Election can’t come quickly enough

September 14 cannot come quickly enough.

Finally we will be given the opportunity to vote in 15 councillors to Central Coast Council whose job it is to listen to their community’s concerns.

Finally we will be freed from a State Government administrator who appears to love nothing more than lecturing the community on what he believes is right for them.

For years we have been lectured on how the council’s financial woes were the sole responsibility of our last democratically elected council and how we should feel fortunate to have had the administrators in place to turn around the economic fortunes of this council.

(We have been) lectured on how we should tighten our belts and suck-up their austerity measures which include large increases in council rates, and lectured how it made economic sense to sell large tracts of environmentally sensitive council-owned land to pay down council debt.

At the May 28 council meeting, our current administrator Rik Hart rubber stamped the staff’s planning recommendation to move all Deferred Matter (DM) zoned lands in the former Gosford LGA into the Central Coast Consolidated LEP 2022.

Mr Hart chose to completely ignore written expert advice to Council, from the NSW Department of Climate Change, Energy, the Environment and Water, that such a move would undermine the region’s biodiversity and alter its future character and liveability.

He also chose to ignore similar advice from the Central Coast’s Community Environment Network (CEN), whose chairperson spoke to the meeting on the night.

It appears Mr Hart’s primary reasons for rushing through the planning proposal were: he wanted to comply with time constraints imposed by the State Government Department of Planning; and that Council could not afford to pay the costs involved for detailed ecological survey programs over the Deferred Matter zoned lands – surveys that would have clarified the biodiversity importance of these DM zoned lands.

So Mr Hart is not prepared to use our own money to pay for studies that would have helped identify and retain environmentally sensitive lands for future generations.

At the same time, despite our apparent financial misfortunes, Mr Hart has reiterated his determination to demolish, at ratepayers’ expense, a perfectly good and much admired architect designed library building that has stood in the heart of Gosford City for more than 40 years.

(It is) a building that could be readily repurposed for a variety of council/community uses.

He also remains intent (on imposing) a wasteful, unnecessary and expensive referendum at the forthcoming Council elections.

For reasons that remain unclear, Mr Hart believes the Central Coast LGA, the third largest LGA in NSW, should not have 15 democratically elected councillors spread over five wards, but rather nine councillors over three wards.

The old five ward system might not have been perfect, but the new three-ward proposal is simply offensive.

This three-ward proposal … is certainly not an improvement and makes no sense whatsoever.

So come September Mr Hart will leave the Central Coast but the damaging legacy of successive council administrators will remain.

This legacy will affect ratepayers, the community and the region’s precious biodiversity for generations to come.

I look forward to our long overdue Council elections in September, where 15 newly elected councillors will return democracy and locally based stewardship to our broad community.

Email, Jun 3
Paul Links, Wamberal