and your future and financial life is sudden put on hold for 3 years by a few faceless man in the Council. Is this Russia or China? It could not be Australia could it??
Yes it is happening here in Queensland

Concerned citizens

Tuesday and Wednesday meetings

2011-11-30T22:35:00.000+10:00

Sorry, I had a very long day yesterday, frustrating too, and I was not at today's meetings so I'm just reading the Agenda documents. Yesterday the first meeting was the Animals & City Standards committee meeting first. Partly due to the influence of the chairman this meeting tends to be a rambling thing from time to time and, certainly, not much is done to keep councillors to the subject of the discussion.

It is frustrating that a meeting worth, maybe, twenty minutes takes forty-five minutes to finish.

Item AS1, the monthly report for the animals & pest service has a raft of stuff in paragraph two about the number of cats and dogs handled by them. Paragraph 2.8 on Page 3 shows the results for the council inspection of Woodridge, Loganlea and Park Ridge. If you want to know why council does these house-by-house inspections you only have to read that.

Item AS2, Animal Management Strategy Progress Report, deals with a strategy to keep the city safe over the 2011 to 2015 period. There are some nice aims in the strategy, but the sting for some dog owners is on page 9's table. You can see an explanation for what is happening under the table. Cr Bradley spoke about the issue and they decided to make a recommendation that the State government clean up the Animal Management (Cats & Dogs) Act 2008. There's little chance that anything will come of doing that, even if there are only the government members in the house on another sitting day!

The main problem is that the cognisant Minister is Paul Lucas.

Item AS3, the Inspection Program, has recommendations for the start and end dates of the program starting on page 30 of the Agenda. It covers from January to June 2012 and from July to mid-December. This is a very long program and I think that council is pushing its limits. For one thing I don't think that there is the manpower available to do the work. The KPI for this is devolved from the Corporate Plan's to encourage community health and wellbeing.

Item AS4, The City Standards monthly report, identifies changes to legislation, on page 31, that is subject of the report. There are a whole lot of other charts and tables showing results for the branch. I don't have the energy for the analysis. Maybe a reader can come up with an explanation for us?

We also suffered through a period where Cr Bradley spoke from the far end of the room, having turned completely away from her microphone and the officer, also a quiet speaker, didn't have her volume control set to be audible. I was quite surprised when Cr Able reminded both that he could not hear what they were saying at the other end of the room from the public. Not much changed.

In General Business Cr Black said that he was concerned about shopping centre carpark charging and the affect it would have on the surrounding residences. Cr Dalley said that the next meeting has an Item covering the issue. Black was barely restrained and went on to election advertising, particularly by candidates against sitting councillors. I almost fell out of my seat. Last election Black was one of the people pressing the laws to the very limit! Anyway, he suddenly stopped what he was saying and sat quietly again. Pidgeon complained about an election-sign trailer and car parked on the side of the road where it might have caused a danger to motorists. You'd think that councillors with their open-line to the police would be able to deal with that sort of thing themselves! He also asked, "Do we have Main Roads on side?"

If they cannot, why bring it to a meeting? Does he think that dumping on Main Roads one week and asking for their help the next is a good way of cooperating together?

Cr Grant spoke about Jerry-built add-ons to homes that were accepted by private certifiers. He wanted to know the process to cope with the situation. The officer said that they get a show cause notice first. Usually expecting and answer in a month—maybe 20 days. After that, if there is no reply they used the provisions of the Sustainability Planning Act to force compliance and that might take months.

Cr Able reminded they wanted a report on the number and value of outstanding fines due to the council and that became Item GB1. The meeting closed at 9.15 am.

The Planning & Development committee meeting was running by 9.25 am and Items PD1 and PD2 were done in a moment. The first was the Development Assessment branch monthly report and the second the branch's resolved appeals. The only appeal that is shown as resolved is Stockland's that involves Jimboomba where they were against the Chinese restaurant and The Coffee Club (TCC) being granted a license for liquor trading. The part that has been settled is the MCU regarding TCC. There are nice plans at pages 28, 29, 30 and 33.

Item PD4, Logan Urban Design Awards Update, has run into a scheduling problem and will be put off until May 2012, at least. There are two full pages of recommendations from page 70.

These sort of competition-awards things allows councillors minds to run wild with alternative and self-promoting suggestions for how the panels can be done differently. Not better, you understand, differently. In the end they ran with the recommendations.

Item PD5, an Information Report on Amendments to the Plumbing and Drainage Act 2002. This Bill, that is sitting in State Parliament, will introduce changes that have councillors hackles raised. The main issue seems to be that plumbing companies can decide to make additions and renovations to houses and offices without asking council first. Taking from council their ability to sit back and be asked nicely if work can be undertaken and then being able to rate the property without doing anything except reading their documents is a serious issue for councils. But the big companies have obviously got the Minister in their hand.

Cr Dalley lead the way to a motion that has council making strong representations to the Minister, the Department and to the Local Government Association Queensland. I'm not sure what they will do if the government goes ahead with the Bill and it becomes amendments to the Act.

Item PF6, is a request for councillors to allow a more streamlined compliance system. This was agreeed in a moment. Item PD7, about a court appeal, saw us banned from the meeting while they debated and then return for the voting, A Yea to the proposals.

Item PD3, a relocatable homes at Carbrook was put on the skids right away and the councillors confirmed the negative recommendations.

In General Business for the Development Assessment (DA) manager Cr Pidgeon wondered if they could get a report about the Old BSC area DA requests. The Deputy CEO thought that was too big a task. Cr Power said that they wanted only undecided applications. This became GB1 and they were off again, hoe to manage the impact of commercial buildings lights on residential premises. Another was that one property had been changed so that all the flow of water off the property had been redirected through a pipe to a single point to run over the neighbour's.

The officer was trying to say that the water was already, naturally, draining across to the other. He couldn't see that redirecting all of the water to a pipe to run next-door would be an issue.

I have to say, here, that I have a conflict of interest: one of my neighbours has a dam that overflows into my place at just one point. It scours a channel as it flows and almost uproots the posts and fence.

I was wondering how closeted in his office this officer was! Did he not understand the implications of what he was saying? Even the Deputy CEO was talking a lot of waffle in support of his staff. Finally the chairperson said, "Take it on board fellas!" I'm not sure how the officers will take that remark, but she normally means what she says.

Just after they started to discuss Item PD10, Central Beenleigh Revitalisation Project, I left the meeting for another appointment. I'm told that the meeting lasted about another 15 minutes for that and the last Item PD11, Draft Logan Central Master Plan.

Sorry, change of plan. I'm going to leave today's meetings to another day.

Last week of committee meetings this calendar year

2011-11-28T20:40:00.000+10:00

There was a good crowd of people for today's City Roads Infrastructure committee meeting. I guess that Cr Pidgeon knew that there was a late-Item on the agenda and he wanted to parade that before his constituents—see the Chairperson's Agenda from the link above. It's a pity he didn't just drop me an email, and that is another reason I dislike the secrecy that exists in council.

Item IN1, a starred report, was done in a moment. Nothing contentious in it either. One of the things that I did notice, there was nothing about the progress of the Edwards bridge that used to have its own report every meeting. The other is that the new waste service is said to be causing a rise in annual road maintenance costs, from $60 thousand to $220 thousand. I'm astonished that this was not foreseen in the budget. The report also identifies that a "maintenance of service levels" budget item, for road maintenance, was not approved last June. This represents a $431 thousand shortfall, on page 8. It is hardly any wonder that they are unable to keep up with deterioration due to every-day traffic levels.

Maybe the councillors were trying to bury the bad news? I didn't look further.

Item IN2, about the Luscombe weir near Cedar Creek took up a lot of time. One of the prominent issues is that it is a shared infrastructure item and much depends on what GCCC wants to do. But they talked for about 20 minutes about all sorts of things before instructing the Infrastructure and the Environment officers to liaise with GCCC officers.

As predicted the Div 11 councillor was not there today to ride herd on Item IN3, Upgrade of Greenbank School car park. The report identifies that money is coming from at least four sources and that for one of those there is a need to spend it soon because potential elections might freeze the State government's spending intentions.

Item IN4, about land for SES in Jimboomba points out that council owns the parcel where the high-level water tank exists next to the school at 91 Brisbane Street. The Item was voted in a moment. Item IN5, Translink Bus Stop Upgrade Program, survived a question by Cr Bradley and was voted in two moments. IN6, the South East Busway Extension Review, suffered a question by Bradley about detail and mapping. Crs Bradley and Grant said that they wanted to be consulted.

Item IN7, Bicycle Facilities at the Loganlea Interchange, was also questioned for detail. Bradley, Grant and Lutton want to see the details. Item IN8, about the last Logan Road Safety Advisory Committee meeting was kissed-off as soon as it was announced.

The new Item IN9, Park Ridge Connector—Results of Consultation, end up being a damp squib because the consultation period has been extended to 2 December and that has placed council in the position of having to wait, now, until the first round of meetings in January. Boo-hoo!

I felt sorry for the members of the public who had sat quietly through the meeting, only to be told it was all over. But they stayed to the end of the meeting—such stamina should have been rewarded but Monday's meetings don't even deliver morning tea to us at all. Again the spectre of the State government elections was creeping around the meeting room ready to bite the unwary councillor who thought it would be easy.

In General Business for the managers, councillors asked about signs, about most-affected residents, about property on Green Road and repair of potholes and whether it would be reasonable to apply a $10 per ratepayer levy, per account, to pay for repairs. One councillor, not known for his mental processes, offered that that was $60 per year. Grant, just the opposite, corrected him to $40/year. The Deputy CEO broke in to say that it is a budget discussion and present councillors are not to become involved. Grant said that too many drivers are saying that they have suffered damage from pot holes. Hackwood said that at least those people were driving on paved roads. Leaving us all to consider the alternative.

Cr Power raised the issue of parking at the Logan Hyperdome and what would happen if management decided to charge for longer-term parking. This made it into GB2 as a report to be delivered. I was fascinated again today at the number of motions from the floor were bandied about. Not one reasonably researched or written in draft.

The Roads Infrastructure Management Manager reported that since the flood maps were placed on council's web site there had been 3000 different people look at them and each accessed about three pages.

The meeting closed at 11.03 am.

The Environment & Sustainability committee meeting got going at 11.13, right on time. Item ES1, Waste Services Branch Monthly Report, was wrapped-up quicker than I can type this far!

In General Business for the manager Cr Dalley asked if the truckload of dead chooks that arrives at the tip every Saturday couldn't be scheduled for a weekday? The manager acknowledged the smell problem and said that they dug pits for them, but with little improvement. Cr Able asked what was the reaction to the new State levy and he was told that it doesn't start until Thursday, that there was good signage out and they still expect grumbles.

Cr Grant wanted to talk to the manager, ex-meeting, about rubbish trucks digging up pads where bins were located and the strife that causes. It seems to me that this is another result of the two-bin service where the contractor has to get the greatest productivity from the staff. Meaning faster work practices and less care for turning circle diameters.

Item ES2, Slacks Creek Futures Study—Tender Awarded, was gone in a moment. Some wanted to make Item ES3, Coal Seam Gas Exploitation, into a political issue. Cr Black asked, did the manager realise that some Millstream Road properties were subject to exploration. The manager gave a longish spoken report and pointed to page 30's list that says it all. Cr Dalley said that she was opposed to CSG operations but that she thought that people had, primarily, to know why they opposed CSG exploration and exploitation. There is a good-definition map of the license blocks on page 38 and it is surprising how close to Cedar Grove one comes.

Item ES4, an E&S Monthly Report was gone, as was Item ES8, about Community Briefing! Item ES9, a progress report on Managing Our Waterways, was just as quickly disposed of. Item ES5, about the Flinders Karawatha Corridor drew a great amount of irrelevant comment and was passed. Item ES6, the Blackwell Street Wetland, needs to have a contract in place and work started—fear of State elections again. Done.

The manager spoke to Item ES7, Community Environment & Sustainability Awards, with some passion. He said that for a very modest cost we could be recognising people's commitment. Item ES10, Transport Noise Corridors, was beyond my understanding because all the councillors had the maps at Appendix A and none of the public did. You'll see that there are two maps from page 398. I understand that at some level of zoom some colours are detectable on the pages and they change from place to place along their length.

There was no General Business for the manager and the meeting closed at 12.07 pm.

Tuesday meetings

2011-11-28T00:27:00.000+10:00

The two meetings on Tuesday begin at 8.30 am. The Animals & City Standards committee starts first. It has four Items, three are simple reports and shouldn't take more than a few minutes. Item AS3, Approved Systematic Inspection Programs for Unregistered Cats and Dogs, is the one to watch for. It will give authority for council staff to come onto your property at certain times of the day and days of the week over some calendar months to look for those animals.

I don't generally quibble about these sorts of fishing expeditions by council staff if they were really doing their jobs. But I don't think they are, in the more rural areas. There are too many feral animals in those areas and, because it is far better to get results in the city areas, they concentrate their efforts there.

If you're at all concerned just check for the inspection dates in the Agenda papers that come available on the Internet at about 8.30 am, on Tuesday.

The following meeting, that should start at 9 am, is the Planning & Development committee meeting. There will be at least eleven Items, two closed to the public and three kiss-off reports. Four of the others seem to be open-and-shut cases unless someone hasn't read his agenda papers and will ask a series of questions that will have obvious answers.

There will be a discussion about the deputation's presentation about the Central Beenleigh Revitalisation Project. But it shouldn't take long.

With any sort of luck the meeting will be over by 10.30 am.

Last round of meetings for 2011 this week

2011-11-26T13:51:00.000+10:00

On Monday there's the last round of committee meetings for this calendar year. City Roads Infrastructure committee and Environment & Sustainability committee meetings start at 10 am. The other meetings follow from Tuesday morning when they start at 8.30 am.

Without checking each individual List of Items, the whole week's Lists appear to be there. One I did notice was in the Health, Sport & Community Services committee, Item HC9, Community Gardens Policy Final Endorsement.

The City Roads committee has a more substantial List this week with eight Items. However, five are kiss-off Items. Item IN3, Upgrade to Car Park at Greenbank State School, might see the reappearance of our divisional councillor for this Dear to her heart piece of business. But I understand that she is waiting on a more important decision from another court.

Item IN4, Land for Future Jimboomba State Emergency Service Use, might also be an interesting item. I had no idea that the issue was still up in the air, as it were. You could ask why this issue had not been decided long ago.

The second meeting has ten Items, four are kiss-off things. Item ES5, Flinders Karawatha Corridor, seems like a reaction to the Commonwealth government's declaration that I posted for you on 13 November at the above link. Item ES7, Community Environment and Sustainability Awards, sometimes creates surprises. I hope that a couple of the NGOs' representatives can be at the meeting to give the councillors a bit of steel for their decisions.

Otherwise the meeting is about waterways and noise corridors.

I keep barking at councillors about the fact that they keep deciding to not allow the public to see the whole of the committee Agendas at the same time as they are available to councillors, usually by the Friday before the meeting, but at least two days before any meeting. For various reasons they are afraid to allow us immediate access to the complete agenda for meetings.

I keep offering that they need the additional scrutiny of the public to alert them to things that are not right, things that were overlooked and things that you would only know from a historical or immediate view. I've also pointed out here, often enough, that some councillors come to meetings without ever having read their agenda documents.

Their response to that is that it is up to each councillor to vote for or against making agendas open to the public and that there is no movement, at present, to make them available.

I think that it is an election issue because, at their first meeting, councillors make a number of decisions that will carry through for the rest of their four-year term. Those issues have traditionally been voted the same way for the last, almost, 20 years! No right to information has ever crept in to disturb councillors' post-election meetings.

Ask your candidates why.

How to build a road

2011-11-23T21:50:00.002+10:00

Just before I get going on the main story, please pay heed to the following if you rely on Caller ID on your phone for deciding to pick it up. Who's on the line is a NY Times story that we can no longer trust Caller ID. Not that it should bother Cedar Grove residents, we've not even got it now!

There have been a number of comments to my Park Ridge Connector article about road-building that I'd like to try to help people understand what goes on in public roadworks.

We can all look at what is happening around Chambers Flat Road and Crowson Lane to think that we know how a road is built. And you're right. The only problem is that it is just the last, two-year stage, of the event. The beginning was long, long ago and far, far away—Ok, no more.

Back in the mid-1990s there was a new guidebook called SEQ 2021, I still have a copy somewhere, that was about peering into the future—a good bit over 20 years into the future. I believe, I'll take no bets on this, that it was the first rational planning instrument for this area, ever. Prior to that it was a Joh and Russ Hinze scene where politicians did what seemed right at the time, to get more votes. Long-range planning took a back seat because the civil servants could never outguess the politicians. What could be the point of planning something that was never going to please the politicians? How could you know?

SEQ 2021 must have taken years to get written. A really hard bit must have been to get people in Departments thinking on a rational basis about the future when that was not a skill in demand just a short while before. When you think that civil engineers, for example, might have a 50-year government-employment history you can understand that some of the current heads of department must have seen the death throes of their superiors in some numbers, during that time.

Just as an aside, I saw something like that situation when we changed from being an electrical-driven society to an electronic society. I felt really sorry for the older blokes who couldn't cope. It was a disaster for them, then. Probably many of you have been through that same kind of upset?

I was told once that SEQ 2021 took four years to assemble, I can believe that sort of scramble to get it together and out there into the hustings. Re-educating some would have taken much of the time. Finding non-government experts in things like ecology would have been scarce and distrustful too. Their information would have been as scratchy as a wombat in the sun. Developing an environmental situation where people's competence was able to stand the test of education or just feet-on-the-groud knowhow would have been a raucous situation where none trusted the other. And that problem still lingers in planning circles today. To some extent.

It wasn't a great result. But remember that it was a first step. Many people went through the re-education better than others. Some people went to sleep during this period but everybody, except the non-government ones, were drawing salaries to keep planning and co-ordinating with other government departments. In many cases, not particularly well.

You could see the prior result, still, in Local Government of the late-90s. Not one Department or Branch was in the habit of talking to the others. Of all of them, finance was the most walled-off. You may remember that the public counter for customer service in Beaudesert was the finance department. They controlled everything. Except planning and development, and most of that was still being done at the behest of councillors who had been required by law to stop doing that in 1993. Still the old Joh and Russ syndrome there.

By the turn of the century it was obvious to everyone with a particle of brain that SEQ 2021 was not the instrument that everybody thought it was to be. There was a lot of white-anting about its structure too. During this time some of the NGOs were also expressing their powers, catchment and other authorities. This was partly in response to more government money being available to do that sort of work on issues in SEQ and offshore.

Wait a mo—I'm getting close to today now.

There was likely about eight hard years of work, by numbers of end-of-the-road people and likely-lads coming up, to get to the realisation that what they had created was a mini-disaster. It was about that time that people realised that their long-range plans were not long-range enough and that realisation was enough to get government moving again. It didn't help that along with the NGOs there were small groups, like LARC and LACA, that were joining the chorus all over South East Queensland.

Nor did it help that some smarty-pants people, immigrants from Victoria and New Zealand for example, who were putting pressure on all levels of government to pick up their socks and do decent jobs of consulting with folks out beyond the black stump at the edge of the urban splurge. There were Pyrrhic victories on the government side and substantial ones on the non-government side. There are still senior mandarins in government that think that people do not need a voice in these issues because they were elected or appointed to exercise the public good in every case.

None of this disguises the fact that governments have planners in every department, even local governments have them. Just as they have mouth-pieces to speak for them they have both political and technical planners.

We now have a document—instrument—SEQ 2031 that has been around for a couple of years, I guess since 2008—I just cannot remember for sure. There's a bunch of very squiggly lines on the SEQ maps showing where roads are going to go. Some of them outrageously in the wrong places. Sometimes the words don't have a jot of concurrence with the artist's impression on the map. But, as time has gone along there have been proper maps showing where road and rail corridors will go. I'll not be surprised to hear that you have never heard that in about 2008, just before the last local body elections, there was work done on a corridor for rail—and maybe road in due course—to go from Kagaru, across the south of Ipswich, to Amberley Air Base. Already planned, signed and sealed. I have no idea, but I wouldn't be surprised that land has already been acquired.

And that is another issue. The way that governments acquire land for infrastructure is a shambles. It is no wonder that people are afraid of having their land taken. However, there was a good start when they planned the Mary River dam from a land acquisition point of view—not the planning for the dam! They went and bought all the land that would be involved and left the original-owners on it to continue as long as they wished under peppercorn rentals.

I know that has fallen into bad times, since. But that is more a stupidity of government that has caused that to happen.

One of the reasons that governments should buy land early for their long-term projects is to help people adapt and move on. Buying land from people residing in an area as early as possible is, in my opinion, a good government principle. Especially when the people have the money and can stay as long as they like, except for the limitation of being removed at construction time. It gives people a nest-egg to do what they like about. Buy new, buy existing or not move and invest elsewhere. Any other combination too, because it is their money. Just that when they move out the department owns the property and can lease it until the last minute.

You can see that we're getting ourselves into social sciences and people-friendly activities here. Not your rough and tumble buy and sell stuff of the property market. Unfortunately, having those altruistic inclinations is not a public-servant skill or priority. And that is why our Sustainable Planning Act 2009 is not up to scratch.

