SEPTEMBER 7, 2017
YOUR INDEPENDENT COMMUNITY NEWSPAPER
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PH: 4325 7369
ISSUE 166
Residents to vote in historic first election O
n Saturday, September 9, the residents of the former Gosford Local Government Area will have their opportunity to vote in the historic first election of the combined Central Coast Council. They have not been democratically represented at a local government level since Gosford Council was dismissed by the NSW Government on May 12, 2016, and replaced with an administrator. The former council was sacked, along with neighbouring Wyong Council, because the NSW Government had declared it “unfit for the future”. Former Gosford Council CEO, Mr Paul Anderson, was appointed interim deputy general manager of the newlycreated Central Coast Council, but did not take up the post. Within months, not one of the senior executive positions on the new Council was held by a former Gosford Council employee, leading to claims that the merger was more of a Wyong takeover than a meeting of equals. All former committees of the Gosford Council were dissolved immediately and have not been replaced. Former councillors were invited to take part in the Administrator’s Local Representation Committee, and all did except former Mayor, Mr Lawrie McKinna.
Vacant chairs in the Wyong chamber ready and waiting for the newly-elected councillors to take their places
However, the LRC was deemed tokenistic by many and resulted in former Councillors being silenced from commenting on Council issues publicly. Since the proclamation that created the Central Coast Council, the workings of the former Gosford Council have been the subject of some disturbing headlines. A forensic audit of the 201516 accounts found anomalies that could have resulted in at least 50 unauthorised people making unverifiable changes to the accounts. CEO, Mr Rob Noble, said he
had no evidence as to whether or not any unauthorised changes had or had not been made to the books. Assets were massively revalued as part of the audit process, and some matters were referred to ICAC, although the Commission has not announced any subsequent inquiry or report. More recently, the former Gosford Council received negative publicity in an ABC 4 Corners investigation into illegal dumping at Spencer, and its failures to manage the Mangrove Mountain landfill between the early 2000s
and 2014, to ensure that it remained within the bounds of its development consent. More matters have been referred to ICAC. In his final interview with Coast Community News before departing the position of Administrator, Mr Ian Reynolds, said those legacy issues had been unexpected when he took up the position in May 2016. They are far from resolved and will now fall into the laps of the 15 men and women who will be elected to the new Central Coast Council.
The Gosford and Wyong chambers of the new Central Coast Council have been readied to accommodate the 14 new councillors and mayor. The mayor will be elected by the other Councillors, not by a popular vote of the people. So who should the people of the Central Coast elect to fill those 15 vacant chairs for the next three years? The job facing each new Councillor is enormous, so the task of deciding who to vote for is a significant one. The new Central Coast local government area is basically a
NSW Government experiment. It is a mega Council, one of the biggest in Australia, let alone NSW, encompassing the geographically and demographically diverse area from the southern shores of Lake Macquarie to the northern shores of the Hawkesbury River. The new LGA has been carved up into five Wards, and the former Gosford Council area falls into three of those: Gosford East, Gosford West and, to the surprise of many, Wyong. Residents of each Ward will be able to elect three Councillors to represent their particular area of the Coast. The ward boundaries appear to be an attempt to dissolve the north-south divide between the two former Councils, instead dividing the Coast vertically, with three smaller wards hugging the coastline, and the bulk of the new LGA appearing to be divided between the geographically large and rather disparate wards of Wyong and Gosford West. It will be up to the newlyelected Council to determine whether or not to keep, throw out or re-arrange the wards. Some candidates have declared they will immediately reinstate community-based committees, others have advocated the need to quickly establish precinct committees.
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