Disaster and Emergency Committee Meeting - 31 March 2022

Good evening, everybody. Thank you for your attendance here this evening, councillors, staff, other members of the committee, as well as members of the public. I'd like to start by acknowledging the Darug and Darkinjung people as the traditional custodians of the land of the Hawkesbury, and pay respect to all Elders past, present and emerging, and acknowledge all Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people as the first persons of the country. Just going to run through a few procedural matters. So committee members and members of the public attending the meeting in council chambers are advised that in the event of an emergency, you will be asked to proceed in an orderly manner to the nearest exit, following the guidance of our warden.

I would also like to advise that the meetings of the council committees are recorded and live streamed. In the terms of the Privacy and Personal Information Protection Act, this may involve the recording of personal information provided at the time of the meeting. The recordings are made to assist staff in compiling the minutes of the meeting and to enable the podcasting of council committee meetings. The provision of any information that is recorded is voluntary. If any person does not wish to be recorded, they should not address or request to address the meeting. The recordings may be made available to other persons where such access is in accordance with the relevant regulations. The recordings are stored on council's record management system.

Thought that was it. I'll turn the page over. For the benefit of those persons who will be addressing the committee, it is expected that you will refrain from making any insult, allegation or personal reflection against any person present or not at this meeting. This request relates both to your address to the meeting and any answers given in response to the questions from the committee. As a courtesy to others, it is requested that mobile phones either be turned off or on silent. So that's all those matters. Are there any apologies this evening? I don't think we have any formal apologies. We have Councillor Kotlash. We have an apology from Councillor Kotlash. Councillor's and prognoses just arrived.

Is that so far not heard from Councillor Dogramachi, so I'll note him as an apology. Some wishes to move that. Move Councillor Richards, seconded Councillor Reardon. All in favour? That carried.

Are there any declarations of interest? No. If not, we'll move to the first item, which is the confirmation of minutes. Somebody who was present at the previous meeting wish to move the minutes is correct. Moved, Deputy Mayor. Seconded

Councillor Richards. All those in favour? Carried.

So we now have two reports before us, and we do have a very full agenda this evening. We've received 93 written submissions in advance of this meeting. We've received some further written submissions which have been tabled this evening, and a copy of which has been provided to every member of the committee. We've also got 15 registered speakers. So we're going to start with registered speakers on all items, just get that hear from everybody first. We're then going to give each agency representative and council staff member who wishes to a chance to address the committee and provide information and any response to information that comes up. So there are quite a number of speakers, probably in the vicinity of 20-something.

Each speaker is entitled, each member of the public speaker is entitled to five minutes, and some of those people are here in person, some are doing that via audiovisual. I just encourage everyone to just be conscious of how many people would like to have a say, and to try and stick to that five minutes or shorter if at all possible.

So therefore we'll move on to the public speakers. Our first public speaker is

Amy Barry, who's registered to speak via audiovisual. Amy there? No?

Amy Barry not present?

All right, we'll move on to Mark Reed, who's by audiovisual. Oh, Mary Reed, sorry. Is Mary there?

Just search, make sure. No.

Is

No one in the waiting room that I can't see, is there?

No.

Okay. In which case, our first

Speaker who is present is Mark Hartley.

Mr Hartley, if you want to address us now.

Good evening, distinguished members and learned councillors. I'd like to point out that the road, just down the road here, heading to Richmond, or the Richmond Air Barracks, there's a tiny little bridge that's there, and the underpass, and the actual road is acting as a weir. The creek hasn't been cleaned out since who knows when. We've had two floods previously in the last year before this flood. The previous flood was from the Hawkesbury River, and it was tidal, and the water that came up Rickaby Creek was salt. The flood we just endured was basically rainfall. The rainfall wasn't being able to escape adequately because the watercourses have been changed. If we jump one block across to Richmond Road, there is quite a substantial bridge that holds a lot of water.