Don't get me wrong, some public servants are much better at their jobs that you might think! Many can be really sympathetic with your fate, face-to-face. But, too often, they are hamstrung by regulations and not able to tell you exactly that. I have to say that I know people who have damned the consequences and been great examples to follow, but not very many. Mostly the really smart ones.

People who contribute to the guts of such as SEQ 2031 can be called all sorts of names, planners mostly. Maybe infrastructure planners. Mostly they reside in head offices because the mandarins like it that way. These days, to a large extent, they work off aerial photogrammetry. While the science is very good, those people never walk on the ground, never see a person or house in reality. Never look at a garden over the fence. They send surveyors out to do work to confirm their deliberations.

Don't get me wrong, photogrammetry is very good. The military and the mapmakers have it tuned to a high degree. The problem is, in my mind, the planners no longer need to step outside the office door, except to go to the pub or go home.

I'm going to cut this off here. Once the surveyors have done their initial jobs there might be a break of a small number of years, ten or so, until you see more surveyors who are working for the contractor that will dig the land into the needed shape. That is another story, and many of you who live south of Jerry's Downfall will have watched the processes after that.

If you want more, just ask.

Are wind turbines worth building

2011-11-22T18:41:00.000+10:00

This article from The Guardian asks whether Prince Phillip is right, or is he wrong, about wind farms in the UK. Do windfarms work? is based on UK experience but draws in a lot of data from other parts of the world. It asks questions that I didn't think about before too.

Just remember that our power station, Swanbank, is a hybrid, three boilers putting out about 480 MW and one gas turbine of 385 MW output. The boilers can run on coal but I think that, mostly, they are burning gas now. Swanbank is also going to be attached to the new natural gas pipeline from NSW.

If you're interested in comparing wind power against traditional boiler technology, this article will give you something to think about. Remember that gas turbines are easier to throttle and shut down than boilers, but run at somewhat lower total efficiency.

Park Ridge Connector - New closing date for feedback

2011-11-21T17:46:00.000+10:00

The following email popped into my inbox today. I wouldn't think that you could expect any more displays and information.

Good Afternoon

Due to overwhelming public interest in the Park Ridge Connector Planning Study, the Department of Transport and Main Roads has extended the public submission period until Friday, 2 December, 2011.

Public displays closed on 18 November, however anyone wanting more information or to talk to a member of the Park Ridge Connector Planning Team can phone 1800 799 824, Monday to Friday 8.30am to 5pm.

This will allow any extra time for any residents wanting to have their say about the planning study. Anyone wanting to make a submission can email or post to Department of Transport and Main Roads, PO Box 442 Nerang QLD 4211.

Kind regards

Park Ridge Connector Project Team
South Coast Region
Program Delivery and Operations | Department of Transport and Main Roads

Satisfaction survey quadrant analysis 2011

2011-11-19T15:56:00.000+10:00

The Logan Listens 2011 survey was released by the last Ordinary meeting of council.

The following images show the Quadrant analyses for the whole of Logan and for the rural parts of Logan.

They are in the same format as last year. You should be able to recognise the way the data are presented, but to remind you—

The bottom and the left side of the chart is cut off because there are no results for those areas below about a 3 index in the whole of city one.
The charts show results out of five, three is an average score meaning neither good nor bad or we don't care.
In the rural chart the left edge is at 2.3 index, meaning that we hated those items close to that edge.
While the whole exercise is called a satisfaction survey it shows the importance of things too.
The stuff up in the top right corner is what council can be proud of. It is needed and they satisfy us with their performance.
Remember that this is our feedback to them. There's a lot they would like to say about the stuff top-right, but it is the whole left side and bottom-half that we know is not good enough.

You should be able to click on either image and get a larger, readable, diagram.

Public Trustee makes application for summary judgement

2011-11-18T14:39:00.000+10:00

There's a report, on line now, about today's hearing of an application by the Public Trustee.

One has to wonder why her "lawyers have withdrawn".

Thanks to a constant reader for this email reminder to me.

A messy Ordinary meeting at council today

2011-11-15T22:32:00.000+10:00

Today's Ordinary meeting of council was a bit of a muddle. Not a muddle caused by lack of control, so much, as a lot of messy processes going on that people didn't easily understand. One of the characterisations was that the five sets of agenda documents set out for the public were missing a bunch of pages that should have had the recommended resolutions for today's meeting. Some people were handicapped by the lack of information.

I did take care to see that the agenda sets available to reporters on their desk—there were only two reporters there today—did have the recommended resolutions there, but the detail for every meeting item—for example Item PD8 shown as a closed meeting—was not accurate. Another indication was that Cr Black, looking at his wife, made passing reference to their ongoing efforts to have a child. We also suffered Cr Black thanking Cr Dalley for her leadership in the Planning & Development committee, for Item PD8, when she convinced them to not close the meeting to the public as indicated in the agenda.

There were significant numbers of amended and left-over resolutions to be worked out today too. One can only wonder why a committee meeting with two agenda items could generate such confusion and helpless incomprehension in the attending public. There were about 40 members of the public there today too. It is a little hard to count exactly because there are, on some occasions, numbers of council officers there too. Suffice to say that, except for the journalists benches, most seats were filled with bums.

There were significant numbers, again, who were interested in the two Planning & Development Items PD1, Clutha Creek Sands, page 164, and PD8, Bahrs Scrub Net Developable Area Landowner's Concerns, Page 171, and they filled two rows of seats. As you would understand many people in the public gallery were likely to have things to say to each other at various stages. Few councillors took any notice except Cr Black who rose to accuse a particular person, who sat two seats away from me, of making a loud noise. However, the mayor wasn't interested and told him to take his seat again, immediately.

I thought that outburst was such a petty issue that should be beneath the dignity of a councillor. The amount of noise was certainly not as distracting as the very loud, fortunately brief, bursts of static noise from the new public address system that is intended to help the public hear what is being said. Those noises came at random throughout the morning after the committee reports were being considered.

The new animal keeping local laws were said to be commencing on Friday, 9 December 2011. I wouldn't trust that they really will give us 12 months to settle into them, but you should have a reasonable chance to work towards meeting their intent.

In re-reading my notes of the meeting I'd have to say that most of the talking from councillors was about their future election prospects or how to protect them in the face of a good-size gallery of voters. I was also struck, again, at the idea that they decided to have a security-staff member in the antechamber of the meeting room all of the time the meeting was in session.

I couldn't help chuckling to myself that he could have been there to ensure that the Conflict of Interest councillors, excused from the meeting, needed controlling by a security person. I can only say, again, that positioning a security staff member outside of a meeting like this does not demonstrate that the council trusts its residents. Doesn't believe that the public can control themselves or that there are councillors who are likely to step over the traces and need physically removing from the meeting. Which is it?

The issue of typographical errors in the record of the committee stages came up today too. Normally no one notices those and they get buried in the dark of the file repository. But, today, for some reason, Cr Lutton, sitting in the chair for the Mayor, out for CoI, towards the end of the Planning & Development report, took the councillors back to Item PD1 and had the Conditions for 1.1, 7.3, 9.1 and 16.1 re-voted to set the record straight. You can understand the uproar there might have been when the public documents on the day were deficient in detail and the council made the wrong conditions in a vote that we expected to be a different outcome.

Earlier in the meeting there had been remarks about what a wonderful council we had working diligently for us. By now there were about 40 people in the gallery who were either confused or thinking otherwise. I suppose that I should stop barking because they did go back and rectify the mistake that they found themselves.

During the passage of the Health, Sport and Community services recommendations at Item HC6, Jimboomba Junior Rugby League Club Inc proposal, the $100 thousand grant, Cr Black had the gall to get up and tell us how hard his colleague, Cr Black, had worked to get that money for the club and how some previous councillor had made a mess of it. There were changes to the Governance & Finance recommendations too. Mainly about the Allconnex Water system changeover. By the end of this part of the meeting Cr H Black returned to it.

There were two Mayoral Reports, MR1 about Logan Listens for 2011. The results of the survey about what residents, chosen at random, think about council. There was a briefing for journalists, both of them, after the meeting too. Yours truly was not invited again this year either. Maybe they didn't like my analysis last year? Item MR2, was a semi-secret report about Allconnex Water or water reform, or both.

Cr Pidgeon asked leave to present a number of petitions from his residents. There was little said, that I could hear, about their contents. I suspect that they are about the Park Ridge Connector.

And we had the General Business speeches. Normally these can be useful contributions to the way council goes about its everyday business or doesn't as the case may be. But we are now only four meetings from the elections and there is a lot of self-justification to be done. If only councillors would realise that they voted to stop recording minutes of any meeting, that there used to be up to seven reporters at their meetings and that few will remember what they said today, we might have more rational general business items.

Cr Smith was the only speaker who spoke about general business. He said that people needed to know that there were community engagement processes going on for the Parking Strategy, the Meadowbrook Master Plan and for Riverdale Park. Cr Dalley spoke about how well the planners had done in the last three and a half years and she pointed to the new Karawatha—Greenbank—Wyaralong corridor that had only just come to her attention. She said that it was a wonderful surprise to have it running along the back fence of her residential property.

Cr Pidgeon said that his residents were seriously concerned about the Park Ridge Connector route, particularly those who will live beside it, and he attempted to frame a motion that would be sent to the Minister about the shortness of the consultation period. The Mayor interrupted him and the DCEO for Infrastructure told us that the consultation ends on Friday 18 November and that council will get a report on the consultation at the next round of committee meetings to ruminate over. Pidgeon gave the answer for his rush by saying that he had to go to a public meeting this evening and explain what it was all about. He said that he thought they deserved answers. But he didn't elaborate on the questions. Maybe he knows what those are by now?

Cr Power told us about the pending amalgamation of the Loganholme and Beenleigh soccer clubs and then told us he shouldn't be lifting the lid on this piece of intelligence, that Loganholme will have Costco opening there soon. Mayor Parker said, "Darren can we not say any more!"

The meeting closed at 12.32 pm.

Ordinary council meeting 654 Tuesday

2011-11-14T19:32:00.000+10:00

There you go, we're almost there for the year, only one more Ordinary council meeting after Tuesday's. Number 655 it will be. When you realise that there are 16 such meetings a year it gives you an idea of how long the old girl has been running.

The one tomorrow will not be anything out of the box, no, that is next Ordinary meeting when Santa will come and embellish the season with little gifts for all. Tuesday will see awards presented to Staff. And there will be a report to be decided from last Tuesday's Planning & Development committee meeting, Item PD8.

I cannot make head or tail of the following. But Maybe one of you can help? Meadowbrook interests me because there is a small specialist medical centre there, a hospital and a coupe of training universities use the hospital as part of the campuses. There's also a rail stop, even for express trains.

That means that our only means of access, a private car, needs parking space for any of those activities and my family has been sorely tried recently in finding parking. See if you can make head or tail of this newsletter—

Meadowbrook Traffic Plan will be available for you to view and comment between the following dates:

Start date: 14/11/11 2:00 PM
End date: 2/12/11 6:00 PM

Please select the following link to view this event:
http://lcc-consult.objective.com/portal/roads/meadowbrooktmp

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address bar on your web browser.

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Feds take a hand in determining the Flinders Karawatha Corridor environment

2011-11-13T18:22:00.000+10:00

I know, I'm cheating a little but I want to give you the information from the horse's mouth. This Government announces 5 year vision for Flinders Karawatha Corridor item was released last Wednesday, 9 November. I've sat on it so that you've all likely to have read the council stuff and are hungering for something new.

This is the exact document from The Honourable Rachel Nolan, Finance, Natural Resources and The Arts—

South East Queensland’s last remaining unprotected bushland corridor is to be preserved through a five-year vision announced by Natural Resources Minister Rachel Nolan today.

Ms Nolan said the Flinders – Greenbank – Karawatha Corridor runs from Karawatha Forest in Brisbane’s south through the Greenbank Army Reserve and on to the Wyaralong Dam near Boonah.

“At 60km in length, it is the largest stretch of open eucalypt bushland in South East Queensland and includes rare flora and fauna including brush tailed rock wallabies, koalas and native olives,” Ms Nolan said.

“The land has a degree of protection through regional planning mechanisms but today’s move cements that protection. It is held in a mix of ownership from council nature reserves such as Karawatha in Brisbane to Ipswich’s White Rock Conservation Area to private landholdings.

“The corridor abuts the future growth areas of Greater Flagstone and Ripley meaning its preservation creates unique recreational opportunities for SEQ’s major future population centres.”

Ms Nolan said the corridor presented remarkable conservation and recreation opportunities for South East Queenslanders.

“Brisbane’s northside has the remarkable bushland of Mount Glorious and Mount Nebo on its doorstep. Preserving this corridor means that the growing southern and western regions can become green communities too,” she said.

“While government is already doing a great deal in the area to create outdoor recreation spaces such as the Mount Joyce Escape Park at Wyaralong Dam and the Boonah to Ipswich Rail Trail currently under construction, preservation of these lands mean that the whole region can ultimately provide recreational open space for South East Queenslanders.”

The five year vision includes three distinct phases –

1.Planning Protection for the corridor

Between now and December consultation will be undertaken with landholders, councils, the development industry, rural industry and green groups around precisely defining the boundaries of the corridor. The area, once refined, will trigger provisions of the Regional Plan to prevent urban development within the corridor.

It is expected that that protection can be applied by Easter 2012.

2.Tenure Resolution for corridor

The next step will be to determine how the publicly owned parts of the corridor are to be managed.

Consultation on tenure and management operations could be finalised by late 2013, allowing time for proper involvement of the local councils which have already purchased critical bushland areas. It will also be necessary to consult with private landholders who may be willing to provide conservation protection or public access to their lands in exchange for that land being used as offsets for bushland lost elsewhere.

3.Infrastructure Provision

Properly opening up the corridor to public access will involve the provision of infrastructure such as wildlife bridges and walking tracks. This infrastructure will be provided over time as funds become available.

The goal is to make the land connected for wildlife and people within five years.

Consultation on the first stage of protection opens today and will run until mid-December 2011.

Media Contact: 0400 367 174

This statement is likely to cukoo the plans of some big organisations.

Governance goes into water and development

2011-11-10T22:51:00.000+10:00

The Governance, Finance & Economic Development committee agenda this week is a big file, 17.3MB, it could blow a hole in your data allowance. But it does have a complete copy of the Annual Report for the last financial year. All 142 pages of it.

The meeting took a long time too. In part because some councillors could not restrain themselves from carping over and over about the way the council has been dealt a black hand by a range of external forces, including both superior governments and partner councils in the water enterprise. I do agree that they are coping with some ridiculous situations, but just regurgitating the same whining mantra again and again as each second Item is discussed is not healthy and costs a bomb in wasted time—particularly the employed staffs' time.

The meeting began at 8.34 am because there was no quorum, just seven needed, until then. Cr Smith, in the chair, pointed out that there would be presentations when the CEO could get there and at about 10 am. He wanted to rush through as much of the agenda before those happened.

We seem to be missing the Blacks a lot recently. If you look at page 204 in the Annual Report you will see that Ms Black appeared for only 78 of the 130 meetings held last year, so far, since 1 July, it has probably been for less than 25 percent of the meetings. But then, a councillor's duty is to the constituents and the general well-being of the division, not necessarily to attending meetings like all of the other councillors. I was told today that the football club at Tully Park will get their very large grant because the Mayor took up the necessary massaging of the State Government to ensure the passage of the grant.

There seems to be an error in the salaries paid to councillors on page 204 of the Annual Report too. Some of the non-chairpersons are shown with an inflated basic salary.

Item GF3, Budgeting and Planning Timetable 2012–2013, is about the manoeuvres necessary to accommodate the councillors' elections in March 2012 so that the following year's budget is agreed to and able to be voted into place by the incoming councillors. What it is telling us is that the staff will be doing a lot of the budget planning and the new councillors will be putting the final touches to it.

With a good Corporate Plan and an excellent Operational Planning system now in place it is only the really peculiar things about divisions that might need final adjustment in the budget. It is likely that a few mistakes will need covering up later, but the four-yearly elections give us a better overall budget system than the three-year system of earlier years. I think that the way that the Local Government Act requires a reliance on planning documents and that our council officers have been working on performance indicators has helped us get value for money too.

People tend to forget that a great council plans ahead. That it has plans, policies and processes in place for almost all contingencies and that the employed staff are competent at handling the exceptions makes for a great city to live in.

Items GF4 and GF6 were disposed in a moment. The discussion about Item GF6 was whether we had a chance of getting a realistic rental payment for the Rural Fire Brigade's piece of land in Jimboomba. Items GF7 and GF8 were also disposed of quickly. Item GF10, Mayor's and Councillors' Community Benefit Fund 2011–2012, ran into some difficulty because Cr Black was not there to detail his requested grants. It turned out that there were two different organisations with the same principal person. The monies were voted into place.

Item GF11, about meeting procedure, allowed for a lot of back-chat from Cr Able. He was pointing out that 26 years ago he and a few other councillors, long gone many of them, didn't have to put up with all of this crap. He could not see that his colleagues had recently as the last Ordinary meeting asked for this report on the ways to tighten the moving of motions in a way that the minutes secretaries could use and the other councillors could understand what they were voting about.

None of the more junior councillors bothered to disabuse him of his rant. There's a copy of the policy from pages 46 to 52.

At 9.10 am the meeting was closed to discuss Item GF5, Economic Development Branch Workshop on new Economic Development Strategy. An hour later it reopened and a minute later it had been closed again to discuss Items GF9 and GF1. The latter Item is about Logan Flood Mapping and it must have been very hard for councillors to come to a decision to let us all know what they know about flood-prone areas. Fancy having to decide to give up their ability to show us peasants how smart they are to know these sorts of things! The decision for GF9 was to have the solicitors to write a demand notice to the administrators to pay council the money the Rochdale Rovers Soccer Club owes.

A rear-guard action that should never have got that far.

By now it was 10.49 am and Item GF2, the CEO's briefing about the disestablishment of Allconnex Water was beginning. You can read the report at GF2 yourselves, but the CEO seemed to be saying that it is becoming a bigger and bigger muddle as time goes on. One thing that should be happening is that the Gold Coast City Council should be paying our costs of retrieving the bits we used to own, but it looks like GCCC will say, "Go blow" to our invoices, "Take us to arbitration and see how much you get."

It also looks like the State Government does not have the capacity or willingness to pass the necessary legislation to facilitate the return of our assets and dismember Allconnex Water. They have a Bill. But the process sees that there will be public consultation on it until the end of March 2012 and a report to Parliament in April but the bill contains legislation requiring councils to do certain things before April.

There were two recommendations to the report. They added another five to the list. Most of them are the result of frustration with everything to do with Allconnex.

Item GF15, a car park for the Logan Village Community Hall, came under discussion because they were trying to provide funds for something that will happen next year, at least after the elections, maybe later. Mr Oberhardt said that they could not allocate funds from the 2012–2013 budget year, not any way. Then someone realised that the money could be allocated this year and if the project was delayed the money could be carried over. That would not be very legal so they received the report, meaning that there would be nothing overt done.

Item GF12 was gone in a moment, Item GF13, about charges by the Regional Conduct Review Panel, caused an explosion because of the amount of an invoice to our council, and the lack of detail on it. It looks like making a serious complaint about the conduct of councillors will cost council almost $20 thousand a time if it is serious. Cr Able was wont to blame the people complaining. Again, none disabused him of his prejudices.

Smith, from the chair, reminded them of all of the recent escalating fees and charges from State level organisations. Electoral commission and Review Panel being just two examples.

Item GF14 was passed in a moment and in General Business for the Governance Manager Cr Able asked if the quorum for a meeting could be lowered to six members because of the absences of particular councillors. I thought that it was only one, really, and the chair could not get any interest in discussing the issue so he went to the next Items, GF16 and 17 that went right away. As did Item GF18, the Annual Report. The meeting closed at 12.19 pm.

Meetings still going on

2011-11-09T19:49:00.000+10:00

Even though I have not been there today the committee meetings go on. On Tuesday we had the Animals & City Standards committee and the Planning & Development committee meetings. Today it was the turn for the Health, Sport & Community Services committee and the Customer Service, Marketing & Parks committee meetings. I was absent for the two today.

The first meeting yesterday had two Items. Item AS1, the Animal Management Local Laws, was talked-up by the chairperson who said that the exercise of making them was a success story from the beginning to the end. Not anyone who could speak told him otherwise, nor did anyone say that they had a disaster on their hands after the first draft came out. Only after significant work with the professional breeders and keepers of animals had their say did the process get back on track. But, I suppose, if you want to call that sort of shambles a success story you can. And they are not keeping any meeting minutes so everyone will, probably, forget the false start. This blog post will be the only remaining record of the near disaster it was, and with no thanks to the people of the city at yesterday's first meeting!

People owning animals need to look at these Local Laws before too long. Yes, there are a lot more permitted animals and a lot less ground area needed to keep some of them. But there are some prohibited dogs, for example, there are siting limits for pens and suchlike and there are a few other little traps. There will be nothing for it but to read through much of the 340 pages from page 11 onward. Pages 1 to 9 will give you background on them.

The General Business for the manager after this Item was less than I had anticipated.

