REPORT CARD: General Manager's Book of Spin

STATUS: this publication has been circulated to ratepayers for assessment with their Rate Notices – some are ratepayer and residents some are just ratepayers.

The Rate Notices are a good opportunity to communicate with ratepayers but this document fails on a number of points:
1. It is blatant serf serving SPIN that demonstrates that the producers are concerned that they are unappreciated – and thus may not get their rewards, bonuses, promotions, whatever. This book is an example of The Big Lie technique in operation in the 21st Century.

2. It addresses its audience on the assumption that it is reaching the people who count. In one way it does but it misses a vast number of people who are residents, who also count but are not ratepayers who receive Rate Notices – renters generally, many medical professionals working in our hospitals temporarily, students from elsewhere studying in our schools, colleges and university, migrants and refugees and many others. Without these people the city would not, indeed could not, function and deliver the quality of life the writers are claiming as being ’their work’. The 'residents' – well large numbers of them – are left out of the equation yet AGAIN.

3. It exudes a 1980s “GREED IS GOOD” ambiance and mindset. It oozes opulence and waste, with its expensive non-recycled paper, colour printing and clichéd graphic design. All this is compounded by the fact that residents and ratepayers – and potentially visitors and prospective residents too – would have been much better served by an interactive electronic publication – yet another lost opportunity and an example of misspent resources.

4. It engages in political bias, which is TOTALLY inappropriate for such a publication. Residents and ratepayers can see this for what it is and can be expected to ‘bin it’ – physically and intellectually.

5. It fails the ‘cost effectiveness’ test. Imagine this, there are approximately 30,000 rateable properties in the Launceston Municipality and think about the cost effectiveness of 30,000 of these things being posted out to unappreciative readers – then multiply it by 4! The ‘Marketing Department' at Council has grown out of all proportion to NEED as is demonstrated by this document.

We could go on but we would rather you leave your comments – opposing, concurring, divergent, parallel, whatever – so that this assessment carries the endorsement or otherwise of readers. ALL comments will be posted unless they are libellous or defamatory.

What was the final Cost? When will it be reported?

It is now a year on and you have to think that the reporting has been done and that the reports are available for scrutiny. If it has been done, what did the reporting tell us? If they are not in yet, then why not?

So much gets lost in the in the melee of day to day management of a large enterprise like Launceston City Council – but tracking expenditure and assessing outcomes are a part of all that. Assuming that there was State and/or Federal government funding involved you would also think that by now it would have been necessary to report on outcomes by now.

If the speculated cost reported in the press in 2008 had any veracity this project represented approx. $130 plus per rateable property in Launceston. The question that really needs to be asked is just how many budgetary glitches like this do ratepayers need to carry.

After that, ratepayers need to be quizzing their Aldermen about this project and this kind of thing. Why? Well, because in the end they are the ones who need to find the dollars to cover the expenditure – as taxpayers and/or ratepayers.

There are a lot more questions linked to all this that should or could be asked but let’s keep this simple and confined to some basic first principles for now.

A 21st Century Objective

Click here for Zero Waste Australia

WASTE OR WATER – WATER OR WASTE

This is nothing new, Launceston has been wasting water for a very long time. However it is nonetheless disturbing for ratepayers to see water wasted, and not only that, see their rates used to exacerbate the waste – plus see their rates wasted along with it.

Trevallyn ratepayers are having the experience of watching Council spend $1.8 million on separating stormwater from their sewage. That is possibly a worthy project but in the way it has been implemented, well it turns out that it is by-and-large a wasteful exercise.

Where is the waste? Firstly, Launceston’s ratepayers should NOT be involved in this project at all because it is the responsibility of the new Ben Lomond Water Authority But it does not stop there!

Secondly, the plan was conceived without consultation with the ratepayers and the project budget seems to have been pulled out of the air – or worse still concocted on the back of an envelope. Apparently the budget is an extrapolation of $15,000 per property. But without line item budgeting how could you trust or control that figure?

Thirdly, there is no evidence that the project was researched and designed to fit either the ‘geography’ or the 'ecology'. In fact the engineering shows every sign of the project being designed for a region with a rainfall at least treble that of Launceston.

Fourthly, it is environmentally irresponsible to be piping stormwater into rivers from urban landscapes. Rather current research [1 • 2 • 3 • 4] is telling urban planners that in water sensitive design processes, stormwater should be retained in the landscape and filtered through the soil profile. Why? Mainly to water the landscape and reduce to the pollution, nutrient and contamination levels in rivers that pass through urban landscapes. So without research or consultation, Launceston, and Trevallyn residents in particular, are being delivered a lazily designed, overly expensive, wasteful and environmentally inappropriate stormwater management regime.

The icing on the cake comes with the city's General Manager, Frank Dixon, saying that "the council will be exploring opportunities to reuse rainwater." This is a hollow promise and it totally lacks credibility to say the least. Excuse the long suffering ratepayers – the city's shareholders – if they might think that in regard to this project an opportunity to do just that has already been bureaucratically squandered.

The short and long of it is that the Trevallyn Stormwater Separation Project is an exemplar of civic mismanagement and the lost opportunities such projects amplify. They say, "if you pay peanuts you buy monkeys." But, Launceston pays its bureaucratic management TOP DOLLAR!

When looking for waste in one place it very likely that when you find it, it will take you everywhere else!

POSITIONS VACANT: Launceston Community

There is mounting evidence that lazy bureaucrats have taken over Launceston City Council. Tamar Waste Watch’s initial survey suggests that the bureaucracy is expending approximately 46% of Council’s – that is ratepayers' – available income and human resources on 'self management'.

Management itself is the primary beneficiary, not residents and ratepayers. The collection of rates ensures that salaries are continued to be paid and employment entitlements continue to grow. Nonetheless, services continue to reduce as costs increase.

So Waste Watchers are needed to identify waste wherever it is to be found. People with 'local' networks are encouraged to apply!

FACT: Ask an Alderman to get you some information about a financial matter and you will get the run around, not from them, but from the bureaucracy. Ask an Alderman about expenditure of almost any kind and they are unlikely to be able to help you. Ask a bureaucrat and they’ll most likely give you a long list of reasons why it is that they cannot explain.

"Commercial-in-confidence" is increasingly used to explain the inexplicable. When pressed for answers, The Bureau at Town Hall will usually undertake to provided them "in due course" – and anyone who has waited for that will know that it months away and even for Aldermen.

There are reports that Council does not run a line item budget. This is very troubling! If this is in fact so, how can ether the Aldermen or management control expenditure? What opportunities do they have benchmark performance?

Since the servants are preventing the elected representatives from representing their constituency the citizens need to look out for there own interests. The work is not difficult and mostly the waste is self evident. There is so much waste to be discovered the difficulty is mostly to do with prioritising the reporting of it.

Register the waste you see by sending an email to tamartimes@7250.net