a recipe for disaster …
Residents & ratepayers trying to follow the broadcast of this week’s meeting of council would doubtless have found it extremely frustrating.
Due to the Covid 19 pandemic, it is still apparently unacceptable for councillors & senior council management to conduct council meetings in the Council Chambers, so they are participating in “virtual meetings” via a software application called “Zoom”.
Quite apart from the constant interruptions to the audio & video streams, the stop/start nature of the meetings due to councillors having to operate Zoom only adds to their dysfunctional nature.
Add to that the underlying friction evident between some councillors & the obvious difficulty the Mayor experiences in effectively managing the meetings & the situation is almost impossible to follow.
When it came to trying to keep pace with this week’s discussions around the Long Term Financial Plan (LTFP), the Operational Plan & Budget for 2020/2021, the task of finding the documents that councillors are speaking to in the meeting was made almost impossible by the above factors.
In addition, given that there are literally hundreds of pages of documents involved, the task of following proceedings was made even harder by the fact that some councillors referenced documents by the page number in the councillors’ meeting packs (that only they have), others referenced page numbers in individual documents (sometimes visible in the meeting agenda, sometimes not), while some provided no references at all.
Following the further serious concerns about council’s financial position raised by its former
Chief Financial Officer (CFO),
Lucas Scarpin,
at the Public Forum earlier in the day, the situation could best be described as confused & at times panicked, with no evidence of unanimity amongst councillors as to the best way to proceed in respect of council’s financial plans.
While council subsequently resolved to defer the adoption of the LTFP due to the further discovery of major anomalies in council’s financial modelling software this week, it nevertheless proceeded to adopt the Operational Plan & Budget for 2021 (on the recommendation of council’s general manager) knowing that the financial implications of those anomalies have not yet been established, let alone clearly understood, & knowing that there are significant errors in the Operational Plan & Budget for 2021.
The fact that council’s finance staff are using financial modelling tools that are clearly unreliable smacks of a careless if not negligent approach to its financial planning.
Given that the best that council’s general manager can do in response to this situation is to regurgitate the same lame excuses for council’s ineptitude used every year for years, is it any wonder that councillors have expressed a lack of confidence in her financial competence?
How can councillors, let alone residents & ratepayers, have any confidence in any financial reports presented to them by council management in the circumstances? The answer is simple: they can’t.
And, on that basis, how can residents & ratepayers have any confidence in the current council? In the view of the association, the answer to that question is also simple: they can’t.
Yet another recipe for disaster.
John Richardson
Secretary/Treasurer
Bega Valley Shire Residents & Ratepayers Association
Tel: 0264945669
Email: secretary@begavalleyshireratepayers.asn.au
Website: http://www.begavalleyshireratepayers.asn.au