As expected, some councillors wanted expert legal advice immediately that Item AS2, Neighbourhood Disputes Resolution Act 2011, was introduced to the meeting. Needless to say, 25 minutes later they stopped talking and the meeting closed at 9.05 am. The problem that I have with the way that councillors handle the notification of Acts that impact on the way council does its business with residents, or does not do it, is that they expect officers to have an intimate knowledge of the Act and the way it will operate.

Reality is that it is almost impossible to say what the early cases through the courts are going to discover. It is often the case that the law drafters have made mistakes. It is sometimes the case that solicitors, advising clients, make mistakes and occasionally the case that the magistrates and other low-level judges make poor decisions. In the case of new Acts, you read what it says and you try to follow what that means to you.

What I am trying to tell you is that in the case of this particular law you cannot rely on the advice of most councillors, and the good ones will tell you that straight off.

When she opened the Planning & Development committee meeting, Cr Dalley made a very blunt statement about the first Agenda Item—PD1, MCUI/23/2009—Material Change of Use—Clutha Creek Quarry—Negotiated Decision, she said that she was in two minds but that the dominant one was to just refuse the negotiated decision and tell them to take council to court. But, she pointed out, there were minor mistakes in conditions that had been made in the previous decision that needed some repair.

There was a largish crowd of people sitting behind me, people from the neighbourhood of the quarry, and they were obviously pleased with the first bit but apprehensive by the end of Dalley's speech. But it seemed to get councillors onto the right track even if, at first, they didn't know what that track might have been.

After a bit of fruitless back and forth, by others, Cr Grant offered that he was prepared to move a series of motions to address individual conditions that had been negotiated. His offer was taken up by all. Starting at page 15 of the report, according to my scribbled notes and understanding of the things said, they approved condition 1.1 (the words in bold), the same for 7.3 on page 17, Condition 9.1 too. Cr Smith, taking the bit between his teeth, moved to strike condition 13.2 (in bold) from the recommendations. Grant again moved 16.1 to approve, the old (not bold parts) of 16.4 and 16.5 to to be reinstated, 16.6 to be reinstated as 16.6, and 18.4 on page 22 to be approved as it was.

Largely, the amended-out words, except for very few, were to be returned to the conditions. The Deputy CEO reminded them that they also needed to endorse the balance of the conditions that they had not either approved or rejected so far. Cr Grant said that he was not prepared to do that and Cr Smith asked Cr Power if he was satisfied with the re-vegetation provisions in condition 17. Power was, and Smith moved the balance of the recommendations and the chair was looking for a seconder, Cr Able stepped into the breech. The motion was lost.

Cr Power questioned what the intention was and asked, We're just re-approving the conditions we have approved in an earlier meeting? Dalley agreed that he was right. Cr Grant offered that they had just firmed the whole recommendation up. DCEO Pickering asked if they could [see their way to] resolve to approve the amendments to the recommendations. Dalley pointed to the screen on which a new set of recommendations had been assembled from the remnants of the old one by the minutes secretary.

That was voted into place and they moved on to Item PD2, MCUI/113/2008 Accommodation Units (Relocatable Home Park) Jimboomba Lakes, that is just to the north of the Shell servo and immediately south of Jimboomba Creek. Black declared a conflict and stayed, Power did too and left. Cr Pidgeon want to know why this was still on council's books. He said that being left over from BSC and 2006 was not a good reason and he thought it was a waste of officer's time. The DCEO said that they know it has been dragged out but council has to process it. Pidgeon pointed out that the area was subject to flooding. They refused it on the grounds stated.

You can see how much work is involved even with a refused development application. To some extent there is more to justifying a refusal than to justifying a grant of the application.

Item PD3, about changes to a delegation of authority was resolved in a few seconds. The remainder of the meeting was to be closed to the public and as the chair started to sort out how to handle the conflicts of interest and ensuring that for each item there would be a quorum, I left.

Each closed Item would have had an open-to-the-public vote on the recommendations. Closed items always have, for the public to see, a For consideration annotation because they don't want us to know anything about the recommendations.

In earlier days the council made every attempt to even disguise what the purpose of the discussion would be. We pointed out, fruitlessly at first, that they had, under the Act, to say what the purpose of the discussion was, and that we would refuse to leave the meeting if they would not follow the law. At that stage they instituted a system in the Agenda of including a Purpose of Report section where the letter of the law is satisfied. Well, usually, the wording is good enough to satisfy members of the public.

All of the recommendations will be summarised in next Tuesday's Ordinary meeting agenda papers, we will get to see them then.

A piece of late-unfolding information: I was advised this evening, Wednesday, that when it came to Item PD8, Bahrs Scrub Net Developable Area Landowner's Concerns, Cr Dalley, with the agreement of the meeting and to the delight of the public at the meeting, decided to not close the meeting for that Item. I understand that this was not entirely to Cr Black's benefit when he was trying to raise certain matters, but they all persevered and came to a conclusion, with everyone who came from the Bahrs Scrub area much more satisfied with that result than they could have been with a closed meeting.

This is such a wonderful result that I'm finding it difficult to explain how hard it has been to get council to this point. Just a month over four years.

I can tell you that it has been a massive shift in the way the officers, lead by their Deputy CEO, have accepted that it is better to allow discussion of some issues in public when a representative number of petitioners turn up to the meeting. I can also say that it must have been a great leap of faith for the councillors, under the guidance of a competent and considerate chairperson, to agree to do something that has been on their conscience but just beyond their grasp and hearts, for years. I understand that Cr Black also contributed by recognising the need to keep his mouth shut when he might have wanted to sway his colleagues with confidential information.

I also think that there was, at the time I left the meeting, a greater showing of ordinary people for a planning and development committee meeting than I have ever seen. Council and councillors have always said that they want more people to come to their meetings and to understand the sort of issues that they face every day. I'm glad that everyone saw something about open meetings that none had seen before at Logan City Council. Choice as!

Because of more commitments I didn't go to both of today's meetings.

You can read the Agendas for yourselves. I expect that I'll get more feedback at tomorrow's Governance, Finance & Economic Development committee meeting. Sorry, I had thought to tell you some simple things I could have said about today's meetings, but the news that PD8 was opened to the public has completely taken the wind out of my sails. I'm becalmed and wallowing in sentiment. You don't want to read that!

Two easy meetings—one made hard

2011-11-07T19:22:00.000+10:00

There was the City Roads Infrastructure committee meeting at 10 am today. I managed to solve the mystery of where the three, yes three, properties were by reading the Agenda and listening to the conversation. Item IN1, Update on Land Acquisitions for 41 and 43 Rowland Street and 123 Macquarie Way, is not about those streets just anywhere, the first two are in Slacks Creek and the last one is actually at 1–3 Macquarie Way, Berrinba.

Did you get it? Someone said to another, "One to three" and the typist duly punched-up "123" so that future searches for the address will not find it! Would you think of converting 1–3 into 123? Me either! All the addresses now owned by the council.

The addresses are death-traps when it is pouring with rain and the council intends to install covered or improved drains.

In General Business Cr Dalley was predicting that in the coming wet season council would experience a major outgoing of funds if the drainage situation, generally, was not tidied up. She was speaking to a sympathetic audience in the Deputy CEO and the Manager present. The DCEO offered, however, that because of the number of treatments needed for situations it was not always possible to be prepared enough in all likelihoods. Dalley said that in that case council needs to be aware of the financial cost of this summer. Cr Bradley, with her Environmental hat on ahead of time offered some advice to the others as well.

Cr Grant wanted to talk about work signs. He was told to bring the issue up after the meeting. Cr Bradley wanted to talk about the footpath on Frankum Drive, Underwood, where, partly because of no kerb and channelling partly because of a narrow road, many cars were forced too park half-on the footpath where the foot traffic was impeded. Cr Able, the sage as ever, said that, "We did this to ourselves." He also pointed to a Policy that was traced, by the minutes secretary in a minute, to be from 17 December 1998.

We heard Cr Power berating the officers for the case of a roundabout in his area that was dangerous when it was designed, dangerous when it was constructed and dangerous to road-users in its use. He said that it took another six months, after an accident, to fix the problem. Power hardly knows when to shut up, when he has made his point. Ultimately the DCEO told him that he should have gone to the manager and not kept barking at the staff. He said that the manager would have raised the issue with him, the DCEO, and the problem would have been funded and gone away.

You can hardly blame the DCEO for being a little vexed that Power waits until well after the fact to attempt to embarrass the senior management in a meeting like this. Particularly not when even after he had the explanation he kept on about the likelihood of motorists being killed. Does he think that his part of the city is the only place that is dangerous to drive? He should try getting onto the Logan Motorway from Mt Lindesay Highway at peak traffic hours.

Cr Pidgeon saw the need to add to Power's voice and was told that there was a need for internal solutions, if possible and that sometimes there was no funding available. Power added that someone could have got killed. This resulted in a motion, dictated by the DCEO, to have a report to councillors about the KPIs in use and the regard for response times. The motion was resolved and the meeting closed at 10.21 am.

Councillors decided to have a private meeting until 11 am when the Environment & Sustainability committee meeting was to start. We sat in the antechamber and talked to each other for the forty minutes. Item ES1, Waste Services September 2011 Quarterly Complaint Report, shows that the July month, when there was a new service, that lead to many complaints. I suppose we can all recognise, now, that the contractor would have to start the day earlier and that the recycle bins would be emptied five or six hours before we were used to them being done.

Item ES4, in the chairperson's report, Waste Services Branch Monthly Report for September 2011, caught a couple of councillors on the hop, having not read this late addition to the agenda papers. Cr Bradley, the chairperson for this committee had the Item moved, seconded and resolved before one councillor could open his mouth to cry halt. Too bad!

Not reading the agenda papers before a meeting is one of the greatest crimes that people attending meetings commit. I have no sympathy with that in this city because council is required to keep agenda documents from the public in case we bug councillors about issues over the weekend before the meeting. The solution to missing out on picking up their agenda papers is in their own hands!

Item ES2, Amendment of 2011–2012 Waste Disposal Charges due to State Government Levy, seemed to also catch some councillors on the hop. This levy, an additional $35 per tonne of commercial waste, has been simmering on the stove, as an imposition beginning 1 December, since late March of this year. The agenda shows that the current fee for tonnage will rise from $79 to $118 and the small-vehicle load from $9 to $17.

Cr Able was telling everyone, who would listen, that council has become a tax-gatherer for the state government. Wasn't it ever so?

Black offered his opinion that the ALP government would be run out of parliament at the next election and that this matter should be deferred until after the election when he was certain that the LNP would reverse the imposition of the fee. As if any government would give up a $22,000 a week income! Just from Logan alone.

The officers pointed out that, willy-nilly, council would have to pay the fee. That they had placed the issue before the citizens earlier in the year in a newsletter, too. Black began to construct a motion full of political innuendo and was temporarily stuck for words while the chairperson—in a gritty move—went on with the recommendations and got a mover and seconder and voted them into place. In the confusion even Black held his hand up to vote Yea. He was calling foul and that he had his name to a motion; the chair said that there was no seconder and that she'd moved on. Black asked for his name to be recorded against the motion. He was immediately typing away at his iPad. You can probably see an exculpatory explanation on his social media, timed at about 11.15 am.

Cr Pidgeon thought that council should put a big sign at the weighbridge explaining the fees to the public. The DCEO pointed out that there are three A4 pages of type in this report and that he didn't think anyone would read it even if they did manage a big enough sign to paint it all onto.

After more argy bargy the DCEO said that he would be loath to bring it to the notice of the public that the state government had managed to introduce a method of making all of the councils in the state more efficient in their waste management systems.

Cr Dalley wanted to be sure that the sign said that the fee structure applied to commercial waste only, not to greenwaste and domestic waste. Meanwhile Pidgeon was attempting to construct a motion and Black asked if he was going on with it, Pidgeon's Yes answer was No'd by the chair. Pidgeon offered that he had the right to move a motion. Bradley told him, not in my committee right now!

She was right too. For the order and administration of committee processes the chairperson has the last say. A no is a no.

Bradley said, "Move on," and they did. I have to say that I have often wondered about her tentative way of chairmanship but today she was iron-fisted in determination. A great improvement that the usual rowdy bunch could not break. I'm in a new mind of admiration for her example today.

Item ES3, Conservation Incentives Program Policy Amendments, began as my time at the meeting ran out. I left at about 11.40 am for other needs. The report says it is to change some policy items and the background paper, for conservationists, runs from page 22 to 34.

Tomorrow's big meeting is the Planning & Development committee with Item PD1, MCUI/23/2009—Material Change of Use—Clutha Creek Quarry—Negotiated Decision. There may be others but most are closed to the public.

In the case of PD1 I cannot see how councillors can have confidence that Clutha Creek Sands (CCS) will have the honesty to comply with any negotiated decision that they agree to. People, and organisations, that have been found guilty of, and have admitted to, telling lies can hardly be an honest party to a negotiated decision.

I'm still concerned about how council is going to monitor the blasting that they have allowed CCS to "trial" and what the parameters of the trial will be. Will CCS be honest in their evaluation of the trial? Will council have independent observers there to check? Will there be a pass—fail standard that council, CCS and the residents are confident about included?

We know that council received a very large sum of money from the fine, over $100 thousand. Will that money go toward the setting-up of a trial formula and monitoring team for the five blasts that will be allowed?

Of what does a "blast" consist? I bet that if you asked every councillor what a blast meant you wouldn't get much more than, "a single bang". The reality is that CCS and many experts will tell you that a blast consists of the line of blasts, ten to thirty, that will remove a wall of rock from the homogeneous mass and then a series of new blasts to break the removed portion into bite-sized chunks for handling to the crusher, possibly 40 to 60 charges set off. Possibly many more.

It seems like the negotiated decision in that MCU will have to be a very much modified version of the original trial permit. I have to think that, based on previous councillor's decisions in this matter, there is a lot of room for them to do a better job on behalf of the whole city. They certainly need to wipe away a lot of manure in making that decision.

More meetings Wednesday

2011-11-06T15:59:00.001+10:00

Wednesday has a Health, Sport and Community Services committee and a Customer Service, Marketing and Parks committee meeting. The former has five Items, two of which are kiss-and-run things and the other three are not earth-shattering.

Item HC1, Round 29 of the RADF funding, will see a few people with money in their pockets and a few with disappointment in their eyes. It is the way it always is, and I have to admit to a conflict of interest where I was a sponsor for an applicant. But I have decided that is is a virtual conflict because what I did has been done and gone and I have no further interest. I will stay and vote, or comment, on the issues.

Item HC2, Master Planning Process for Sport and Recreation Parks, has been a long time coming and, because this is a starred item it is likely to be an interim report for information for the councillors. Item HC3, is about a block of land, owned by council, that someone wants. Normally these sorts of sales are for the profit in the transactions. I hope that they are smart enough to see the profit. Item HC4 is a quarterly report and HC5 is a report of progress in the updating of Meakin Park.

There are three Items in the latter meeting. One is about policies for allowing advertising in council publications. The sticking issue in that has always been that council does not want, not ever, to be seen to endorse any product even by allowing the organisation or product in its publications. And we know of instances where customers have been ripped-off by advertisers in the past—not necessarily Logan City Council, but some councils.

I'm sure that we would all tolerate the advertising and council can add their disclaimer and it will cost ratepayers less to be informed. It is only when it gets to be an advertising publication with no council content that most would quibble.

Item CS2 will give us some response to the Koolan Park petition. Off-hand I cannot remember what it was about and I'm hoping that both council staff and councillors are well informed by this item. As petitions become more and more a part of everyday government in Queensland our Council has an opportunity to set standards for how petitions are handled. So far it does not look too good.

Item CS3 is about council acquiring some land on Grandview Road in Jimboomba. If you remember back about a year it was the subject of some articles in the Jimboomba Times because of drainage issue. This land borders Rotary Park.

Before leaving you I would like to offer another piece of information where I fell short in a comment to Park Ridge Connector of 18 October. In there I offered that people could snail-mail and ask to be sent the Feedback form. I now know that it is also on line here.

Apology and next week at council

2011-11-04T20:23:00.000+10:00

I'm sorry that I've not been on the blog for the last five days. Not so much for lack of possible material but a lack of Internet connectivity. I've been in Logan hospital for the week getting tests and advice—much of the time waiting for slots in the CT Scan system, I guess. Everyone has been very supportive, but the hospital does not have any connection, available to patients, for the Internet. There is a WiFi signal available, but it seems to be private and is locked and requires a password. Without access to the Internet I could not search out the owner.

Yes, I know I should have bought a WiFi dongle that latches onto the phone network, but I was too silly for that foresight. I've looked at the prices of those dongles today and am not very impressed at the cost. Have any of you readers got experience of good systems to buy into? I guess that I wouldn't be looking at more than a few days use at a time, but it looks like they are all monthly plans.

Help!

There are Lists of Items for next week's meetings on the council's web site. Monday's City Roads Infrastructure committee has one Item for acquisition of two properties. Hardly earth-shattering stuff!

The Environment & Sustainability committee has three Items, one a kiss-and-run report, another a mooted increase in fees, that all the councillors will vote for, and the last a, likely, reduction in conservation incentives policies.

There's, otherwise, not a lot that I can guess about the two meetings on Monday.

On Tuesday the Animals & City Standards committee has two Items, one a report of dubious importance and the other a report about the Neighbourhood Disputes Resolution Act 2011, that has been passed into law recently and which commenced last Tuesday. You can guess that hardly any of the councillors will have bothered to download a copy and read it. It consists 69 pages and, from the listed chapters, one would think that it wouldn't tax many brains to be able to understand most of it. I bet there are interminable questions about it in the meeting.

It seems to me, too, that the wording follows modern trends to simplify the language and make it accessible to a reasonably high-school educated person. In reality it is only the other things that a court takes into consideration that might make it worth consulting a solicitor too.

Talking about solicitors, did you notice this Courier-Mail item, Councillor faces court over funds?

The Planning & Development committee has eleven Items, eight of which are closed to the public. Item PD1 is a Material Change of Use (MCU) application from Clutha Creek Sands (CCS) where they have a negotiated decision to vote into place—or not. You'd wonder that councillors could bring themselves to agree to something like this after the recent court decision against CCS. It will be interesting, this is an open Item, to observe how the chairperson handles the meeting.

Item PD2, a MCU about Jimboomba Lakes, a relocatable home park, will also be interesting because of its location at 5376 Mount Lindesay Highway, Jimboomba. You may not notice, but it keeps grinding on my nerves that the city council's IS (computer) system allows the incorrect spelling of Lindesay (by dropping the letter e from it). I'm going to have to talk to both the minutes secretaries and the customer service folk about purging this problem from their computers.

Just think what the bellow would be if they constantly spelled Carnubia or Woodrige wrong!

Item PD3 is an amendment to a delegation of authority. I have to say that it seems that our council is one of the top councils in keeping their books straight. Delegations are one of the most important to be done properly because of the ease which which some people can rip-off such delegations and pocket lots of cash.

The remaining eight Items are hardly fathomable and I won't try. I'll try to catch them all as they get voted in the public part of the meeting. If that is at all possible.

Connecting Queensland

2011-10-28T13:23:00.000+10:00

Back in the dim-dark days I was involved in feedback to the SEQ Regional Plan that eventuated into a document of that name dated from 2009 to 2031. I guess that I still have a copy some-place here. I didn't see the draft Connecting SEQ 2031 during its consultation period, I must have been asleep back then, but I have, today, received an email as follows—

The Queensland Government has released the final Connecting SEQ 2031: An Integrated Regional Transport Plan for South East Queensland.

Connecting SEQ 2031 is a companion document to the South East Queensland Regional Plan 2009-2031, and delivers the strategic framework to guide the development of a sustainable future transport system. Its vision is for a transport system that “supports the lifestyle enjoyed by residents and visitors, enhances the state’s economic vitality and protects the natural environment”.

The draft Connecting SEQ 2031 was released for community consultation from 31 August to 26 November 2010. The feedback received during consultation was positive and constructive, and was used to shape the final document.

Connecting SEQ 2031 can be downloaded from the project website at www.connectingseq.qld.gov.au, with limited copies available on request by contacting the Department of Transport and Main Roads on 1800 038 178 or team@connectingseq.qld.gov.au.

The Connecting SEQ 2031 team would like to thank you for your interest and input into shaping the transport future of south-east Queensland.

You can do whatever you like with that information. But don't say I didn't tell you. It is only a 5792 KB download from the site.

Mt Lindesay overpass diagram

2011-10-26T19:15:00.000+10:00

I've been meaning to tell you about the overpass for Crowson and Chambers Flat roads and kept forgetting to do that. Just remember that the link in the last sentence and from the tittle will get you a file downloaded right away. It is not very big.

I've kept driving through the work area and forgotten every time to look for the picture. Here it is. You can click on it and expand it to full-screen or larger if you like.

Going out without even a wimper

2011-10-25T21:51:00.000+10:00

Today's Ordinary meeting was a damp squib rather than a roar of righteousness. Nobody stood up, at any stage, and defended the words they were reported to have said or repudiated them. Does that mean that ignorance is bliss?

Just take care with the first sentence's link, it will download an eleven gigabyte file. The agendas for Ordinary meetings are different from all others. They carry two sorts of data, mainly. One is the record of the things that happened at the previous meeting with just the resolutions for each set of committee meetings. The skeleton of that previous meeting if you like.

