Financial crisis … nothing another Committee can’t fix

Suspended Central Coast Councillors

Forum –

Can we take Adam Crouch’s word for it that the State Government will neither stump up a $100M loan to provide Central Coast Council with enough cash to meet recurrent expenses nor authorise the Council to misuse funds from capital accounts to cover operating costs?

If so, what expedients are open to the Council to retrieve the calamitous financial situation it has got itself into?

What has happened to the much-vaunted Audit, Risk and Improvement Committee that was supposedly providing Council with specialist advice, specifically to avoid the kind of incompetency now being displayed?

It has obviously fallen so far down on the job it was supposed to do that no credence could be given to any suggestions it might now have to make.

While it takes some chutzpah for Councillor Chris “Never-lost-a cent” Holstein now to present himself as the champion of fiscal probity, he is right to question the Council’s so-called 100-Day Plan which seems to have no basis in reality.

Through what phantasmagorical process could this Council find its way out of the morass it has blundered into, over the next three months?

It appears pretty clear that no councillor has any grasp of how this mess came about, so how can we expect any worthwhile contribution towards clearing it up?

Well, the answer is obvious.

In order to bring about the required loaves-and-fishes miracle, Council is going to transmogrify into a COMMITTEE.

Thus, enlightenment will fall like manna from heaven onto a committee where it would be denied to a mere Council.

However, the great merit of a committee is that its proceedings can be kept SECRET.

It is classic behaviour of our Council that the first instinct is not to explain anything to the citizenry but to hide information from view and obfuscate the facts.

The only outsider on the committee will be the individual who is now both Acting CEO and Acting CFO, the CEO proper apparently being on vacation.

Why was the CEO not ordered back to his post for these crucial discussions or why was he not fired for dereliction of duty?

Regardless of what happens as a result of the committee deliberations, Central Coast ratepayers face a chaotic period until the next election and an ongoing debt load that will cripple development in the city for a long time.

Now is the time for every property owner to take action by e-mailing the OLG and/or writing direct to the Minister, to demand that the Council be sacked and Councillor Best appointed Administrator, since he seems to be the only Council member with the faintest idea of what has been going on.

If you behave like sheep, you will be shorn, so take the initiative without delay.

If it is within the Minister’s powers, we should also be pressing for every councillor to be barred from seeking office at any future election.

We must all acknowledge a debt of gratitude to Central Coast Newspapers for revealing this state of affairs.

Imagine the situation, if we did not have this information medium available to us: how would we ever know what the Council does not want us to know?

Email, Oct 20
B. Hyland, Woy Woy