And that water comes through Rickaby Creek, and I'm a resident on Cox Street. And this year's flood was higher than last year's flood, based on the fact that the water that was falling from the heavens couldn't escape. The question I'm leading towards is: who is responsible for the creek not being cleaned out the previous two floods? Who is also able to petition maybe the powers that be to build a better access for the water to leach back into the Hawkesbury River? Because the Hawkesbury River was lower than Rickaby Creek for some stage, and it's a bottleneck. And the people in Cox Street endured that water for a lot longer than other creeks and other water catchment areas. Further, just being notified that the flood was coming, didn't receive a message on my mobile phone.

Maybe I should have been with Telstra, but I'm with Optus. I don't know if that's got anything to do with it. Maybe the powers that be could look into that. But the actual floods closing the roads, there were no barriers on Cox Street. There was a piece of police tape that's two inches thick. At night time, you couldn't see that. The local residents were putting their garbage bins out to stop the tourists coming down to check on the floodwaters. Still, we did not get any barriers or barricades or notifications that the road was flooded on both ends of Cox Street in front of the pool. I know you're all busy, so I'll just keep it short and sweet, and thank you for your time.

Thank you very much. Appreciate the feedback. Our next speaker is Mr. Paul Bryant.

All right. So first, I'd just like to say thanks very much for having me here tonight. I really appreciate the invitation. Unfortunately, I was able to get out tonight as well. I'm just speaking on behalf of the issues that have been raised in the Upper Colo area, and I firstly want to start off actually not by addressing the physical aspect, but also the mental health aspect. I just want to let you all know people are really fatigued in our area. We've had three floods, the fires of 2019-20, and also COVID. There's a general level of fatigue in the place, and I think that's really noticeable now. People are very flat. People are finding it very hard to move forward because we're keep just getting slapped down all the time.

There's also now a fatigue of driving. A trip to take our kids to school, for example, to Shops can now take us up to an hour due to the road conditions or roads being closed or there being other issues as well if we don't have a four-wheel drive. So there's also that extra issue of feeling of being trapped, as the roads are sort of, you know, obviously with all the inundation we've had, there's a lot of issues there too. The next part of the mental health side of it as well is the effect it's having on local businesses, because people are unsure about how they're moving forward, what the plan is as well, and people having to cancel bookings and everything else as well if you run an Airbnb or you're running, like, other business out in the area too.

So I just want to address that firstly. Then I want to talk about the initial response. So during the flood event, the actual initial response, especially I just want to commend the SES and especially Kevin and his team on the excellent work that they did, the food drops and the fuel by the SES and other groups was just excellent. And for the first time out of three floods, people felt acknowledged and validated that they were going through an issue. We're going to try and address that in a local coordination point of view as well by creating an actual Upper Colo Residents Group as well. I want to talk about the council response next, and I'm going to say that that was very mixed. There was no response on the ground till after locals cleared the roads and the crossings, despite numerous requests to start work in the valley whilst the Hawkesbury Valley was still being impacted.

Local people took countless hours clearing roads and making them passable by using bobcats, tractors and shovels, and it was a lot of work was put in. Access during the event was very limited to locals as the roads were failing. I know I've spoken to Will Barton quite a lot and have had some really positive conversations how we move forward. We've provided a list of issues, and it's great to see them being addressed. I do want to say thank you for that, but there's a lot of extra work to do in the valley as well. I think the biggest thing for us was the fact that there was—we didn't see anyone for ages after it happened. And like I said, if it wasn't for a couple of people on bobcats and tractors, we would have still been locked in there for a long time.

I'd also like to acknowledge Endeavour Energy. They did an excellent job. We were without power for 13 days, and they worked very hard. And also the RFS and the Army. We've got a real communications issue down in the Upper Colo area. Our landlines have failed again. Our mobile phone is mixed, and there's a vast majority of the comms in the valley was actually done by internet through Messenger and Facebook, and this created real issues for us for notifications when the generators were turned off. For example, we had a medevac of a local resident, which Kevin and I were able to try and organise. It took five and a half hours to get that person out of the valley as his medical condition deteriorated, and to me that's unacceptable, especially in the field that I work in at this point in time.