The next main part is the recommended resolutions, only, for each committee Item from last week. These are the resolutions that will be confirmed at this meeting, subject to rejection, amendment and acceptance as councillors wish to vote. There is nothing, in these documents, in the way of new stuff that might be brought into today's meeting to fill in for deferred Items from last week. No new General Business for committee meetings or for the Ordinary meeting either.

Otherwise there is the occasional stuff and the feel-nice stuff. Things like apologies, prayers, condolences, congratulations, Matters Resolved by Council to be placed on the Agenda, Questions on Notice, Council Reports, Mayor's Reports, Petitions, Consideration of Notified Motions, and Reception of Notices of Motion for Next Meeting. Some of these are hardly ever used in a normal well-run council meeting, others are hardy annuals. The two Reports are there to manage late-breaking items that need to be managed, voted and put back into a dark room.

Questions on Notice are a device to stop council from being caught short or hamstrung by anyone trying to get something hard agreed at a moment's notice. Most well-organised committees should have this sort of thing on their books to stop the existing committee getting shafted by some small pressure group in the membership. It is also the way to run the nominations for the new committee before the Annual General Meeting so that everyone who wants a new, or existing, member to be elected can see the pedigree of each and every nominated person before voting. I know it happens otherwise, but in a well-regulated, and rich, organisation it should not. Not ever!

As you scan the Agenda you will see the actual recommendations that were resolved, or not, three weeks ago. The actual words that were voted on. Not, as in today's listed committee recommendations, the hopeful recommendations from last week's committee stages.

Normally, if the minutes secretaries have done their job, and they are a super-competent bunch, there is no business arising from the items in the previous minutes that were just confirmed. This is quite different from a community committee meeting because the resolved items that are being confirmed are in everyday use by the employed staff of council, not by a group of part-time volunteers.

There is, sometimes, a small quake of upset. Today it was from Cr Bradley trying to not move a committee Item to resolution because she wanted to be recorded as voting against the Item. Council has this convention where the chairperson of each committee first moves that the report of that committee be received for discussion.

That allows the councillors to leap in and offer their esteemed words of wisdom about the committee discussions, the recommendations themselves or their opinions about why they will, or will not, vote for the recommendations to be resolved. In this case Cr Bradley wanted to offer exculpatory words as to why she would be voting against a committee Item, so she could not honestly complete the next step and move that the committee Items be adopted.

There was some classic misapprehensions stated, about the room, for a few moments until the CEO, whose job it is to offer advice on procedure, said that she should not move the motion for adoption but that Cr Lutton could do that in her stead. She could thus vote against the Item concerned and have her name recorded as voting against, if she requested so. In case you're wondering the Item was ES12, Land Acquisition at Loganholme, and her reason was that council is, notionally, working on an overall master plan, to be secret of course, of the land acquisitions planned by council for the next many years.

It didn't seem to bother any other councillor about voting to do the acquisition.

Cr Black declared a Conflict of Interest (CoI) for an Animals & City Standards Item and Cr Hackwood joined him in the declaration. Under the new rules for CoI neither walked out. I noticed that Hackwood did not vote on the Item, about the penalty on CCS Materials P/L (Clutha Creek Sands) but didn't see what Black did. Maybe in the next Minutes for Confirmation?

There were amendments for Item PD9 during the next discussions. I didn't note what they were.

I am told that council is considering how they can project ad hoc amendments somewhere in the room so that we can all see what they are debating about and voting on. It will make a great difference to what councillors think they are voting for and will help the public understand what is going on at any time. It cannot happen sooner. There were only six members of the public there today, three who go very often, one who does frequently and two others. It is pathetic really and the only answer is for council to become more open, use every means of helping people to understand and draw pictures if necessary!

Even us constant audiences are flummoxed from time to time about what they are doing! How can occasional meeting-goers be involved, informed and satisfied about the experience?

The committee reports rumbled on. They adopted the general business Item for the Marketing Manager to change Seasons Greetings, on cards that councillors can send out, to Christmas Greetings.

This is a city with 176—more or less—language speaking peoples in our midst and they decide to send, rather than a non-denominational card, a strictly Christian greeting card. I wonder if our good Cr Black will realise what she's missed, not being at last week's and today's meetings, and that her colleagues have bent over backwards to throw overtly Christian greetings cards in the faces of her friends. There's a very good reason why you buy seasons greetings cards in the USA nowadays.

During the reception of the GF Items Cr Able spoke about the cost that we are going to have to pay for the next quadrennial elections. Cr Grant said that the old city of Logan paid just over $300 thousand for their elections. He though that, even with a bigger city and escalation of costs, the council could run its own elections for a saving of $400 thousands over what the Electoral Commission will charge.

At the end of the procession of committee reports there were no odds and sods Items and we listened to General Business speeches. Cr Black made a speech about going to a conference where he had been invited to speak on constitutional recognition of local governments. He spoke for almost 5 minutes, a record for the tolerance of other councillors. Cr Able was able to tell us that Wembley Road is a car park too often. He obviously doesn't drive Mt Lindesay Highway very much. Cr Pidgeon was wont to add to Cr Black's talk about constitutional recognition.

Cr Power raved about a family of doctors who have been told to go work in a rural town in Victoria or go home. He told us he was talking to his federal MP. I wondered why he wasn't involving the Logan–Beaudesert Health Community Council that has been constantly lobbying for more GPs and Specialists in our area.

The meeting closed at 11.13 am.

Ordinary council meeting Tuesday

2011-10-23T13:04:00.000+10:00

The Ordinary Council meeting on Tuesday at 10 am is not going to be any great stand-out as far as new stuff is concerned. Maybe the only thing that might happen is that a councillor, or more, will present a petition.

There will be the usual rattling through the committee recommendations and I don't think that they will cause any hiccups. I'll be pleased to see that the recommendation for e-Petitions will go forward. E-Petitions were a long time coming and the policies and procedures will take a while yet to work through, but we might see them in action on council's web site after the council elections.

I'm hoping that e-Petitions will be able to be generated by any resident of Logan City. That the people who are interested in the statement in the petition have to do their own publicity and other donkey-work to get others to join the voting and that council does not set any high voting-bar to acceptance of a petition. I use the word voting here to signify the addition of one's online support, however they may be identified. Look at Parliament's system here.

The General Business at the end of Tuesday's meeting might be interesting. I think that a couple of councillors will be wanting to back down from their publicised position as transcribed to last Wednesday's The Reporter. It may be that they were misquoted? Or that their remarks were taken out of context?

Any back-down like that will make sure that everyone learns the lesson.

I'll be shocked and dismayed if they don't! It will demonstrate that at least two of them cannot be trusted to consult with an organisation with which they, the council, have not just a consultative agreement but a co-operative agreement. It means that their re-election is likely to be much more difficult than they expected. That even counts the comment of 21/10/2011 15:53.

They did it again

2011-10-21T20:51:00.000+10:00

The final Item in the Governance, Finance & Economic Development committee meeting yesterday is now on the web site there. Item GF18, Potential Land Acquisition Throughout Logan, was closed to the public under the part of the law that covers where a public discussion would prejudice the interests of the local government. The title doesn't say much and I expect that it was designed that way.

I guess that the recommendations will have been suitably opaque as well. The list of acquisitions will be pursued according to the schedule indicated sort of thing.

I'm almost in two minds about this sort of thing. My major view is that they are working for us. They, the councillors, should be looking out for all of our interests as a first priority. That means, I believe, that they should be keeping everybody in the loop and aware of what is going on. I know that might mean that some people might, over time, be disadvantaged.

Meanwhile some others will not.

After 44 years working for the government I can also see their point of view. The problem I have with their secrecy is that it tends to be a very leaky secrecy, and the big boys, with lots of money, always know what the secrets are.

I have to come down on the side of no secrecy about our best interests. Keep us in the picture and work on how to protect the little people from the unscrupulous.

Local Governments should be, unless otherwise instructed by superior governments, believe that the interests of the local government is the interest of us all who are contributors to—maybe owners of—that local government.

Some new processes come towards acceptance by council

2011-10-20T20:00:00.000+10:00

I've been thinking about the way that two councillors put themselves out, in The Reporter, and how that fits with the Logan City Main Roads Alliance and with the fact that the same two councillors were part of the intimate discussions that went on, leading to this public announcement of the Park Ridge Connector. The reasoning behind the Alliance was that it gave both parties an equal footing at discussions that involved them both—council from a land-planning point of view, and Main Roads from a long-range road-transport planning and short-term road maintenance view.

Given that I've been told that both Able and Pidgeon were at the meetings with Main Roads' planners, you would have expected them to have spoken their fears and doubts at that time? Maybe they did. But like all such discussions there should have been a consensus about what was on offer. Consensus leads to responsibility-sharing.

With that sort of responsibility opt-out you'd expect that the Alliance was not much better than soot up the chimney by now. It will be interesting to see what happens next—it certainly does not auger well for the election hopes of that couple of bad-mouths when their constituents discover that they were part of the decision-making body. This is a case where doing things in secret will rebound on a number of councillors.

I'm really sorry I missed today's Governance, Finance & Economic Development committee meeting today. There must have ben an amount of cringe in the meeting room.

The meeting consisted 18 Items, one a late Item, seven were starred kiss-and-run things and one was closed, the first. Item GF1, Funding Arrangements for Land Clearing for Southwest 2. While there is no detail in the background you can bet that the lack of funding is a serious issue where everyone forgot to do their jobs properly. But, a bit like the billiard tables, we won't go there and spend all that money to find out it was everyone who got it wrong. Annual budgets are for annual plans, annual plans are called Operational Plans (OP). Everything in an OP has to be funded.

What is going on over there in Logan Central?

Item GF2, Economic Development Branch Monthly Report for October, was likely to have gone in a moment. This is one of the very rare reports that is focussed on the here and now and not the last completed month. I just hope that the board of Invest Logan Pty Ltd is more on the ball than councillors. I'm amazed that they are this far down the track, with Invest Logan P/L, and there is no web site that exists for the business. I wonder, what is going on?

Reading on through the report might offer the idea that it has been a great month for junket. But I wouldn't believe that!

Organisational Services Branch Monthly Report for September, GF3, has a few pages of happening. Because of the cock-up yesterday with the two presentations I thought of looking what Information Services was doing in the way of providing a better service to the council. I stumbled on …significant in roads has been made… as a statement in their part of the report and cringed at the example of idiot report writing. They are inroads and they are plural and have been made. I'm getting as good, or bad, as Cr Grant!

Can you rely on a computer-specialist manager who is partly illiterate? Maybe her/his word processor is not set-up right? Maybe someone else wrote the report, eh?

We can also look at the Organisational Services Directorate expenditure and income graphs on page 13 and say, That looks good, a big upward bulge in the Operating Revenue and a close-to-the-line graph for Operating Expenditure! We're rich! But look at the amounts on the right side of the graph. The first (upper) one is in thousands of dollars and the middle one is millions of dollars! Very deceiving.

The Mayor's and Councillors' Community Benefit Fund outlays to date are at the end of this report starting on page 20 and ending at 32. Then follows Item GF4, Managing Claims for Private Vehicle Damage, that is a report stemming from Cr Blacks tirade about a divisional resident whose claim for $1500 of our money was denied. The Item starts at page 38 and runs to page 44. You can read my original comment here.

I thought that Item GF5, General Rates and Charges—South East Queensland Comparison, would be a whitewash. And it sort-of is. It takes no real account of the land value in each city area. The main chart is on page 47. Item GF6, Executive Financial performance Report September, has a chart on page 54. Item GF7, Request for the Waiver of Interest re Assessment #9249623-6, is one of those dastardly times when, for the want of $11,300 and a bit, in rates, someone's house was threatened to be sold.

There is no recommendation and that means that the councillors can do as they like, no officer of the council was brave enough to put in a recommendation. I wish I was there to report to you what they said. I'm sure it was interesting. Anybody at today's meeting can leave a comment with the answer. Were they brave enough to discuss this Item in an open meeting and did they waive the interest?

Page 71 opens with Item GF8, Local Government Electoral Act. You can go look at that link for a copy. The report runs from 71 to page 73 and you can read it for yourself. The one interesting item, to me, is the cost for the election of $950 thousand. A government monopoly!

Item GF9, Innovation in Urban Water Management & Treatment Conference, allows Cr Hackwood to go. Item GF10 2011/2012 Annual Review of Business Activities, is a who-cares thing that is aimed at stopping council from directly competing with private businesses. Item GF11, 2011/2012 Divisional Infrastructure Capital Improvements Program, details the expenditures from the councillors biggest slush fund. There are two items listed for division 3 and one for division 6 on page 90. Page 91 details a complicated arrangement for a community hall car park in Logan Village. The agreement runs over two financial years and who knows what councillors will be carrying the can next year.

This is the same sort of problem that H Black faced with the sports fields in Jimboomba right after the last elections and for the following year too. The charts for each division start on page 92 and run to page 98.

Item GF14, Implementation of E-Petitions, has a recommendation for them. This is just Logan Council catching up with the 21st Century. Don't expect it to happen until after the elections. Pages 111 to 113.

The Council Property Local Law, Item GF15, was recommended to be resolved. Items GF16 and 17 are there if you wish to read them, but the last Item GF18 is not yet available to the public. I'll let you know what it was as soon as I can.

A competent job with organised councillors

2011-10-19T18:55:00.000+10:00

Today's big news seems to be the Park Ridge Connector road. While I do support the road I have to also say that things are not quite right in the State of Queensland. For example I see in the Jimboomba Times, on the front cover even, a quote that a community reference group was consulted.

I was told, angrily, this morning by a member of the reference group that Main Roads' staff took absolutely no notice of everything that they said.

One of the councillors told me that the chosen route would wipe out all of the industrial sites along one side of Magnesium Drive, Crestmead, or the other, depending which side of the Logan Metro Sports Centre was chosen for the route. Another pointed out that one of the two options would cross either a swamp or a landfill in that same area. You'd have to say that a number of councillors are not happy. So much for the Logan City Main Roads Alliance.

Page 10 of the Times lists when and where there will be information sessions. Our nearest one will be at Park Ridge on October 29 and November 5 at the Park Ridge Baptist Church, 11 am to 3 pm.

Today's The Reporter had as a front-page item Cr Able and Cr Pidgeon complaining bitterly about the parklands that would be wiped out by the planned road. As Pidgeon came to the meeting room to chair his meeting I stopped him and asked why he had done nothing about our requests for help to save Camp Cable Park. His main excuse was that his division did not encompass that park. I pointed out that it was right across the road from his division and he offered that it was too small to be an issue, that he did not know much about it and that he was running to his meeting.

Cr Black who was passing at the time was suddenly interested in what we were shouting about but wasn't inclined to stay after he said that he was going to make a presentation, about the Camp Cable Park, to the next Beaudesert Rotary International meeting.

Pidgeon's Health, Sport & Community Services committee meeting got going right on 8.30 am. The Library and Arts items, HC1 and HC2, were passed into oblivion quickly. The Cultural Services manager had time to give us an outline of the projected art exhibitions next year. See pages 11 to 14 in the agenda.

We jumped to Item HC11, Support for the Annual Chronic Disease Self management Conference, where they immediately agreed to the $3000 donation to the conference under the guise of an Associate Sponsorship. I guess that it makes donations sound more high-blown that way. Item HC12 was a presentation that didn't present. The computer system in the committee meeting room is so poor for doing presentations, and deteriorating every time it is used, that even after valiant effort it would not run. We know nothing about Community Planning and the Health Decision Support System, although councillors will get a CD each with the presentation on it.

The Health Decision Support System will take over the councils's Healthy Cities program—and funding, I guess. A nice earner for Griffith University.

There is no reason why presenters should not be able to walk into the committee room and load a CD into the computer there and expect that the video and audio will work properly. It is such a simple computing task that everyone at home probably could do it—but our council cannot.

It is well past time that the system was straightened out.

Items HC3, HC4 and HC5 were resolved in seconds. For Item HC6 Cr Black had a prearranged motion for the minutes secretary that had three sub-recommendations for this city to be non-sectarian that he moved and Power seconded and most voted for. I think that, when we get to see the resolution, it may become a great lever to move council away from its devotion to its current ways. We might be looking at a change in the way that council does business in the future.

Moving on, Item HC7, about surplus scout halls, one at Meakin Park and the other at Daisy Hill, was voted in a moment. Item HC8, Council Endorsement for Continuation of Local Area Multicultural Partnership (LAMP) Program, a $40 thousand a year expenditure, was endorsed without pause. The Draft Community Infrastructure Strategy, Item HC9, was closed to the public. The recommendations they voted into place were to accept the strategy and once it was accepted it was to be no longer confidential.

You'd thing that meant that we could look at it today—right? But, no, not for a while yet. Committees are not actually empowered to resolve anything right away, by themselves. No, their recommendations go to the Ordinary meeting for final resolution. We have to wait for the confirmation, at the next Ordinary meeting, of the previous Minutes to be able to see what it was they decided today. Just bureaucratise and procrastination.

Item HC10, Major Venues and Facilities Branch Monthly Report for September, goes on for 11 pages. It is well worth reading to understand what these people do in a month. Yes, I know it is well-loaded with officialese and some gobbledegook, but it is readable.

We all need to understand what councillors get from these monthly reports. Too often it is obvious that some do not bother to read them, but at least Cr Grant goes through them with a fine-tooth comb. By doing that he keeps the senior managers honest and honed to their purpose—and he often leads other councillors into asking questions that would never have occurred to them.

In cases where our jobs or interests are in conjunction with a council's branch reports it helps to understand what is happening, in our interest-area, by reading these monthly reports. The meeting ended at 9.02 am.

Cr Dalley chaired the Customer Service, Marketing & Parks committee meeting that commenced at 9.13 am in place of Cr Clarke who was away today. There was a second presentation, during this meeting, and it didn't work either. Otherwise the meeting worked through the Items without much ado and the meeting finished at 9.45 am.

Wednesday's meetings in October

2011-10-18T20:36:00.000+10:00

There will be a Health, Sports & Community Services committee tomorrow at 8.30 am. After that finishes the Customer Service, Marketing & Parks committee follows.

In the former there are 12 Items, only Item HC9, Draft Community Infrastructure Strategy, is of great interest on the city and it is closed to the public. Item HC6 is one of Cr Black's bugbears and I'm wondering if she will bother to turn up for it. It would be the first time this week.

In the latter meeting there are seven items. Only the final one CS7, Parks Local Law, might raise some interest. Item CS6, Opportunity to Acquire 169 Beaudesert–Beenleigh Road, Mt Warren Park, might cause Cr Black some concern as to his Conflicts of Interest.

Park Ridge Connector

2011-10-18T20:16:00.000+10:00

I have been talking about the Park Ridge Connector for a while now. It is a Main Roads plan to extend the Gateway Motorway south to at least Park Ridge Road and, likely, to Granger Road. The orange area on the map below—click it to make it larger—shows a broad concept for the road that you'd expect to be at least a four-lane road, two each way.

The northern end terminates at the junction between the Logan Motorway and Wembley Road. As it goes southward it splits to go around the Logan Metro Sports Centre in Browns Plains Road and crosses Green Road, Park Ridge Road and Granger Road.

The technical details of the connector road are here. Take care it is a quite big file. The link in the first sentence of this report is a smaller file and quicker to download. But it is an Environmental Factors overview only.

This roadway, I understand, will be built sometime in the 2020 to 2030 time span, however that is their idea. I think that it is likely to be started earlier. The first signs that you should see is improvements to Park Ridge Road, Granger Road and Stoney Camp Road. Possibly Chambers Flat Road too. Some of those improvements will go ahead in 2012.

Cool runnin' today

2011-10-18T19:52:00.000+10:00

For whatever reason we had a good pair of meetings this morning. Enough slack to allow people to have their say and enough discipline, including self-discipline, for efficiency. The morning started at 8.32 am with Cr Able calling the Animals & City Standards committee to order. The first five Items were all kiss-and-run things and very little about any of them.

Item AS4, Alleged Smoke Nuisance in Justin Place, Crestmead, is an illustration of how difficult it can be for the council staff to take any effective action. That results in more frustration and annoyance for the resident making the complaint.

The situation, I believe, calls for council to own more items that can be used for things like air sampling and a simple video camera for the complainant to use, and suchlike. Most simple means of surveillance are less than $100 each to buy and just being armed with the right tools can make a resident feel that they are better able to help council to help them.

People who are concerned about this sort of nuisance issue should read this background paper and think about how they can hep themselves. I understand that, in this case, the complainant is rather old and without a partner for support. I do not think that council and councillors were able to think outside of the box in this case. Such a pity! Maybe Cr Pidgeon's slow recovery from the bot didn't help much either.

Item AS5, the magistrates decision in the illegal blasting by Clutha Creek Quarry is summarised. Cr Dalley said that she is delighted that this brings the end of a long battle by council to bring the business to book. She thanked the City Standards Branch for their diligence and success with the prosecution.

Council's Submission on the Health Legislation Amendment Bill 2011, Item AS6, shows what council thinks about the current bill. Item AS7, Eat Safe Logan Administrative Review and Regrade Policy, is to sort out problems with the main policy document. If you run a restaurant in our city you might want to read this.

