Council is committed to defending & protecting our pristine environment … well, some of the time & depending on who you are, of course.
If you refuse to pay council tip fees & decide to dump your old mattress, whitegoods, car parts or green waste in the bush,
your reward might be even more significant: up to $8,000, depending on the scale of your offence.
If you are a developer, you can pretty-well write your own rules in the Bega Valley, with council only likely to take any serious interest in your irresponsible anti-social behaviour if there is strong public awareness of the situation.
And even then, unlike the $20,000 fine imposed on the environmental vandal in Bermagui, your reward will certainly not be in-keeping with the scale of your offence or your record. But we’ll get to that soon …
If, as is sometimes the case, the shoe turns-up on the other foot &
an offence is committed by council, then all the rules change again, & there are no prizes for guessing who the losers are then.
Back in November, 2016, council managed to pump sediment laden stormwater into a nearby creek from its Central Waste Facility in Wolumla. That little episode drew a $15,000 fine from the NSW Environment Protection Authority (EPA), plus a $4,000 administrative fee.
Given that ratepayers were being expected to pick-up the tab, the association spoke to the EPA at the time to find out why the penalty had not been imposed on those responsible.
The EPA’s black humorous response was that in order to do that, it would need to be able to identify the individual responsible.
Now the association had no wish to see a low level employee earning the basic wage at council’s
Wolumla facility getting hit with a $15,000 + fine, so instead it wrote to council asking who is
"ultimately accountable for this breach of its legal obligations" & what steps council intended to take to impose a penalty on the manager/s responsible.
Well, that request sparked
an angry & emotional response from council's general manager, who claimed to be “
appalled” by our request & alleging (falsely) that we had requested her to “
publicly name staff” responsible for the incident. While the general manager then went on to profess that she was ultimately accountable for the actions of council, she stopped short of offering to meet any of the financial costs involved.
On April 1st, 2019,
the association again wrote to council referring to a further significant incursion of sediment into the
Lake from the same development, asking council what steps it intended to take to impose a penalty & what were the findings of the
Environmental Consultant who had been requested to assess the damage to the ecosystem of the
Lake.
So it is that in the Bega Valley, an ordinary “tosser” will likely be had for $500 for throwing a piece of paper out of the window of his car, a resident of Bermagui has to cough-up $20,000 for illegally removing some vegetation & even council cops a $15,000 fine for pumping storm water into a creek (notwithstanding that the bill gets passed to the ratepayers).
But when it comes to developers, what penalty does the community think is reasonable in response to two separate incidents where tons of sediment have been allowed to flow from a development site into a pristine lake, contrary to council’s environmental controls?
$500? Maybe $1,000? Maybe $10,000 or maybe even $20,000? Or maybe even more?
Nope, you’d be wrong.
In the developer friendly world operated by BVSC, the cost for polluting our environment is absolutely nothing: zero; nix; nada; zilch; zip.
And apart from Cr Nadin, who at least attempted to pursue the issue at the last meeting of council, not a word of concern was voiced by our inept & ignorant council in response to this latest act of environmental vandalism.
John Richardson
Secretary/Treasurer
Bega Valley Shire Residents & Ratepayers Association
Tel: 0264945669
Email: secretary@begavalleyshireratepayers.asn.au
Website: http://www.begavalleyshireratepayers.asn.au