And as we also know too, the Upper Colo gauge is unreliable at this point in time, and it seems to constantly be going down. In terms of roads and infrastructure in the area, they're very poor condition. I'd really encourage all of you to go for a drive and encounter the drive that I have to do to get my kids to go to school every day, which is via Comleroy Road. At one stage there, we were doing fuel runs for residents, and to get out Mount Lagoon Road to Bilpin was taking us an hour, and that was with just in four-wheel drives. I know that's being addressed at the moment, and I really appreciate that work happening, but we have no escape routes in the valley if something goes wrong, and that's a real concern.

We have no way of getting out, and we have no way of people getting through our area in the event that we have a wildfire event or a flood event, and it's really concerning. And having dealt with the 1925s, I can absolutely say that people at Colo Heights and Mount Lagoon would like that ability to get out. I've already talked about the driving issue. Drains have been blocked. They're still blocked. They're still not doing their job. We've had extra landslips happen in this last rain event as well. So that's something else to look towards. The plan forward, I was really, really happy to see today that there was communication sent out by the council about what's happening in the Upper Colo area.

However, there was still no mention of Holbert and Collar Heights Road. They're two critical roads for people on the northern side of the river, and even from a fire perspective as well, when the bridge gets built, we'll need those fixed as well. There's still an issue addressed with rubbish collection too. And also, like I said, I really want to stress the effect on local business and local operators in the area too. So the way forward, I guess for us as out in our community, we'd like to know the plan. So what is it? What's the timeline? And is it possible to access other funds, et cetera, to pay for these roads and other issues such as escape routes? And is it possible to access Commonwealth and State funds?

And I really thank you for your time and giving me the opportunity to speak tonight. So thank you very much. Thanks

Paul.

Our next speaker is David Gerran

Good evening. Thank you for giving me the opportunity to speak and address council this flood emergency committee. Three things I want to touch on. Firstly is— Mr Mayor

Sorry, I don't think Mr Gerran's microphone is on.

Sorry, I forgot my people on Zoom. Yep, we'll fix that.

Okay

Thank you. Good evening, and thank you for the opportunity to address the Flood and Emergency Committee this evening. Three things I'd like to touch on, the first being sandbag availability, distribution, and distribution. Now, in the first instance of the first predicted flood, which was on the 2nd of March, which was by Wednesday, on the Tuesday the 1st of March, Penrith Council, in conjunction with the SES, had sandbags available for collection from midday on that Tuesday. They were all stacked on pallets along the Jamison Road sports field internal roads, and I have photos of that. In the Hawkesbury, on the Wednesday, when the rain was becoming very apparent we were going to have a major flood event , I had phoned the SES in the morning to ask when sandbags would be available.

It was going to be at McQuade Park, and they said, We haven't heard from Council to actually action this yet. I contacted the Council, asked what was going on. They said, Oh no, it's not up to us. It's up to SES. Finally, at 4:30 Wednesday afternoon, sandbags became available at McQuade Park. By 6 p.m., they had run out. They were bringing pre-filled bags in. They said it would be a couple of hours. It was nearly three hours till any more bags were available. The queues were extensive. If we had had the flood height of the predicted 14 metres on the Tuesday morning, I certainly wouldn't have been able to have had adequate sandbagging, particularly trying to do it through the night, in rain, with just the help of my son, and just not being able to get enough bags.

Luckily, we didn't achieve that height, and the weather cleared on the Tuesday, and by late morning on the Tuesday, sandbags were available, and in fact some deliveries were organized by our volunteers. So by Tuesday afternoon, I was well equipped for a 14 metre flood. Did not occur till the next week. I was already prepared, but speaking to other residents on Cox Street, where I reside, they hadn't had the sandbags from the week before, but were trying to get them on the Tuesday. Went up to McQuaid Park, and they started trying to collect them from about 11 a.m., and they were restricted to only being able to have 10 sandbags per person, per trip. So they got 10, took them home, came back, queued again.

We were again restricted to only being able to get 10 sandbags. So they were only able to get a total of 30 sandbags. By the time the water had cut their driveway off. By about 2:30 in the afternoon, the shortfall seemed to have been remediated, and you could take as many as you liked. But by then, they couldn't get them up to their place. So this was a major problem. Now I have asked about, and somebody from I spoke to at council, one of the problems was council just didn't have enough bags to put sand in. And if that's the case, surely since last year's flood, when we've all been forewarned of this event occurring again, we were certainly up for flooding again, council would have had plenty of time to have acquired more bags to put sand in.