In the General Business at the end of the meeting Cr Black spoke about the issues being experienced by resort villages (aged communities) and he named three, including Opal Gardens at Logan Village. He said that there were issues with the management of these places that were of great concern to the residents therein. Some of the problems were needing solving at State government level. He spoke about the fact that under legislation homes on a concrete pad could be classified as relocatable or removable. He wanted to get guidance from council officers about how they could handle the issues with standard processes. He said that the present problems were causing untold grief for the present residents.

My Pickering, Deputy CEO for Economic Development, said that he was happy for his staff to look into the situation and work with people, including Local Members (MLAs) and with Fair Trading. Cr Dalley said that in one case, with Beaudesert Shire Council (BSC) as the controlling authority, the provisions were not strong enough. I took her saying that to mean that Opal Gardens was another BSC stuff-up. She said that it is a State level issue, to resolve, for all of the similar situations, Queensland wide. She said the issue was in the right committee, here, and that they would have to wait on the state government.

Cr Pidgeon offered that it is a serious problem. He said that his enquiries showed that it was also a taxation situation where the homes were relocatable for one government and not for the purposes of tax rebates. He wanted that to be sorted too. The DCEO promoted a round-table discussion for after the meeting and everyone agreed. Dalley said to concentrate on practical things to do. The meeting concluded at 8.59 am.

It was followed almost immediately, at 9.04 am by the Planning &Development committee meeting. Items PD1, 2, 3, 4 and 5 were finished very quickly. The only comment of significance was for Item PD5, an Material Change of Use (MCU) that involves Stockland Development and the Jimboomba Convenience Centre that houses two food outlets, the restaurant and the Coffee Club who are both waiting for a liquor licence.

Part of the problem has been a planning cockup and Stockland has taken advantage of that to oppose the granting of a liquor licence. Item PD5 may have gone some way to rectify the situation but only at the risk to the restaurant owner missing out completely. For the time being. Meantime both shop owners will, likely, have missed the more paying times for the Melbourne Cup and Christmas days.

Items PD6 and 7 were, despite the issues for PD7, done in a few minutes. I was surprised that all of the councillors at the meeting, all seven of them, seemed concerned to work together and arrive at solutions quickly. The chair was even prompting for more debate, occasionally, and not getting more. You might have expected an issue over the paying of Infrastructure Fees to council, or not, would have generated a great amount of heat. But it did not and PD7 has been set aside so that they can work out a policy that suits. In this case it might be such a beast as council, on one hand, paying council in the other hand so as to square things up.

Item PD8, an amending instrument for the Park Ridge plan, was adopted almost instantly and while Items PD9 and 10 were closed for a few minutes both were dealt with quickly too. There was no substantial General Business and the meeting closed at 10.25 am. A good demonstration of the properties of well-read councillors, intelligent chairmanship and cooperation within the meeting between councillors and staff members.

Roads and sustainability

2011-10-17T20:42:00.001+10:00

I was going to say that we ran with the City Roads Infrastructure committee meeting today, but it was more like dawdled. It wasn't so much the officer's presentations but the councillor's questions. Not so much the substance of the question, you understand, as the preamble and post-ramble of words to illustrate the words in the question.

I sometimes wonder if councillors, some of them anyway, cannot understand that they are asking quite well educated specialist managers with serious qualifications what are, essentially, simple questions.

I usually get to the meeting venue at Logan Central about 15 minutes before the meeting starts. With road works and road accidents there is often little time to spare on arrival. This morning it was a situation where an oversize-loaded truck was parked on the side of the Logan Motorway and Gateway merge zone. For some reason the accompanying warning vehicle was down in the bottom of the drainage channel on the north side of the road. Maybe a rain-caused situation?

Traffic was down to 30 kph at about 9.30 am and this area is a merge of the on-ramp from Mt Lindesay and the through-traffic on the two motorways that were expecting to be doing 100 kph without difficulty. I needed to shift across at least one lane and what was right in the path of a B-double. Almost an IRL problem!

But I survived and made it to Logan Central in time.

Cr Hackworth had the meeting away on time. Items IN1, IN2 and IN3 were gone after one question from a councillor. At IN2 there is a series of round-up papers showing changes to the existing drainage programs. IN3 has a summary of the Flood Commission of Inquiry's interim report starting at page 61. The items have priorities allocated from H=high on down. I noticed that on the first page it says that council's Disaster Management Plan (DMP) should be on the council's web site. And there it is. It has taken our council almost four years to manage that!

Item IN4, a presentation that concentrated more on the latter part of Update on Activities related to current Wildfire and coming Storm Seasons, that was narrated by Mr Ken Neller. With all of the rain about he skipped the fire-storm stuff and concentrated on the DMP's storm provisions. That lead to many questions from councillors about how council can help residents.

Most didn't know that there is a Council Policy on aid to residents—and there isn't much of it. Most residents will go to SES on 132 500 first. There is the likelihood that council will come and help when its trees impact on your property in a storm. It could be possible, depending on the degree of storm, that greenwaste could be gathered by council. It is more likely that there might or would be free tipping days for greenwaste.

Item IN5 is Roads Local Laws, and the amending pages start on page 75. I have not read them yet, and we should get a public consultation at a later date. I want to see what the Local Law commits council to do for us. If it is not enough it needs changing again. Councillors passed this item without hesitation.

There was a presentation by TravelSmart people, for IN10, that aimed to show how they could do things to help council's staff get to work more cheaply. The presentation said that 60 percent of the people travelled to work by car as the driver, only 28% as a passenger in a car and 7% by public transport.

During the presentation I'm thinking of how people from our parts of the city get to specialist medical facilities anywhere and the answer is always by car. But everyday travel to work might be different for our council's workers. Maybe we could take councillors' cars off them for a month to see how they got on?

Back to IN6, Quinzeh Creek Road Pavement Sole Provider, allows council to contract with Ruby Developments P/L, the people here who have no web site of their own, to do the roadwork on Quinzeh Creek Road. I hope that council keeps a tight rein on the work being carried out on our behalf. No web site is very suspicious, it seems to me.

Item IN7 caused few ripples. Item IN8, Emergency Flood Access between Veronica and Twilight Courts, Buccan, and most of the councillors showed that they had no real idea of what was being addressed by this item. There is a map on page 231 but I'm sure that a decent aerial photo of the last flood in the area would have helped! After a lot of barrel thumping they decided to defer the item until next Tuesday. They might have discovered some spare money by then too.

There is a Parking Issues paper strategy to use consultants to work out a plan as part of IN11. Cr Dalley was tearing into this item because of the failure of this branch to have consulted with the town planners. I record six councillors and senior officers who thrashed this about before they compromised with a further recommendation to do the consultation and point out that there was no money until the 2012-13 financial year.

Item IN12, 2012-13 National Black Spot Road Safety Program Funding Application, has details of the five black spots that council will bid for on page 241. I'm surprised that we are only looking for $530 thousand and had to notice the principal criterion of five deaths over five years to be worthy of the funding now. We must have been lucky with the Cedar Grove—Cedar Vale—Mt Lindesay intersection.

It was hard to get what the recommendations for IN13, a closed item, so I'll leave it. Item IN9, Alberi Park Estate Infrastructure Provision Refund Request, was also closed. I presume because it was embarrassing to council to have no definite policy for this situation. The recommendation was to refund to Devine almost $230 thousand.

The General Business was reasonably brief, but councillors were back on the storm-damage bandwagon. The meeting closed at 12.18 pm.

At 12.30 pm the Environment & Sustainability committee meeting go under way with Cr Lutton, substituting for Cr Bradley, in the chair, The six starred Items and ES4 and ES5 were all passed by 12.32 pm. Items ES9, ES10, ES11 and ES12 attracted little comment too. No changes to any of their recommendations. The meeting closed at 12.36 pm.

One of the things I did pick up today was that council is committed to spending $1.8 billion by 2030 on roads in the old-Beaudesert Shire area of the city. This money will be spent on council roads only. Development area roads will be funded by ULDA and all Main Roads roads will be funded by the State government during that period.

I've been asked to give a link to Logan Food Gardeners here. Their vision is: Growing food for sustainability, lifestyle and fun

Tuesday shows promise

2011-10-16T14:55:00.000+10:00

It shows promise of being a day for sitting out and reading my book. But we will get to see some interesting reports, I suppose. First we will have the Animals & City Standards committee starting at 8.30 am and Planning & Development committee follows. The two meetings have 17 Items between them but only four will be of any substance.

The first meeting, seven Items, has no serious contender for the more than two-minutes per Item prize. But the second has a number of interesting Items, most are going to be lock-out Items though. Only Item PD7, Payment of Infrastructure Charges for Development on Council Owned or Managed Land, will be worth the day. And more because it is a recovery of short-sighted policies than from real, new, business.

The four closed discussions of court appeals are likely to show the normal resolution, that council will defend its decision against the developer, and the other two closed items are about planning schemes, and the council has a very difficult job to see that people become interested in these early stages of overall planning or amending planning decisions. This, lack of interest, problem is something that the chairperson, Cr Dalley, is well aware of. She has made changes to the way that planners go into the field to consult and she will try to present herself to homeowners who ask for her time. But I have to say that she probably knows that the worst of Logan's future planning problems are in ULDA's hands not her committee's.

More to come after the meetings.

Problem aged-care facilities in Logan

2011-10-16T14:08:00.000+10:00

This contribution was made by The Seeing Eye.
Do not believe what you read in the papers!
Digging under the glamorised surface of Mature Aged Resorts or Villages, the big sting emerges. The supposedly-controlled industry seems to be spinning out of control.
Some slippery operators, with their sleight-of-hand tactics and smarmy oratory, hoping to defeat regulations, could be coming to your neighbourhood.
There seems to be two types of operators; one the corporate type with television-advertised high-standard resorts, the other back-yarders—pretenders who abort existing standards at whim—one might say backyard abortionists.
It is a reasonably safe bet the homeowner will lose out with the second type of village owner.
At one mature-age village it smacks of mentally incestuous, top-down, directorship without any understanding of social and preventative medicine. In fact it smacks of maniacal-whim development.
The pall over the place is alarming to visitors who see their once happy friends trapped in despair and unhappiness.
Is it time to bring in the Mental Health Authority?
For those who wake themselves screaming, during the night, don't let the Purple People Eater get you, get to Beyond Blue straight away.
Is the tiny hamlet of Logan Village, so blessed with community generosity, about to have a blot on its landscape of human warmth from the absurd machinations of well-practised disregard for human well-being—right at its doorway?

New committee meetings next week

2011-10-14T22:05:00.000+10:00

There will be seven committee meetings, next week, at the main building of the Logan City Council at 180 Wembley Road, Logan Central. Two committees per day for three days and one on the Thursday. The first day the meetings start at 10 am and the rest start at 8.30 am. All of the Lists of Items for committee meetings are available from Council's web site. Click on the name of the committee—in the main or the right column on that page— and then click on the List of Items in the main column. The List shows the Item numbers, and their titles, for each business item in the meeting.

On Monday the two meetings are the City Roads Infrastructure committee and the Environment & Sustainability committee meetings. As I said, they start at 10 am and this week the councillors will have a task to get through both meetings before midday.

The former meeting has 13 Items, only three of which are starred as being For Information only. No resolutions needed. I call them kiss-and-run Items because they normally take up to about 20 seconds to pass over and move to the next Item.

One of the things about this meeting is that councillors are getting more and more twitchy about the results from this branch. Of course there are good reasons for that. You only have to look at Stoney Camp Road and New Beith Road to see why. And there are many other examples like those everywhere. And there are good reasons why those disasters have happened.

The main reason is because the State government withdrew grant funding for such as roads in late 2008, and again in 2009/10 and subsequently, so that our council has to look almost completely to its own resources for funds for roads. You also have to realise that any decent road soaks up money like a very bad habit does. Quicker than an RSL full of pokies does. The real problem is that you cannot build a road to last just two, three or four years—the amount of time till the next election. Roads are supposed to be built to a 20-year standard.

Most councillors, that are moderately successful at getting re-elected, wouldn't last that long! They end up spending money that will never buy them votes. This is a no-win situation for short-term councillors.

The other problem in recent times, maybe for eighteen months or so, is a shortage of bitumen in Queensland. Bitumen makes Asphaltic Concrete pavement (ACP) the stuff of sealed roads. No money, no will to spend more, no bitumen, no roads and no decent road repairs.

ACP roads have a finite life. Usually about 20 years for the sort of roads that exist in Cedar Grove. The bitumen loses its elasticity and the edges break off, the surface cracks and leaks water into the substrate and that collapses and the road starts to get potholes. Potholes grow enormously in wet weather because the water and the vehicle traffic combine to create hydraulic forces that destroy both the sealed surface and the underlying structure.

You can see what happened on Mt Lindesay Highway in South Maclean where Main Roads were forced to install inlay repairs during the wet weather. As you drive along and look at the blackest areas of the road—the new bits—you will see in the two wheel tracks there are fine grey cracks and slight depressions like little ponds in the road surface. Those repairs to the road, that were installed as repairs in January and February, are already at the end of their life. You can tell, after a bout of rain, that the pale grey cracks are failing areas, the more brown cracks—they are wider and let more coarse material up from underneath—are the end-point of the surface seal and the road will be done in a month in summer-time rain, like we have here.

Item IN13, Priority Plan Roads Network, will be one of the major talking points on Monday. Every councillor will want her or his share of the program to bear fruit by the time of the electioneering before the end of March.

This in contrast to Item IN12, 2012-13 National Black Spot Road Safety Program Funding Application, the federal government grant program for small patches, usually intersections, on roads. This is not a priority for the councillors who fear the hatchet in March of 2013, some three months before the first dollar might turn up.

Item IN11, Logan City Council Parking Strategy—Issues Paper, will challenge few. Not that the challenges are not there but because most councillors think that shopping centre developers are responsible for providing parking for their customers. Unfortunately what was considered suitable for shoppers ten years ago was not adequate for today. Just look at Jimboomba on Market Saturday.

I'm going to be interested in what Item IN5, Roads Local Law, will tell us. I wonder what the Local Law will obligate the council to accomplish?

The Agendas for meetings are available each morning of the meetings at 8.30 am. I'm not usually home then to check, but I believe that they are often in place before that. Agendas have the details of the briefing that will be presented at the meeting.

When the first meeting is done and after a ten minute break, the next starts. Monday's E&S meeting has 12 items, six are kiss-and-run Items, two will be closed to the public.

One of the big Items for me will be Item ES4, Pavement Indemnities for On-Property Waste Collection Services, that I'm guessing is a muddle where the owners of multiple dwellings like aged-residential facilities are annoyed that the new waste services trucks are eating up their sealed entrance-ways and bin-access roads. It is a calamity of the council insisting that the contractor must service the waste bins and the owners must pay.

So much for that meeting too.

For On-Site Sewerage Facilities owners, the proposed Local Laws—three of them—are at that link. The last day for your feedback is by close of business Friday 28 October 2011. You'll notice that they have closed off email submissions that arrive before midnight on that Friday now.

Supreme Court allows searching Google for anonymous identities

2011-10-09T15:56:00.000+10:00

This is a warning message for you all. It is not a worry for almost all of the people who read this blog site. It just matters to a few of the more out-there Anonymous commenters that leave comments that could be considered defamatory in some circumstances.

The message is, as reported in the Courier-Mail on 7 October, that your identity may be open to access by the legal fraternity through a court from Google.

The Supreme Court has decided in a particular case that the person who made comments on a web site, not necessarily a blog you understand, will be identified by Google. Read the link above for the details that have been reported. Make up your own mind about what it says.

I think that there might need to be a fair amount more legal work done before this decision has been explored, appealed and worked-out into a process that means that it is easy, and cheap, to get people's names. I say that because there is one higher level court in Australia to which appeals can be made. One would also need to read the actual judgement, from the Supreme Court, to see what it entails. Then there is a lower court process that might need to be arranged and, possibly, refined through a court process, before anyone could walk into a solicitor's office and get an order for less than $200 or more.

To some extent this sort of judgement protects me a little too. Not a lot, but some.

If you are one of my every-day commenters you have nothing to worry about. You and I are working together to make this blog a success.

But if you're one of the few commenters trying to get me to publish defamatory material, and I miss the meaning of your writings, you will be in the gun at least as much as me. Maybe totally. Have a careful think about it before you do try to get past my better nature. For those about to try to trick me into publishing some words and then attempt to bully me into making a contribution to their political standing or community status, just remember that the truth will out.

Keep the Scenic Rim scenic

2011-10-07T22:11:00.000+10:00

For readers to the south of Cedar Grove, and people interested in the city, there is a very strong movement to keep the Scenic Rim the way it is, scenic.

There's a newsletter and web site here.

I'm sure that people promoting the exclusion of Coal Seam Gas (CSG) miners from the area are doing the right thing. We all need to remember that our drinking water comes from the Scenic Rim council's watershed and artesian storage sources. CSG operators take no care of the water resources, that would protect us, until after it is polluted.

Stoush between councillors ends in threats

2011-10-07T15:59:00.000+10:00

In my post last Tuesday I wrote about the issue of Lutton doubting Black's calling herself a barrister. Black said that she would see him in another venue at the end of it all when Lutton would not apologise.

It appears that Lutton knew something about legal titles. I understand that anyone has to both be admitted to the bar and to hold a practising certificate to be a barrister and be titled a barrister. Hajnal has told us, herself, that she does not hold one.

Looks like she will not be seeing him in the venue where she will get any sort of satisfaction. Maybe there's a lesson in that for all of us. Don't aspire to be titles above your current position.

Lastly, the motion to exclude Lutton from the meeting last Tuesday week should not have been voted into place because the premise that they acted on, that Lutton was out of order for calling Hajnal's insistence that she is a barrister, is wrong. It may mean that councillors will have to, at the very least, invalidate the censure motion against Lutton, even if they cannot repair his exclusion from the rest of the Planning & Development committee meeting.

This is an object lesson for all people at meetings. All sorts of meetings. When someone gets up and moves a motion, in this case it was a wife and husband, the rest of the assembly has to be absolutely sure of their ground before voting Yea to support it. I seems to me that not being absolutely certain drives members of the assembly to vote Nay and keep voting Nay regardless of the developing wording of any motion, regardless of how many times it is put.

Ordinary meeting makes for fireworks again

2011-10-04T17:59:00.000+10:00

Today's Ordinary meeting of council started off in reasonable order. There was leave of absence for Crs Parker and Able. There is a Local Government conference on at the Gold Coast and that is probably where the CEO was too. Cr Lutton was in the chair and Mr Oliver Simon sat in for the CEO.

I had had the good fortune of arriving 25 minutes early, making a bigger than necessary allowance for hold-ups on Mt Lindesay, and took to introduce myself to the minister waiting to say prayers. It surprises me how casually the minsters get treated at ordinary meetings. They are expected to know the drill for themselves.

This bloke turned out to be a Cook Islander who was here for his congregation and had been selected to say prayers today. He isn't the sort of person your normal Aussies would pick to be a minister, more like an older person who was trying not to be too conspicuous as a man-mountain. Cr Smith got my nod and moved round to greet him, Cr Lutton came over to check who had come and was pointed in the right direction and asked how to pronounce his name.

It is not hard to pronounce Polynesian words and, often, names especially of religious people, are similar sounding to Biblical names anyway. But I won't give that lecture just now. Most peoples of the Pacific are more Christian than you would think possible and, because of that I had asked him to say at least part of his prayer in Cook Islands Maori.

The Deputy Mayor opened the meeting at four minutes past the hour.

The prayer in English took about 10 minutes. The Minister then said that I had asked him for a short one in Maori and if none objected he would do that. And he did. With my limited command of Maori I could hear him thank our ancestors for us being here and in good health and temper. He also pointed to the Tamariki, the descendants—children if you like—who we need to be looking toward taking our places in the future. I thought that that part of his prayer was more relevant and beautifully spoken and I was glad that I had prompted him.

After the condolences the chair asked Cr Pidgeon to come forward for CG1, a presentation to the Library Manager and two of her staff and the previous library manager who is now the Animals Control manager. The award was from the Queensland Public Libraries Association for the Local Authority of the Year Award. Only two awards are made each year.

There was a showing of a presentation to commemorate the visit to Logan of a Chinese basketball team and the two games that they played here. The presentation was a mounted #22 player's singlet from the Logan Thunder WNBL team. Phil said that this was a one-of-only-two trophy and that it was signed by both teams. He also took the opportunity to say that the Thunder's next game was at the Logan Metro Sports Centre at 2 pm on Sunday, 9 October against Bendigo.

Other councillors got up to ask for congratulations to be sent to various organisations. The one that caught my attention was that Cr Dalley asked for the Greenbank RSL to be congratulated for the Merchant Marine Service of commemoration recently.

Cr Hackwood introduced the City Roads Infrastructure committee's recommendations, made no particular comment about them and then moved that they be endorsed. And they were. Cr Bradley' E&S committee had three recommendations amended. The one castigating Energex was watered-down a little. The A&CS committee's recommendations were endorsed without pause. Cr Dalley introduced the P&D committee's and there was some too-and-fro about issues in that.

