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.

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