I mean, if Penrith can be organised that well, it's very poor on us that we can't be. The second thing I'd like to touch on is welfare. A previous speaker did mention that when we thought we were going to flood on the Thursday, text messages were received from the SES to people in our locations preparing us for the possible occurrence of evacuation.

The next week, no text messages were sent out, no door knocking at all. Police came back and put some more tape up, but that was it. After the event on the Wednesday when people were cut off, there was no welfare checking. So there were people who, there were a number of elderly people who were cut off, people who have disability, like I know for a fact in wheelchairs, people who could not leave their property because their driveways were cut off, they couldn't get a vehicle out. And I'm not talking about, which three days later, you get a knock on the door from the fire guys, whatever, can we drag anything out to the street. I'm talking about just somebody coming and asking, do you need anything? Have you got the medicines you need? Some people lost power. Do you have water for you and your family? There was an absence of that.

The third thing I like to touch on is the disaster centre, which was fantastic. It's been a great thing, and I know it takes time to put it together, but how was the currency of it disseminated to the community? I was made aware through social media. Now, I have neighbours who are elderly who needed some support. They don't have the internet. They don't use a smartphone. And unless somebody comes and tells them this is on. There's no printer newspaper, though I've noticed the Gazette suddenly arrived on the driveway this week. I was told finally there was a letterbox drop this week saying it was there, like two weeks into it. But two of my elderly neighbours, one of them phoned me to go and get something out of the mailbox for her because her mailbox is on the lawn and her walker sank .

Thin wheels, not designed for a bog. The other neighbour, they can't step off into the grass. So there needs to be a bit more done to let people who aren't in the cyberspace to be informed of what is going on.

So that's really the three points I wanted to raise.

Thank you. Thanks, David. I understand Mary Reed is now with us.

Oh, she's dropped out again. Okay, we'll come back to Mary if at the time that we're there, she's there. Blake Morrison is our next speaker.

Is Blake Morrison here,

Or online? No. Josh Robinson.

Is Josh there?

No. Okay. Peter Ryan

Good evening, everyone. Thank you for affording me the opportunity to address you. I'm addressing you on behalf of the Pitt Town Progress Association and the community out there. The main issue I'd like to speak about is the flood evacuation route, and it, especially Pitt Town, but it covers probably a number of flood evacuation routes. The route we have is approximately 15.3 kilometres long and starts at Bathurst Street, Pitt Town, and runs through to Windsor Road. Now, most of these are back roads, which are narrow, that have no lines, no road shoulders, and very little lighting or signage at all. The flood evacuation route is our only way in and out of Pitt Town, and that occurs early. It's just not when it is.

Actually, we produced a video, and if you'd like to have a look at the video, I'll talk you through this. Oh, we lost the video. And this is Boodles Lane, where it starts. You can see we've got large tankers there that go in and out to take away the effluent or

We've lost the video again.

And this is the flood evacuation route. You can see the condition of it. This is during the daylight hours, and it's the only road we have to get out of Pitt Town. The drainage on the side isn't working. The people driving with their headlights on, and this is in the middle of the afternoon. And as you can see, the traffic has increased by sevenfold there. It's essential. The road surface is, as you can see, covered with water, and it is quite dangerous. Fortunately, we were in a large vehicle and had a good driver, and it wasn't me. So we come up to the intersection here of what we call Wiseman's Ferry Road and Pitt Town Dural Road, and this is actually the lowest section on our flood evacuation route.

It hadn't flooded at this stage. The water hadn't got too high. But one thing that happened here on our right-hand side is the airstrip road. It had closed due to local water that had flowed across there. I've never seen that before in my life. I've been in Pitt Town for more years than I'll admit, and too many floods, and it's the first time I've ever seen that happen. We've had to go up here to what we call the emergency evacuation route. This is, I believe, the first time this evacuation route has ever been used. And as we pull into there, you can see that it's a one-and-a-half-car width road wide. And to be honest, at this stage, it's only been open a few hours, and the surface has failed.