Once the small beer was done there was the issue of last week and Cr Black wanted to continue about Lutton calling her qualification into doubt. I think that she had a serious problem with Lutton being in the chair and she was hardly likely to have a clear decision, and so it went on. There were people talking over each other. Motions made and cast aside, points of order flung in peoples faces and suchlike. People were, when they had the floor, talking too fast or talking with a folder covering their microphone and such. My notes are sketchy and I will not venture explanations that might be wrong. In the end Cr Black said that she would take her complaint to another venue.

They tried after that to get the censure resolution against Lutton thrown out. In the end the DCEO's advice was that such a resolution would have no real effect and the motion was voted Nay.

During all of this period there were two sets of votes taken twice. One a show of hands and one a division. That means that they were asked one-by-one what their vote was. I've told you before that a show of hands vote is often taken as a Yea when it is very doubtful whether all of them bothered to signal either way. Sometimes less than half do signal. But when the chair calls a Yea vote and none demur, they all carry on. Today was different, the yapping of some and the carping of others had the public gallery in fits from time to time.

Finally the consideration of the P&D committee recommendations was done.

Cr Pidgeon's H,S&CS committee recommendations went down in a rush. Cr Clarke's CS,M&P committee recommendations were the same. Cr Smith ran into problems with the G,F&ED committee when it came to a Community Benefit Fund grant vote because some councillors had Conflicts of Interest (CoI) with more than one of the grants at issue. This fund, of $20 thousand per councillor per year, has strict rules about the amount and who can benefit from a grant. When there are seven grants to be decided you can almost guess that seven, or more, councillors will want to walk out from CoI issues. Seven out of eleven doesn't leave a quorum, but they managed to stagger through. I'm sure that some of the people in the public gallery were thoroughly confused!

Three of the recommendations were amended and the whole lot were finally adopted.

Cr Power had a petition that he spoke to. I have no idea what he was talking about but it was a development issue in his area, I think.

Petitions are offered up and go to the manager and officers concerned with the subject matter. Ultimately a report is supposed to go to the cognisant committee and some action might or might not be taken. I have to say that unless the councillors themselves are very pro-active the manager(s) largely try to bury petitions. Or so it seems to me.

I think that it is a case of conflict of interest where the staff think that they run the city and not the residents.

In General Business Cr Black was the first speaker. She held her folder in front of her to read from it and her microphone was shielded from her voice by the folder. Later she was attempting to debate that she wanted a wide-ranging motion put to the staff for an answer, she wanted the answer in two weeks at the next round of meetings. Lutton said that he was worried that the staff might not be able to do the work that quickly and DCEO, Mr Simon, offered that there were both upper levels of government to be consulted and they would not be too interested in responding just that soon. Her motion lapsed with a lot of Nays.

She went on to ask for a list of current and future land acquisitions to be reported to a committee. Lutton told her that she should have formulated a motion before the meeting and had it ready to hand to the other councillors because, without it written down and available, the councillors would not know what they were debating and voting on. There were a few tense words and Lutton asked her if she would wait. Black said that she would exercise her right to put the motion now. She restated the motion in modified form and it was resolved. I understand that the minutes secretary got the motion in its whole form. Three councillors wanted their names recorded as being against the motion.

Cr Hackwood stood and read his prepared statement that the disciplinary tribunal had found him guilty of not declaring a CoI about the Clutha Creek Quarry prosecution recommendations and that he stayed and voted against the recommendation to prosecute. He offered a letter with an admission he was in error.

Cr Bradley spoke about an issue with acquiring land for environmental purposes. Cr Black said that EcoFirst at Mt Warren Oval showed that there was life in the old place after all. It was rewarding to him to see that, and that a great number of children were engaged. Cr Dalley, more in frustration than amusement, offered that council needs to write to Telstra and tell them that understanding their own customers' needs was their job and that council could not and would not attempt to fill their request for customer information. From the little that she said I thought that there was a privacy of information issue there too and she might have told that to Telstra too. Cr Pidgeon trumpeted the Crestmead Café and that it was again reactivated. He also touted the products from the Chambers Flat strawberry farm. He said that he and Black had met with the nascent NRL club about Tully Park and were working on solutions.

Cr Power stood and asked, "Shouldn't we have moved my petitions?" which made everyone gulp and Lutton quickly made to do that and everyone was happy to vote Yea. Lutton closed the meeting at 11.43 am.

Kerbside rubbish collection starts Monday 3 October

2011-10-02T20:57:00.000+10:00

The kerbside rubbish collection starts in the south-western side of the city tomorrow, Monday, 3 October. That includes all of the areas south of Park Ridge south down to Woodhill.

Click on the council website link, above, if you're not sure where you live or where the collection zone is.

Civil Liability Act 2003

2011-10-02T20:51:00.000+10:00

The Jimboomba Times for 28 September, last, at page four has an intriguing article about a Spring Mountain Resident who says that she spent $1500 on new wheels after running through potholes on New Beith Road.

The interesting thing about this report is that it follows a council meeting on 13 September when the division 11 councillor asked for a report about insurance claims that the council had sustained in relation to vehicle damage from potholes. She was annoyed at the verbal answers that she had got about pothole damage where the council will not normally pay out on claims for such damage.

The main way that people can make claims against others is the Civil Liability Act 2003 and that act is so simple to read that even a child wouldn't have too much trouble with it.

The important bits of the Act start at about §9 General Principles, that talks about the general standard of care and what that means. The same section at (1)(a) says that if the risk was foreseeable you might have a claim. The Act goes on at §10 and includes a burden to avoid risk, to take precautions to deal with risks to prevent harm to others.

At §12 it says that the onus of proof is on the plaintiff. At §13 it talks about obvious risks and what is expected of people generally about obvious risks.

In §15 it says that there is no proactive duty, on a party, to warn of obvious risk(s). In §23 Standard of care in relation to contributory negligence talks about how careful a plaintiff has to be about inherent risks. You can see that I have skipped sections and there is more after 23, you can read the thing for yourself, and I do not offer legal advice. I'm just telling you what council thinks and does.

It has been a long-term thing with councils to use every part of the Act to avoid liability and they know, as does council's insurer, how few claims stand the test of the act. Under it's insurance policy council is never to admit liability to another party for anything. And we all should know that applies to our own vehicle insurer. Don't admit liability at any stage before consulting the insurer.

However, you might be able to get some compensation if council already knows the pothole is there and what size it is generally. They need a reasonably good guess as to dimensions and an accurate location, as accurate as possible so that the road patrol can find it. Our council says that it will fix the hole within three days. But you cannot run into the hole after you have reported it because of the contributory negligence clause. Report road defects to road maintenance at council by email.

I would also have to say that anyone, like me, who has a 45 percent profile tyre on an aluminium cast wheel, needs to be very careful to miss every pothole. I just happened to flat-spot one wheel about a year ago. It cost me a new set of wheels because nothing would match my eight-year-old wheels. But it cost me just a little more than one third of $1500. I don't expect to damage another if I can help it, and I bought a more common and popular wheel design. I often report potholes to council and they are usually repaired within the time limit.

But I am a frequent user of of some very poor roads, like Stoney Camp Road, and I guess they'll bite me again one day! Don't expect anything much from Cr Black's call for a report, it's about grandstanding not about working.

Governance at the gallop

2011-09-29T19:11:00.000+10:00

The Governance, Finance &amp Economic Development committee meeting went off like a rocket today. I'm not sure that every councillor there had read their agenda documents but it seemed that most had read the important ones. The meeting started on time, in fact one councillor asked for the start to be delayed two minutes because it wasn't 8.30 am yet. Taken in good humour by the chairperson, Cr Smith. Crs C Dalley and H Black were not at the meeting.

Item GF1, 2010/11 Operational Plan—Final Quarter Report, and 09/10 Operational Plan Outstanding Projects, is a bit of a whack on the bum for some branch managers.

An Operational Plan (OP) is the work that council—managers and other officers—is supposed to achieve each year. The OP falls out of the Corporate Plan that is agreed by the council and the councillors after consultation with the people of the city. That one is a five-year document.

Each OP, in past years, has terminated at the end of the financial year in June but the Outcomes and Performance manager has been warning the staff that continuation of that sloppy system would not be tolerated any longer during the 2009/10 year. OP objectives would be back-loaded on branches almost automatically. And we saw that happen today. The recommendations on page 8 of the agenda show what rolls over and the councillors took about 20 seconds to agree and resolve them.

The report gives the large-grained details of the problem areas and the fine-grained stuff is in the background papers from page 10 to page 51. You'll find the background easy reading and there are colour-coded areas to summarise performances.

People who like to criticise council's performance should read and understand the background papers. This is a definitive report and you cannot gloss over what council did achieve. Nor can anyone put aside the things that some branches completely crapped out on. BTW, don't rubbish council for OP items that were cancelled during the action year. The best plans each year sometimes get overtaken by events and the task or the target gets renovated, sometimes right out of the plan. The important thing about cancelled things is that they are displayed plainly too.

I'm sure that you will be impressed at the straightforwardness and honest of the background part of the report. Many businesses could be doing this sort of thing. I'm sure that there would be few other councils in Queensland, maybe Australia, that can proudly point to this sort of analysis of its own performance.

The thing that we have to worry about now, when it is time to put the next Corporate (long-term) Plan together we do not allow council to water down targets or create targets that are insubstantial and unworthy of the undertaking. Some managers react to disciplined OPs by the subterfuge of creating worthless Corporate Plan targets. It behoves us all, especially councillors themselves, to be alert for that and nip it in the bud. In fact you might say that many cancelled OP items are the responsibility of poor councillor oversight in not realising early enough that the OP items are not achievable or are useless to achieve.

We can look forward to more OP Reports just like this one. I am hoping, however, that the cancelled items and the Delayed items will not be on the listing in future years—except for delays for such as bad weather on infrastructure targets.

The starred Items, GF2, GF8 and GF12 were moved to accept in a block. Item GF8, Amendments to the Local Government Act 2009, are worth your attention if you are interested in what has happened about councillors Conflict of Interest declarations. There is both the (manager's) interpreted version and the Act's sections in the item. Most readers will find it simple to understand on the first read-through. I'm sorry to say that up to today, two councillors still don't understand this stuff.

If you are interested in what the senior council executives did in August you can read GF12.

Item GF3, Request to Write-off Sundry Debt of SEQ Underroad Drillers for $8388.92, is one of those slip-ups that happen when you're in business. When you're up to your waist in water and it is still bursting out of the pipe you cannot do too much in the way of forensic sleuthing to see who did what and how. This item was given the fast brush-off too.

Item GF4, Executive Financial Performance Report—August 2011, is the finance manager's report and I don't pretend to understand most of the detail. The council gets a tick every year, recently, from the Auditor General so you could bet your life on this analysis. The background papers run from page 88 to 104. This Item was also ticked off and the time was 8.32 am. Two minutes from the start.

Item GF5, 2010/11 Annual Financial Statement, is the report that councillors sign off on so that the documents can go to the Auditor. The background papers run from page 109 to 160.

Item GF6, Smoke Free Workplace, raised the ire of both Crs Able and Power who tried to bait the manager by asking for details about the costs, in detail, and the reasons why some people continued to smoke despite the program. This was just a set of petty councillor pieces trying to embarrass the manager or the Deputy CEO. I guess that neither councillor has ever employed anyone and has no idea of what the current legislation says. Cr Bradley offered that the place was much nicer to work in and that some areas were so very much better to even pass through.

The Divisional Infrastructure Capital Improvement Program reports always interest me. Item GF9, is worth your attention too. You can see that H Black has $265 thousand left to give to the Tully Park NRL Thunder users—yesterday's Jimboomba Times front page—and that Pidgeon is almost skint, and Clarke is the same.

It is likely she will if there are enough votes in it.

The Mayor's and Councillors' Community Benefit Fund 2011/2012, GF10, details the latest small grants and give-aways. Cr Black withdrew himself from voting on item seven of the recommendations because of a Conflict of Interest (CoI). For another issue Power went out too. Two other councillors declared minor matters of CoI and remained to vote. All kosher as per the newly amended Act.

Item GF11, Amendment to Council's Policy Titled Repeal of Resolutions of the Council, is a minor matter about the number of councillors needed to repeal an existing resolution. It should have been picked up and fixed early last year. It wasn't and to me that is poor governance in itself. But the governance manager is not going to slap himself, is he?

GF13 is one of those cockups that councils can get themselves into without much difficulty. It is one branch enabling grants and positioning a sports club on council land and another branch coming along and saying to the club, Your infrastructures charges for occupying that land and drawing spectators to it is $28,152 before you go any further!

Most of the councillors, bless them, were horrified.

They came to the conclusion that the manager was putting the cart before the horse and that they had to repair the policy first and then make the exemption. Some also realised how urgent this was for the club. They did it the only way they could and deferred it all for the future and the club will not be hung out to dry in the meantime.

Item GF14, Water Business Update, is in the Chairperson's Agenda. It is a wide-ranging story about the politics and the reality of the taking-back of the water business by our council. Read the document, it is only six pages.

At 9.02 they closed the meeting to discuss Item GF7, Purchase of Property, and we were out for about 10 minutes for that. Of course they decided to do that.

That left only the General Business and two councillors wanted to discuss their business items, three of them, in closed session. Under the provisions in the Act for discussing legal advice and the provisions for discussing embarrassing matters they closed the meeting. After another 10 minutes or so I decided that they were not going to decide any resolutions that I wouldn't discover on Tuesday and I left at about 9.25 am. So endeth the meeting report.

Highs and Lows

2011-09-28T18:15:00.000+10:00

Sometimes I sit in meetings and just wonder why people keep talking. Today there was the Health, Sport & Community Services committee and the Customer Service, Marketing & Parks committee meetings. The former has a Chairpersons Agenda as well as a normal Agenda. At the time of writing this there was no published Agenda for the latter meeting.

The first meeting attended to the Libraries Manager and there was applause for her and her staff for winning the APLA top Australian library award at this year's libraries conference. They passed her report, Item HC1, for August, without question. In General Business for her, Cr Smith moved a vote of thanks for her and the staff. Resolved with acclamation.

Item HC2, the Implication for Renaming Gould Adams Park, is a cop-out type of report and you might assume that, somehow, the reporting officer was nobbled into making a vague and indeterminate recommendation. However, both Bradley and Able had things to say. Bradley wanted to know how many people lived within the concerned area bounded by a 600 m radius. I didn't catch the answer but I think that she was told something like, "I don't really know."

The simple answer is that the name of the park should be Goold-Adams Park and any shilly-shallying about will not change that. I think that council wants to sidestep that issue and just mount a plaque with a few details and leave it at that. You can see the recommendations on page 14 and they will result in everyone knowing that it is Goold-Adams Park while still officially being named Gould Adams Park. Such is the state of official inertia.

Item HC3, the Leasing Policy Review—Policy Options Discussion Papers, is about the way that council should manage its leased assets in future and this paper is intended to inform councillors and stakeholders. The document runs from page 18 to page 63 and the recommendations on page 21 say that they should "be received for the purposes of providing feedback." The Manager said that she realised that there were two considerations within the paper, one was for Community Facilities and the other for Sport & Recreation Clubs. She gave a very long briefing to councillors from the background papers that are not divided in that obvious manner. It seems that it was a last-minute decision to handle the briefing that way. She said that this is a policy options paper. But the original recommendations are hardly supportive of that statement.

The chairperson said that there were basically two groups, the not-for-profit (NFP) groups and the commercial enterprises ones. But he was prevaricating about those and said that at least one NFP has a commercial enterprise attached to it. There was a great amount of councillor discussion on the issues. Most of it was commentary, and statements, on their beliefs rather than expository of the policy directions they would be likely to expose.

I think that it is beyond the time when councillors can think through clearly what their briefing papers are telling them and ask relevant questions. Too many of them are well into practising their electoral speeches. One councillor, rightly, pointed out that 26 years ago the $5 peppercorn rental charged to some tenants was appropriate but that one cannot buy a pie and coffee for that nowadays. Another was offering that $100 should be the minimum. Cr Clarke asked how long before the consultation with stakeholders would be done and she was told that it would get under way as soon as.

There were two or three councillors on their pokies bandwagon and they were inclined to repeat themselves again and again. One said, again in this forum, that some clubs were charging access fees that were many-many times the fees that council charges the club for the same facilities.

Some were able to address themselves to the liquor and pokies issues without too much rancour, others were not. The chair had to interrupt and say that they were not discussing the pokies/anti-pokies issues today and right now. Another councillor spoke about the severe limitation council places on some organisations by only offering short-term, 5-year, leases. Those made bank loans to invest in the future impossible and council has to rethink.

The recommendations were slightly amended and resolved.

It is important that club and organisation members alert their executives to get to their councillor as soon as practical and determine how they can be involved with this limited consultation. If it was me, I would not be trusting my councillor to carry the information back to the officers either. I would be talking to the councillor, sure, but I would also have a written-out submission of this subject mailed to the CEO of Logan City Council quite quickly, maybe even in time for the next round of meetings in three weeks time!

From the conversations about this subject today I fear for the outcome of this policy item.

Item HC6, the Safe City Advisory Committee report, in the Chairperson's Agenda, was voted in a flash.

Item HC4, Major Venues & Facilities branch monthly report for August, attracted more interest that I thought it would. Cr Smith again expressed his thanks for the manager's staff who were said to have worked through 36 hours to support the Tongan community after the fire. He said that the area was over-run by film and TV crews and that the organisation just ran so smoothly and he knows that so many of them went away with a lasting impression of the great good that Logan City can do when it gets together as it did. He also pointed out how well the council's social media assisted people in getting their heads around what they needed to know.

Cr Black said that he thought that the council needs to review that situation and rethink how the facebook and Twitter pages were only a single source to the council. He thought that council branches or enterprises should have their own source pages.

The Deputy CEO told them that that would need a business case to support it. I thought that a councillor would chip in and request a report on how council managed to support the whole issue of the fire, the body recovery effort, the demolition of a potentially life-threatening contaminated house and the mourning and memorial services that were supported by, particularly, the Samoan community, to be forthcoming and with an emphasis on how council's systems could be improved. But I guess they were too wound up in their own little minds to think of that. Maybe next Tuesday's general business would be able to stand such a motion?

A few councillors picked up items from about page 71 onward and Cr Power was again on his cry about the charging of kids by clubs who get facilities cheap. He was told this time, by the manager, that those were things that council has no control over. Cr Smith came to his rescue and pointed out that these days clubs pay horrendous amounts for liability insurance, great sums for their equipment, and that other costs come into the picture. But, after he had started by saying "Cr Power is right, but…" Power stopped listening. I expect we will hear his cry again in the future.

After morning tea, at 9.35, the meeting resumed for Item HC5, about Australian Food Safety Week, see pages 82 to 92 and the report was received. There was no GB for the manager and the meeting closed at 9.37 am.

The Customer Service, Marketing & Parks committee meeting commenced at 9.48. Item CS1, Customer Service branch monthly report for August was blown away in a moment. There was no GB for the manager and he left.

Item CS2, the Marketing Branch monthly report for August, had the manager being grilled by almost every councillor at the meeting. Again, it is creeping towards election time and as venal as that usually is. Cr Able criticised the efficacy of the council's mail-out recently. The manager replied that Aust Post was the most practical delivery medium and was efficient and economical too. Some councillors supported the manager and others did not, piling on the poo.

Cr Able was almost apoplectic about today's Albert & Logan News headline on the front page that said Our Cruel City and went on as though the Marketing Manager could control what papers published. Able also complained about "a spokeswoman" telling a reporter something, again as though the manager had any control over what was written. Able's point was that, at one time, it was the councillor's sole responsibility to tell reporters things.

I was trying to calculate how many years it was back to the beginnings of Logan City in 1978 to help him with an answer but realised that I told him the answer about three weeks ago in this blog post at the beginning of this month.

They went on with discussing the report in the same paper at page three where the result of Cr Hackwood's failure to declare a Conflict of Interest over the Clutha Quarry prosecution for illegal blasting is reported. Some were given to wonder, aloud, how that got into the newspaper and why. It seems they they were affronted that a newspaper should report something about a councillor's activities in council. Able thought that there would be a report at the next Ordinary Meeting.

The important thing in the newspaper is that the Court decision on Clutha Quarry's blasting prosecution would be issues on Thursday, tomorrow.

The next objective of the attack was on the manager's marketing strategy, that is dated for 2009–2014 and that the manager offered that he was developing a new one due for scrutiny by the end of October. Cr Smith said not to worry about that but where was the media policy? The manager was wary of allowing this group of councillors loose on that because of the imminent elections. The chairperson asked the DCEO for a report on the strategy at a later meeting.

Cr Black wanted more emphasis on getting the Commonwealth government grants into the council's coffers. She thought that the manager's skill-set was eminently suited to doing that. The chairperson said that this was the wrong committee to be discussing that sort of thing. Black stated a multi-part resolution she wanted to move. The DCEO said that he would sit down with her and help to formulate a motion that she could move next Tuesday.

The manager ended with an up-market report to briefly outline the new marking effort that the council was to commence. Always the good news last, eh.

Item CS3, the Parks branch monthly report for August, attracted more comment, not so much about the report but about divisional things that the should have done outside the meeting.

The public were excluded from the meeting for Item CS4, Logan Cemetery Management Strategy Phase Two (Draft) Implementation Plan. They spent about 18 minutes on this item and decided to do exactly what the recommendations in their confidential papers already said. The next step is for them to go to community engagement with selected stakeholders (the undertakers). Crs Bradley and Able voted against the motion and we'll never know why. After the meeting the chair assured me that there would be a full consultation with the public later—when they have all got their minds all made up?

The meeting closed at 10.53 am.

Thursday's Governance, Finance & Economic Development committee meeting has 13 Items, one closed and three starred as kiss-and-run items. There is nothing of great import in the meeting from the look at the List of Items. I expect that it will be over by about 10 am.

Prepared for a fight

2011-09-27T19:43:00.000+10:00

The Animals & City Standards committee and the Planning & Development committee meetings went off with a bit of a bang today. It wasn't so much the doors as the pyrotechnics.

The first meeting started at 8.30 am and we had a quiet time of the first 20 minutes or so. Item AS1, Animal & Pest Services Branch Monthly Report for August was questioned, in a minor way, by Cr Grant. Item AS2, Logan City Dog Off-leash Areas, is a report requested by councillors back in June. I think that they got a bit more than they expected and Cr Pidgeon was rash enough to say so and indicate that the material therein was mostly in the Parks branch's province that is the Customer Services, Marketing & Parks committee's purview.

As I've said before it is a brave councillor who questions the reports from the Animals & Pest Services manager and she gave him both barrels. She pointed out that in the past some of the work was done in council with little or no consultation between branches and in this case the report reversed that. It was a report involving hers and the Parks' people. She went on to tell him how some of the other things he said were hardly fair in a number of detailed ways. I won't go into any more as you can guess what it was like with ice dripping off every word.

Cr Lutton made a move to lighten the load and relieve the tension. Cr Clarke stirred the pot a little by saying that one branch should be involved, not two. As she is chair of the other committee I expect she was actually trying to dampen the embers a little. Cr Power also stepped in and said that he was not going to anger Cr Pidgeon but that council still had, in the case of the off-leash area in Shailer Park, lessons to learn. Cr Smith said that he was looking forward to what will come back to their workshop on the issue (Recommendation 2.). They voted Yea for the recommendations.

In General Business the manager said that there was a Kids At Work day on Thursday. Sorry I cannot quickly find a URL anywhere for that. Can anyone help?

Item AS3 was gone in a moment. Item AS4, Litter/Waste Investigations in Kingston, was the same. In the manager's General Business Cr Black asked how she could cope with the number of people who rang her with complaints. She thought that most were of a frivolous nature and that maybe the manager could look at ways that councillor could respond to such complaints.

As she was talking about her concerns she suddenly changed tack to complaining about laughter that was coming from the public gallery. Seeing she was looking in the opposite direction I was astonished that she could identify where the laughter came from. She made several remarks about the disruption from the public until Cr Smith raised a point of order and said that nothing happened [in the way of laughter in the gallery]. Hajnal immediately accused Smith of laughing too.

This immediately caused an uproar, Lutton and Smith on one side and the Blacks pointing and accusing from the other, such that a member of the gallery called out that it was not he! The chairperson calmed the councillors down a little and then asked the manager to answer Cr Black's question about what to do. She was told to take the caller's name and ask the person to call the appropriate telephone number [1300 1LOGAN for people on 554 series numbers, 3412 3412 otherwise] and pass on the person's name to the branch.

The chair asked if councillors could see the manager's advice in a future report and everyone voted to do that. The meeting was closed at 9.15 am and Cr Able was engaged by the minutes secretary to detail the wording of the motion just resolved!

The Planning & Development meeting started at 9.30 and Cr Grant asked in Item PD1, the Development Assessment branch's monthly report, about the rate of resubmissions that were shown on pages 9 and 10 of the report. He was redirected to Graph 4 on page 8, and the key to that graph particularly, for the information he was looking for.

Item PD3 is about the new Local Law being proposed for owners of On-Site Sewage Facilities. They will have a notice in the newspapers, a set of the proposals at libraries and customer service centres and the consultation period is from Tuesday, 4 October to Friday, 28 October 2011. The local law is mainly from page 28 to 47 but the whole thing runs to page 50. It is nice that they have provided a clear copy of the two parts of the proposed local law and not oblige people to work through amendment documents that are so difficult to read.

In the General Business for the Development Assessment manager Cr Pidgeon asked why council had accepted a development application for 80 house-lots on a tiny piece of land adjacent to the Logan Village pub. He said that that was a designated commercial site, so he thought. He thought that the community was not generally aware of the application, and he wanted to know if this would come before the next committee meeting. The chairperson said that she, he and Cr Black go talk to the planners soon and, she said, that council cannot refuse properly made development applications.

Item PD4 about an MCU appeal on Paradise Road Slacks Creek, resulted in a decision to defend the appeal.

Item PD5, the Strategy & Planning branch monthly report for August was gone in a moment. Item PD6, New South Wales Court Decisions in relation to Urban Land Development Authority Planning Decisions, upset Cr Black instantly. She said that the report did not capture the essence of her motion that was about not properly consulting with the community. Cr Dalley, in the chair, said that that was the report and conclusion according to the motion that was made. There was some argument about was the motion answered or not. The manager said that was what he understood by the resolution from the earlier meeting.

Cr Black said that if ULDA didn't do the [consultation] process properly they would have to go back to the beginning, if the NSW decision applied here. She said that if they [ULDA] didn't do the consultation properly the local people have been denied due process in case of both Greater Flagstone and Yarrabilba. ULDA should have to go back to the start [of consultation].

Cr Lutton said that she should have framed the resolution more carefully. There were other words and Lutton observed that he understood she was a solicitor. Sean Black leaped up and, pointing to Lutton, said for everyone to hear, "She is a barrister!" There was more shouting and the chairperson adjourned the meeting at 10 am and she got up and walked from the meeting room. Meanwhile the shouting and red-faced pointing and jumping up and down went on.

The accusations were that Lutton had accused Black of not being a barrister or some approximation of that. The response was that he did not say anything of the sort and that he should know. Was he going to withdraw and apologise. Hajnal said that she would take it further—his lack of apology. Four minutes after the adjournment Hajnal was typing furiously on her iPad as everything was quieting. Lutton had walked out of the meeting room. People stopped talking and waited. At 10.06 it was all back to order.

Sean Black asked if Lutton could be suspended. The chair asked that, in the interest of time, can we move on. Sean said it was a concern of the people that ULDA didn't follow the law. Dalley started, "We have—Hajnal you're not listening!" Sean suggested that they could come back to this [agenda Item] next Tuesday [at the Ordinary meeting].

The Deputy CEO, Mr Oberhardt, came in and sat waiting to speak. The meeting was adjourned at 10.10 am and the public was told that the meeting had ended for the time being and that we should leave so that they could discuss issues privately. All of the public left to meeting room.

At 10.23 we were asked back to the meeting room, the meeting resumed and there was a discussion about the construction of a motion that Lutton be suspended from the remainder of the meeting. There was more discussion about the wording of the motion, largely with Cr Grant and Mr Oberhardt involved making suggestions. Ultimately the motion was acceptable to a majority and it was resolved by those who made up the majority.

The next Items were the closed items, PD7 & PD8, about Master Plans. Outside the meeting I slowly realised that they could argue for an hour or so and that they would, likely, go with whatever resolution that they had, for each one, in their confidential papers. I decided that none of us would worry about waiting, until next Tuesday for the result, and I left at about 10.40 am to do my business things.

Two members of the public, today, were young teenagers with their mother, who is a frequent member of the public gallery. Both of them, I know from talking to them, went away from the meeting with a new appreciation of how a meeting goes off the rails and can be bought back to order with wise chairmanship and quiet talking through the Standing Orders of the meetings.

Monday's meetings go well

2011-09-26T20:38:00.000+10:00

This morning there were the City Roads Infrastructure committee and the Environment & Sustainability committee meetings. I thought that the first was going to run quite late but a quorum of councillors arrived by 10.03 am.

Just as well as the Governance Manager, Simon Benham, was there to tell them all the recent changes to the Conflict of Interest (CoI) procedures.

Briefly, there is no longer a provision for a councillor to ask for the others to vote them in or out of the meeting for the issue concerned with the CoI. Each individual has to decide for themself. The councillor must deal with the real or perceived conflict in a transparent and acceptable way.

What real and perceived is meant in those words is that a real conflict is one directly known by the councillor. A perceived conflict is one where others may believe there to be a conflict. I'm not sure how councillors are going to handle the two issues. One should be easy, the perceived bit may be harder and the advice offered said that they should be careful and be safe rather than the opposite.

The procedures go on to say that conflicts must be managed in the public interest. Not, for example, as has happened in a council meeting, the councillor remained in a meeting and voted on the issue to have, or not have, council take court action against a friend.

A councillor not taking part in a meeting is not the only way to manage a conflict in a transparent way. The explanation was that there will be new forms for them to fill out when in conflict and they allow the way that a councillor votes to be recorded. The problem I perceive is that this is all an in-house process and the Minutes will not allow us, the general public, to know what happened exactly. And it is only the public who can tell if a councillor takes part in a Conflict of Interest situation.

The old process meant that a councillor could keep their mouth shut and proceed to vote on an issue. Only if a member of the public knew what was going on and reported it in a complaint did the council do anything. A member of the public includes their colleague councillors but, as often as not, they don't know any more than anyone else in the public. And we can think of situations where other councillors might know about a colleague's conflict and not say anything for a reason, can't we?

Mr Benham said that the existence of the councillor's form would be recorded in the Minutes. I'm not sure how and I'm not sure that it will be helpful. We'll just have to see as time goes on.

Cr Power wanted to know about his situation where he has resigned from all of his community positions and now finds that he doesn't have to be conflicted if he had kept them, and asked what he was to do now. And, of course, there is no advice an officer of the council can offer. He has to decide for himself. Cr Black asked if the penalties for ignoring the conflict had changed and she was told that they had. It was now a misconduct and monetary penalty points did not apply. Benham told her that he would take himself out of the meeting rather than risk a misconduct proceeding. Cr Black asked if Governance had done any work on the legal definition of transparent and acceptable and he was told no. That was not currently a council problem and word to the effect that until a court decides a case it would be hard to be certain.

Item IN2, the monthly report was gone in a moment. Item IN3, the Footpath Program, needed some explanation by the manager. In the past the council has been in the practice of taking a developer's infrastructure contribution, the money, and setting it aside until footpaths were needed. Under the new rules they cannot do that and the money must be spent by the developer as the project gets under way.

This caused a few howls where some pointed out that laying footpaths before the big trucks had unloaded the house-lot of timber would mean broken footpaths! I have to say that the howling did not generate any pertinent ideas about solving that problem until the last moment when Cr Lutton developed an idea that council ensures that the developer becomes responsible for the final delivery of the serviceable path.

Item IN4, a response to councillor's earlier question, in May, about adding a bridge to Meakin Road gives an answer of $11.5 million for the project. Nobody asked any further questions. I had to wonder why they had even asked the original question when they all know that Edwards Bridge costs are going up every month. And you might recognise that the originally demanded monthly reports on progress of the Edwards Bridge have stopped. I guess that the local councillor no longer sees it in her interests to publish a litany of bad news.

Item IN5, the Capital Works and Drainage Program was done in a moment. Item IN6, Load Limit for Chardon Bridge at Cedar Creek shows that the GCCC has load-limited the bridge to 10 tonnes as from 31 August 2011. You have to read the background paper to understand why Gold Coast has anything to do with it.

IN 7, 8 and 9 were gone in a minute. In the case of IN8, they decided to change the policy and the amended policy is at pages 81 and 82. I think that the changes are suitable and that the old 90 percent rule was silly. But note that the previous policy was adopted as recently as April 2010.

A demonstration of councillors powers of thinking ahead!

A Chairperson's Report IN10, Logan Road Safety Advisory Committee Meeting of 22 September, was run in too. Cr Clarke complained that Stoney Camp Road was deteriorating faster than they were repairing it and asked when the hot-mix seal would be done. The answer was almost inaudible, but I think it was soon. The meeting closed at 10.46 am.

The second meeting opened at 11 am and Item ES1, Waste Services report, was done in less than 20 seconds. Item ES2, Kerbside Cleanup dates, has a list of the set dates, until the end of the financial year, at page 23. The dates for the area of Munruben south to Woodhill are 3 October 2011 and 23 April 2012.

Item ES3, E&S branch monthly report, ES4, Conservation Incentive program and ES5, Vegetation Management, were all gone in a moment. The latter deals with the management, by Parks Branch, of the potential for trees to cause all sorts of damage to people. The conclusion is that moving flying foxes on is not an easy situation to solve. Item ES6, Annual Report on the Administration of the Environmental Protection Act 1994, is a covering report for the material sent to DERM that is on pages 55 and 56.

Item ES7, is about the State government's ClimateSmart Business Cluster and the council's participation in that program. The councillors gave it a tick of approval. Don't expect anything soon. But it might be a great incentive to local businesses.

Item ES8, is council's report and recommendation of what to do about Energex. There is a discussion of the issues on pages 64 to 66 and the conclusion and recommendations on page 67. They agreed with a slightly amended recommendation to add the words pending legal advice on outcome of the administrative review after the word That at the beginning. Just covering their bottoms I guess.

Item ES9, the purchase of land at Loganholme was closed and they argued for 35 minutes and I left before it finished. You'd expect anything from their debate.

I was advised that Council's Councillor Complaints Register had an item of a resolved complaint. The item is a complaint about Cr Hackwood not excusing himself from a council discussion and resolution about whether to prosecute Clutha Creek Quarry owners for illegal blasting at the quarry. I understand that he is a long-term friend of the management of the quarry. The RCRP decided that the complaint was sustained and he has been asked to apologise at a future Ordinary Meeting. A very weak result for the people who were expecting a more exemplary result.

Tuesday's two committees

2011-09-25T19:17:00.000+10:00

After Monday's meetings starting at 10 am we have the rest of the week starting at 8.30. On Tuesday it is the Animals & City Standards committee first and the Planning & Development committee meeting later. Usually 10 minutes later unless the first ends before 8.50 am and then it is 9.00 am for the second. This, latter, event is likely because the first meeting has only four Items. Three are starred as For Information reports that could take a minute for them all. Item AS2, Logan City Dog Off-Leash Areas, might take 10 minutes if they decide to argue much.

You would expect that all of the councillors to have read the Agenda Items' background papers when they get to the meeting. But that would be expecting too much!

You might expect councillors would turn up in numbers to make a quorum by 8.30 am too. But it seems to be beyond the powers of committee chairpersons to manage that too. I wonder why they get paid so much more than an ordinary councillor?

The Planning & Development committee has eight Items. Four of them are For Info reports and should go in a flash. Three are closed Items and PD3 is about the On-Site Sewage Facilities Local Law. Item PD4, a closed Item, is about an appeal regarding a material change of use for a property at 120-122 Paradise Road, Slacks Creek. This road goes from Kingston Road down to meet the roundabout that accesses the Pacific Highway and its western service road. If you have driven down Paradise Road you will have wondered what the city could possibly think is worse than the crappy buildings, jammed together, that are there! The road is a rubbish surface to drive over and the homes that are there are the last place I would like to live—with no soundproofing from the massive traffic flow.

Oh, maybe the city has an amazing plan to do a four-lane highway with serious shoulders, bike-tracks, soundproofing, and two-metre footpaths both sides and then redeveloped low-energy, modern, townhouses behind that. Yes, I can dream! But wouldn't it be good if the city had such a plan? Maybe, like the French, we need a revolution for something like that to happen?

PD7 and PD8 are about Master Plans, the first in the Mayor's town of Meadowbrook and the other in Beenleigh. Certainly Meadowbrook needs a masterplan but with the hospital and the university there I can see that it will be a hard row upstream, in a leaky boat, getting that one down on paper because of objections. Maybe that is why they are both closed?

For goodness sake the Meadowbrook one is just a Key Issues Report. Where's the openness in Local Government? Maybe Cr Dalley will be able to tell us on Tuesday morning.

New round of committee meetings on Monday

2011-09-23T20:13:00.000+10:00

The City Roads Infrastructure committee and the Environment & Sustainability committee meetings are on Monday from 10 am.

The City Roads meeting is also being used by Governance to make a presentation to councillors about the Conflict of Interest provisions in the amended Local Government Act 2009. You'd guess that most councillors will try to make it to the meeting at 10 am because this meeting has been poorly served by councillors in recent times. It certainly seems to have been black-listed by some.

The meeting has eight other items with only one starred. Item IN6, Load Limit Recommendation for Chardon Bridge, Cedar Creek, may be interesting. This is the sort of report that saw the Edwards Bridge limited to five tonnes maximum capacity. Item IN8, Amendment to Changing of Names of Road Policy and Renaming of Mt Lindesay Highway Service Roads, is up for discussion. This comes about because of the problem they are having with the new service road from Stoney Camp Road to Crest Road at Park Ridge. Somehow someone already named the northern end without thinking about the issues properly.

You'll notice that either all of Logan City Council has a dictionary correction in the MS Word dictionary for the wrong spelling of Lindesay—no I spelled it right both times, but the List does not—or a reporting person in City Roads has the dictionary problem! I hope that someone knows how to sort it. It is quite easy, if you know how. Leave a comment if you want an answer.

The latter meeting has nine Items, five of which are kiss-and-run ones. The last two of the starred, Items ES5 and ES6 should be worth reading in the Agenda document that will be available from 8.30 am on Monday morning.

Item ES8, August 2011 Update—Energex Loganlea to Jimboomba Power Line, will interest many local people. You can go to the VETO site for more information but I understand that the Minister has appointed some sort of mediator to talk to VETO, Council, Cardno and Energex to come to some resolution. The first three named organisations oppose Energex's plans.

The Lists of Items for the five meetings to start from 8.30 am on Tuesday to Thursday are currently on the council's web site. Go look for yourself.

Gold Coast City Council votes to withdraw from Allconnex

2011-09-16T17:38:00.000+10:00

Ten TV News at 5.09 pm tonight has announced that Gold Coast City Council (GCCC) has voted, irrevocably, to withdraw from Allconnex Water. The vote was close.

That means that Logan City Council will go with a revitalised Logan Water and should be able to recover costs from GCCC. Don't get too many hopes up. The wholesale water supply price is still in the hands of SEQ Water and you can bet that the state government will keep the price of water as high as possible, that the same engineers, who were dumping great masses of water into the Brisbane River as the flood was raging, will be managing the system to keep water as scarce as possible and that nothing much will change.

Except that the placing of the sewage treatment plant on the east side of the Logan River at Cedar Grove might be switched to the west side so that only Greater Flagstone is served by it.

Do we Cedar Grove residents want to be forced to pay for sewage treatment at these prices? If you don't want to download the file I don't blame you because that is Allconnex now, do we expect Logan Water to be cheaper? What is says is For ongoing connection to Allconnex Water’s wastewater distribution system $142.66 per quarter.

I'm flabbergasted that they call it a distribution system! It is a collection system, and anyone who doesn't know the difference should not be setting fees.

Energex up to the usual confusing tactics

2011-09-14T14:54:00.000+10:00

I received the following email from the president of VETO, Mr Dieter Lacko, and I'm repeating his newsletter because I think that what he says, toward the end, about existing easements is important.

Hi all our supporters,

The VETO Rage is about what we wanted from Energex all along, the only change is that "we" the people had to point out our concerns and try to initiate changes that professionals like Energex should have done, hence the Energex consultation did not do what it was supposed to do (listen to the people make appropriate changes to accommodate the people, follow safe and best practice for the people).

At this point of time we are awaiting the outcome of a proposed meeting between Energex, Cardno, Logan Council and VETO. after that the Minister for Energy Stephen Robertson will make a decision. Depending on that decision VETO will decide where we go from here.

Currently the directly affected people (who have an existing easement) have received notices saying what Energex is proposing is OK. My understanding from some affected people is, although Energex will relinquish the current easement, they will then take their 40-meter-wide easement, and only pay for the difference, even if a different path through the property may be the result. I assume that is because of the closeness to some homes requiring easement adjustments.

People getting Energex through their property for the first time have been informed their will be little impact to their property, working farms, dairying, cattle raising, horses etc and little to no affect on native bird and animal life and flora; also Energex will show people how to work with these lines and poles on their property, and any digging near poles. Energex must be informed.

Don't forget our meetings on the second and fourth Tuesday of the month dates and times are in the VETO Rage.

All are welcome

I have to say, having lived on a farm where poles conducted electricity to utilities, that there are so many problems with easements and poles. I remember the vehicles that have the right to enter and destroy your crops and the workmen who will think nothing of, for example, discarding cigarettes into your dry grass. The continuing loss of land around the poles because tractor and implement turning circles are limited, the continued need to be aware of the overhead wires when using some kinds of equipment on the farm. The paltry return for giving up the easement! So it goes on.

I am also aware that Energex has not made any significant move to update their web site to show they understand that they cannot be assured they will be able to go ahead with the original proposal.

Yes, we need them, but we don't need them in their uncaring attitude that they have adopted so far. Let there be light—especially in the board-room of Energex.

Tuesday sees shouting again

2011-09-13T21:00:00.000+10:00

Today there is both an Agenda and a Mayor's Agenda for the Ordinary Meeting of council. Clicking on either heading, under Agenda, will get a file downloaded directly. But don't do that. The mayor's agenda is from 23 August. I'm afraid that governance or the IS service has a long way to go to get things right.

The Mayor's Report is a late Item, MR1, Institute of Public Administration Australia, Queensland Public Sector, Best Practice in Local Government (proudly sponsored by BDO) Awarded to a team working in local government which has delivered best practice outcomes and made a significant contribution to service delivery for their local community award to Logan City Council's Development Assessment Transformation from a Bureaucracy to a Business. And the Logan Development Projections Model Team was a runner-up in the same award section. Both of these teams belong to the Economic Development Deputy CEO, who was very proud to be awarding his teams at the Congratulations part of the meeting.

That the late Item is not part of the Agenda downloads, and another is still there, seems to be quite wrong. That the meeting spent almost 25 minutes on the awards to the two teams of town planners demonstrated the appreciation expressed by the DCEO and the Mayor and you might think that it would all come out right. But for us, the public, it is a disaster!

The acceptance of the committees' recommendations went through with little said. The Environment & Sustainability committee's recommendation that greenwaste charges be reduced from $30 to $16 will start on 1 October. So we were told. We were also told that the original increase was due to new state government procedures to quarantine fire ants and that the new fee was the lowest they could possibly make it. We were told it cost $640 thousand more for the fire-ant regulations.

There was a mention that they were composting that waste and reselling it, I guess that means the lowest cost to be able to sell at a profit. After the meeting I wasn't able to catch Cr Able and ask what he meant, exactly, by his statement.

Cr Able also gave a little statement about the number of abandoned cars that council recovers and costs. He thought that cars were too cheap to buy and that people would rather abandon them on the street-sides. To each his own prejudice, I suppose.

The Planning & Development recommendations were divided to exclude PD4 so that the mayor could be excused for that with a conflict of interest. Cr Black had another shot at PD2, the intensive agriculture allowed by the nursery in his division at 2319–2329 Waterford Tamborine Road. But it all went wrong for him. Cr Black seconded the motion and he spoke about how the people did not want that sort of thing on their doorstep. She spoke and the mayor took a quick vote and the amending motion was lost. For a change Black had said that there was a copy of the motion written out for distribution but it was not needed.

The next substantial business was the general business and Cr Black launched into describing parts of a case in NSW that she said offered a precedent for a legal opinion on whether ULDA adequately consulted with the public, or not. She was told that she'd have to make a motion for a report. She was also told that council had framed its objections to ULDA's plans and that a ruling was due in early October.

She started on the need to follow-up on the legal position. The CEO said that they could not accept non-urgent motions for immediate action but they could make one for a report to a nominated committee.

The mayor pointed out, in relation to this matter, that we were getting 97 percent of the infrastructure charges paid and that roads, now, were costing the city $400 thousand every time it rained. She said that many millions were being spent on replacement road bridges. Cr Black interrupted and said, "What are you doing?" and a few other words too hard to catch. The mayor said, "I support what you are doing. I'm making a statement" as there was considerable uproar. Black's husband was on his feet wanting to make a contributory speech to the motion and was concurrently telling the mayor in a Point of Order that she was preventing him from speaking. She was banging her gavel and calling for Order. Hajnal offered a threat to expose how she was being treated, in this meeting, on her facebook site. Sean was still yelling and Lutton was trying to move a motion that the question now be put. Which was immediately seconded by more than one voice.

When the uproar died down Able asked if the motion could be read again. This is often a good move when meetings are trying to return to calm again. It makes the proposer gather the tatters of dignity and think logically. Unfortunately Hajnal had to stumble her way through her thoughts but she got there, to my astonishment. The motion for a report was resolved by a great majority. I expect to report more after a committee meeting in two week's time.

Black asked for a report about car insurance claims from hitting potholes and that was passed. She blew her brownie points on a rambling speech about the rights of Jewish businesses in another city. She had some motion that was also passed into the record. I'll be interested to see what it says when the minutes are available. There was, after the vote, some discussion as to which committee the report would go to, so I'm not sure what the other councillors thought they were voting about.

I'll say again—this bunch of councillors are too sloppy with motions. They permit vague motions to be put, other councillors second wordings that are going to be changed, without proper amendment procedures, a number of times. They all vote on the proposition each thinks is the motion and it turns out, too often, that none knows exactly what they voted for. I think that sometimes some do not vote at all, exactly because of that vagueness.

A councillor who offers a speech during General Business and does not have a pre-prepared motion on paper, at hand, is not doing her or his job properly. General business is about council's and our business. No a councillor's private affairs or politics, unless they bring council into disrepute. Remember that Act extract last week where it says in §12(3)(c) participating in council meetings, policy development, and decision making, for the benefit of the local government area? Not for the Brisbane City Council or any other council. The mayor should shut down that sort of drivel.

If it is not in—§12(1) A councillor must represent the current and future interests of the residents of the local government area—it isn't a meeting's business.

After all of that Lutton reminded the mayor that the meeting had not voted to receive Item MR1, about the awards, and the mayor apologised and did the motion for that.

Cr Black humbly offered how proud he was of his wife throwing herself in front of the rabid crown to stave off a break-in at a premises. Able praised one of the city's newsmedia for its front-page article about dog attacks and slated the state government Animal Management Act that was causing these serious attacks. There was some discussion about whether or not there was to be a motion from his remarks. It was difficult to tell if there was a motion or a vote, I think neither. Clarke said that she supported Able. Dalley spoke about the feds moving to have the ATO rebate $1000, annually, for each school-kiddie and asked councillors to talk to their local state and federal member in support of that move.

Pidgeon offered that dog semen could be bought into the country in frozen insemination straws but the dogs themselves could not. He thought that was wrong, that the loophole needed closing. One has to wonder how that might be done. How could they tell which semen was which animal's?

The mayor closed the meeting at 11.21 am.

Ordinary meeting, Tuesday, likely to be short

2011-09-10T15:21:00.000+10:00

The Ordinary meeting of council on Tuesday, 13 September, is likely to be short and sweet because there is nothing special on the List if Items so far.

The only likely hiccup will be the decision that Gold Coast City Council (GCCC) is slated to have on the previous day, Monday. They are expected to discuss a repeal notice of motion by a councillor in relation to their earlier decision to withdraw from their shareholding and support for Allconnex Water (AW). If they make a decision to not withdraw that will upset the applecart for our council's decision to go back to owning Logan Water and running its own potable water and sewage systems.

That might lead to a simple decision to also withdraw from going it alone, the only sensible option if GCCC does that too. That will need some quick resolutions to stop what they were doing and to move some new ones to get back into harness with AW. Because the GCCC meeting will have finished on Monday you'd expect that whichever way our council will jump will be known that afternoon.

That will give our executive team time to work through a background paper to lay out the necessary recommendations for the councillors to read and understand at the Executive meeting first thing on Tuesday morning. That means that there shouldn't be any long debates and acrimony about the issues during the real meeting starting at 10 am. With luck whatever GCCC decide on Monday will not disrupt Tuesday's Ordinary meeting. It should be just ordinary.

Efficient Governance meeting today

2011-09-08T15:11:00.000+10:00

The Governance, Finance & Economic Development committee meeting today had a regular Agenda and a Chairpersons Report. The Report, GF9, deals entirely with the CEO's report to the committee about the preliminary stages of the council taking back Logan Water's assets and staff. If you click on that last link (Chairpersons Report, above) it will download the report immediately.

The meeting started when the seventh councillor's nose came in the door at 8.36 am. The following Items were passed on motions in this order, GF8, GF3, GF5, GF6, GF7, GF4 and GF2 and the time was 8.38 am.

I don't think that Item GF2, about single-source purchasing for the library and the Entertainment Centre is entirely kosher but it might take a long time to develop that argument. Item GF5, the Capital Infrastructure fund has division by division expenditure from page 39 to 42. The other slush fund, GF6, has just the results for this round and Cr Back has give $400 to Quota towards its Art Show, page 44.

The meeting was closed for the discussion of Item GF1, Logan Listens: 2011 Residents Survey—Draft Questionnaire, so that I couldn't listen to the discussion about the questions and any amendments to them. I wasn't bothered too much because I was one of the people involved last year with being questioned for the survey and I could tell you what they are anyway! But, there you go. I'm informed that the questions will be largely the same and there has been some simplification and clarification of them to allow people to understand them more easy this year. The resolution says that too.

I'm glad that councillors saw the light and did not try to change things much.

The CEO was there himself to brief people on the water issue, GF9, and he did a good job of it. He apologised for the late delivery of the agenda document to councillors last night. He warned that a councillor at Gold Coast City Council (GCCC) intends to make a motion for repeal of their decision to withdraw from Allconnex Water because the other two councils may/can recover costs from them. He will tell us more on Tuesday morning, he said. I think that he meant the councillors, but likely not as he often makes such news widely available.

I have a bunch of notes here but most of them are exactly what you can read in the Item, if you download it. The CEO said that there are three major steps to the disengagement and they are numbered 1.0, 2.0 and 3.0 in the agenda item.

Cr Black will be pleased that he can read it all in the agenda as he didn't turn up until 8.53 just before the end of the discussion. The report was received and adopted.

In General Business Cr Black started by issuing an apology to the CEO for when he had accused the CEO of failing to respond to his, Black's, correspondence for some time. He said that he was now satisfied that the CEO had made timely responses to everything that Black had written to him. Black offered an exculpatory explanation for the non-receipt that I thought was hardly credible or that means that fellow councillors were implicated in the disappearance of the replies or both.

He then asked what happened about the issue he raised about, I think, insurance, and the chairperson, Cr Smith, said that he had had the staff there, at the meeting, to respond to that at 8.30 am and no one asked any questions. Cr Power asked a series of questions about councillors' computers that showed that he barely understood how computers and their security systems worked and the CEO said that he would get the information for him after the meeting.

Cr Black took the opportunity to remind councillors, who may not have been listening by then, that they had all voted to exclude council information from social media pages operated by councillors. I think that he is still stinging from that rebuke.

Cr Able went into a tirade about the state government being stingy about grants for council parks. He said that he understood that some instruction document explained their position and the CEO replied that he could send him a copy of the document concerned. Able responded by asking when they could expect a report on that issue and the CEO told him that he would chat to Deputy CEO Pickering to prepare a report.

The meeting closed at 9.07 am.

Funny ideas of what councillors are supposed to do

2011-09-07T20:20:00.000+10:00

Today we saw, and heard, some of the silliest ideas of what a councillor is responsible for as you'd get from anywhere. That some councillors exhibited those failings and that none of the others disabused their colleagues shows that we can hardly rely on most councillors to be doing their duty as required by the Local Government Act 2009. You'll find the Act partway down the page, at that link, in alphabetical order and, beneath it, a list of its regulations. They work together. The most often quoted one you see, in Lists of Items and Agendas, is Local Government (Operations) Regulation 2010—both of them were last amended at the beginning of February 2011.

Acts and Regulations often look difficult and some are, but the local government ones have to be easily understood by a wide range of people and they are a reasonable model of simplicity. They are divided by Parts and Chapters but most people skip those and refer to the numbering system for each main heading. These are called sections when spoken aloud and many people write that word too but I prefer to use the proper typographical symbol which is this: § a sort of ess with a bulgy tummy. It is still spoken as section.

Sections have sub-sections that are numbered in parenthesis like this: (1) is the first and they grow numerically as needed. These sub-sections only refer to or define their parent. Sub-sections can have sub-sub-sections that are enumerated with alphabetic letters, like (a), in parenthesis. They often grow enormeously as an Act is amended. The progression is supposed to be (a) to (z), then (aa), (ab) to (az) and (ba) etc. But you will see that is not always the case with organisations that emulate the system. Finally there are lower-case Roman numerals for sub-sub-sub-sections, (i), (ii)—(iv), (v) and so on. Remember that an indented section is only applicable to the next higher one above it. No further.

It is possible, too, for the section numbers to grow and when that happens in the middle of a run of numbers we get suffix alphabetic capitals to the section's number—540, 540A, 540B and so on. This happened in many cases in the 1993 Act by the time it got to 2009, and that is usually a signal to the parliament to do something to reorganise and update the whole set of laws. Some countries are smart and leave gaps in the section numbers to allow for more rational amendment numbering. The US, for example, leaves gaps of five between the numbers.

So much for that. I've just been guiding you into this next comment that is about the responsibilities of councillors. Because of the limitations of my blog controls I ended up leaving some spaces between lines that should not be there, particularly when I change the indentation of the text. Sorry, it is quicker to write this way.

This is what the Local Government Act 2009 at (section) §12 says about councillors—
12 Responsibilities of councillors

(1) A councillor must represent the current and future interests of
the residents of the local government area.
(2) All councillors of a local government have the same
responsibilities, but the mayor has some extra responsibilities.
(3) All councillors have the following responsibilities—
(a) ensuring the local government—
(i) discharges its responsibilities under this Act; and
(ii) achieves its corporate and community plans; and
(iii) complies with all laws that apply to local
governments;
(b) providing high quality leadership to the local
government and the community;
(c) participating in council meetings, policy development,
and decision making, for the benefit of the local
government area;
(d) being accountable to the community for the local
government’s performance.
(4) The mayor has the following extra responsibilities—
(a) leading and managing meetings of the local government
at which the mayor is the chairperson, including
managing the conduct of the participants at the
meetings;
(b) proposing the adoption of the local government’s
budget;
(c) liaising with the chief executive officer on behalf of the
other councillors;
(d) leading, managing, and providing strategic direction to,
the chief executive officer in order to achieve the high
quality administration of the local government;
(e) directing the chief executive officer, in accordance with
the local government’s policies;
(f) conducting a performance appraisal of the chief
executive officer, at least annually, in the way that is
decided by the local government (including as a member
of a committee, for example);
(g) ensuring that the local government promptly provides
the Minister with the information about the local
government area, or the local government, that is
requested by the Minister;
(h) being a member of each standing committee of the local
government;
(i) representing the local government at ceremonial or civic
functions.
(5) A councillor who is not the mayor may perform the mayor’s
extra responsibilities only if the mayor delegates the
responsibility to the councillor.
(6) When performing a responsibility, a councillor must serve the
overall public interest of the whole local government area.

You can see that sub-section (1) is the scene-setter, it says what the councillor's overall duty is to—us all. Sub-section (3) is the nitty-gritty part of the job that is within a councillor's responsibilities. Sub-sub-section (3)(a) provides a broad-brush of what to do, but in the end the CEO does most of that and that person can only be directed by the Mayor (see (4)). The way that councillors can influence things via this sub-sub-section is by making Motions that are voted into place by a majority of them. Sub-sub-section (3)(b) is a sop to councillors ego and something to put in their Résumé, nothing more. Sub-sub-section (3)(c) is the reality of the job—they actually do these things in a meeting. A committee meeting, an ordinary meeting or a special meeting. That is supposed to be it, but councillors always find ways, workshops and executive meetings are prime examples, to thrash out issues and to draft motions for later agreement without having embarrassing discussions in public.

Just to be clear about this, we have a councillor—participating in council meetings, policy development, and decision making, for the benefit of the local government area. That last bit, for the benefit of the local government area is what is new in this 2009 Act and is what can get a councillor out of his/her job. We are left with meetings, policy development, and decision making as the three real things that a councillor does. They have meetings because they cannot do the other two things there without an overall majority. The Act says that they have to make resolutions in public, however secret the rest of the discussions might be—legally or illegally—and those resolutions are about policy, or failures of policy where they make a decision that the policy does not cover.

While the Act doesn't mention it, a council decision, other than to make a policy, is made when they are asked to make one—either because other parts of the Act, or other Acts, say they are the decision-making body for that or because the officers are in a quandary and the existing policy doesn't quite fit the issue.

You see this last reason for making decisions in the Briefing Papers that are put to various committee meetings in Lists of Items and Agendas. The decision is made according to the Recommendations listed near the end of the paper. In fact there is a very limited series of things that councillors can do except vote to accept the recommendation is many cases.

Councillors should, when they come across recurring decision-making questions about similar problems, make motions to have the policy that applies reviewed and updated so that the officers have new guidelines to cover the new situations. This is the only way that citizens will be treated equally and properly by the council.

Making ad hoc decisions all the time might feel good to councillors, but they should all recognise that when they do that they are in jeopardy of treating each citizen that benefits, or doesn't, badly or at least differently. That good feeling is from not doing their job properly or from not making or allowing the officers to do their job evenly and according to the precepts of good government.

The showdown today came about for the second meeting of the morning, the Customer Service, Marketing & Parks committee meeting when the chair, Cr Clarke, announced that there were no reports for the meeting and that they had gathered for any General Business. Cr Able, one of our quarter-centenarian councillors, let rip at the chair person and the Deputy CEO about there being no reports to engage the councillors minds for the morning. I won't go into detail about all of the things that he said, but some of them were less than complementary about the managers and the DCEO. A couple of others took up the cry while many were trying to speak at once and I don't really know what they were saying but the general buzz was anti-management.

No reports means that the staff were not striking any difficulties!

When the dust settled, without anyone apologising, they took up the only item of General Business left and tore the fridge-magnet-booklet prepared by marketing apart again. Much worse than the last round meeting and this time the officer had told us that she was doing a final check because they had all signed-off on their parts of it. I know it was Natalie's job but her manager sat there closed mouth with a wooden face through the tirade. Don't be surprised when we see the cost of this little enterprise, when a printer has a final draft to set it is going to cost you the same amount again to make anything in the way of changes to the print-ready copy. Phew!

The meeting had started at 9.03 am and finished at 9.29 am.

The Health, Sport & Community Services committee meeting started at 8.35 because of a lack of a quorum earlier, Cr S Black made the numbers up and the meeting opened immediately. There were only four Items to the agenda and I thought that it had been likely that it would end so that the next meeting could start at its earliest time, 9 am.

At the start Cr Able wanted to know who was paying for the demolishing of the burnt-out home in which all the Tongans perished. He said that he was annoyed that he had not been told about what was going on. I think that he had a point about being told, but I don't think that he should have been told about the way the emergency services were funding the work. I guess that it was his usual worry about any money going out of the council's coffers and who might have authorised the expenditure.

When he was done, without an answer, they voted leave of absence to Crs Bradley Grant and Lutton, the latter two being away all week so far, and to H Black for having family matters to attend.

Item HC1, Community Services Branch Monthly Report for July/August 2011, Item HC2, Lease to the Rochedale South Cricket Club Inc, and HC3, Trustee Lease to the Jimboomba Tennis Club Inc, were voted one by one in about 55 seconds by my count.

Item HC4, Expression of Interest for Office Space Located at the Logan West Community Centre, was spoken to by the chair, Cr Pidgeon, and then deferred to the next round of committee meetings in three week's.

In General Business Cr Able asked what had happened to some process. The DCEO answered that it was on the officer's To-Do List. Able was annoyed and saying that it was a motion of council that was supposed to be reported back today. Why was it taking so long to do? The manager chipped in with the fact that the task could not be done without the required documents. Able got away with remarking that it was sloppy work by the branch—that the work was a direction by council.

I'm sort-of on the side of Cr Able. If they could not meet the deadline they should have made an appropriate report. But Able has no rights to charge any employee with sloppy, or any other adverse, work.

Cr Power started talking about a lease that was recently actioned by council officers. He said that he thought that is was to be a commercial proposition. He wanted an immediate review of that. The DCEO said that it was a 3-year lease that was put in place and they were not going to bring it back. Power responded with, "How long is the lease?" and the DCEO calmly said, "Three years."

Cr Black said that it wouldn't be appropriate for officers to do anything outside policy, that was councillors' responsibility. Which seemed to calm things a little and the chair told them that he had already said there would be a paper at the next round of meetings—was there any other GB?

Power pursued an issue about a park that I did not hear properly and the DCEO passed the package to the manager quickly. He ultimately said that what Power said is unknown (to council). Power moved and Able seconded a motion to get a report for the next meeting. The chair asked if there could be a discussion with the community facilities staff in the process and the motion was voted Yea.

The meeting was closed at 8.52 am.

One of the things that are a great waste of time for meetings is the range of branch monthly reports that appear in almost every meeting list. Prior to amalgamation Logan councillors went through every one of these reports as though it was a serious discussion item. Some time after amalgamation Cr Hackwood made a suggestion that, like they did at Gold Coast City Council, all of those For Information reports should be annotated against their item number with an asterisk signifying that the item could be voted Yea if there were no questions about issues therein.

After more than three years the number of such reports receiving any great amount of attention has been almost zero. Oh, sure, Cr Grant has identified a number with mistakes, grammar and spelling errors and complained about a few that were so badly written as to be unintelligible.

The answer, it seems to me, is that all of those reports should be placed on the council's web site in the first instance. Maybe a week before the committee round, or at some specified time each month. Let everybody read them. If either the public or the councillors have a problem, with anything reported, they can append the report to the agenda for the next meeting and clear-up the problem(s).

Yes, these reports are a mechanism by which councillors can be—accountable to the community for the local government’s performance. But keeping the reports from the community is counterproductive in that regard. In any case councillors get reports about branch performance in the Governance committee meetings because there is now a manager whose job it is to determine and report such details to councillors. He is the Outcomes and Performance Manager.