Now this is our only route in and out. You can see there's large trees each side. We don't need— if we had one of these large heavy trees come down, we'd be blocked.

And that's probably— if we have an emergency, this is the only way in and out. All those large trucks delivering fuel, garbage, taking out the sewage have to use this now. That's the only way we had for quite a few days. And as you can look at it, the surface is not very good, and there's no lineage. People are driving to the conditions. We've got a hell of a dogleg in here for reasons that I could explain to you later. But this is it. If we have a real emergency, we're in trouble. Now Pitt Town was developed as a 3A state government approval, and I remember back then that the SES cautioned the state government that taking a town from about 400 people to over 3,000 people, there were going to be major issues with evacuation, especially if we got a large flood and an order was given for us to get out.

We only have a number of hours to get out, and a road like this is not adequate. It's a back road, that's what we call it, and it needs to be upgraded, and it needs to be upgraded as soon as possible. We've had enough time to have it done, and yes, we all got a bit slack because we all had that time off when we didn't have floods and we more or less forgot about them. So doesn't our state government have a duty of care? They approved the development of Pitt Town. They've put all these people here. Don't they have a duty of care to provide a safe, reliable, well-maintained flood evacuation route so people can get out? And it mustn't be —it cannot be second class. It's got to be lifted to a standard, a high standard.

So it's in the correct location. It goes the right way. We go away from the flood. We don't want to redesign Mackenzie's Creek or anything like that. That's not what we want. We want a proper, well-designed flood evacuation route for this purpose.

We're quite fortunate, and look, thanks to a lot of you people here, we didn't lose lives this time.

But it could happen. If we have a major incident here at Pitt Town, we will have struggled to get emergency vehicles in there if this road causes us issues. So

Let's work together. Let's get this fixed. It's taking far too long, far too long to deliver this. And I thank you very much for your time. If you've got any questions, please put them to me. And look, we made the video with no experience or funds.

Good job. Thank you. Thanks. Our next speaker is Jeanette Hayden.

Good evening, Mr. Mayor, members of the council, members of the committee, and members of the public who are here. Thank you for allowing me to address you tonight. I've got a few items. Some people have touched on some of them already. The first issue is I live in Redbank Creek as my back fence. The result of the flood, I've lost three-quarters of my backyard, and there were other issues also that affected myself and also my neighbours. The first is the evacuation message that was sent out by the SES in relation to the prospect that the Redbank Dam would break. Pardon me. I didn't get that message by text at all, nor did many of my other neighbours. We found out by accident that we were to evacuate by Facebook.

I rang the SES to find out why we didn't get the text messages, and they said it was sent to the telcos, that it was the responsibility of the telcos to let us know. I've got two mobile phones. One's Telstra, and the other one's Optus, and they both said the same thing: Oh, it's your fault because you don't have a smartphone. I do have a smartphone, but I didn't get the messages from either, so there's something wrong. My next-door neighbour also didn't get the messages, and others as well. There was door knocking on Morton Street, but it never got to Cazella Crescent, which is the street that actually backs onto the creek. So that's one issue. When I rang the SES head office to confirm the general inquiries, to actually confirm that it was actually an evacuation, I then asked where was the evacuation centre, because I live on my own.

My family and friends do not live on that side of the river. I was informed that the evacuation centre was North Richmond Community Centre. So I lumbered down there and found that there was no one there. I didn't find out until one o'clock in the morning, after I had driven the mountains and around the road to my daughter at Ryde to evacuate, that the Maroochydore Centre had been opened. So that is a big glaring error for people who are living on their own. I'm elderly, I'm 70, I'm on my own, and therefore I've got to look after myself. So there's the issue again of the people who are elderly and live on their own. There are three other people on my street who are on their own and elderly, one's in her 90s.

And unless they've got family who are close, they are vulnerable. The other issue is

The damage to my backyard. I actually contacted the New South Wales services to find out how it could be assessed and if the SES could come and do an impact assessment on my property. The insurance company have now done that and deemed, the engineers have deemed it as unsafe. It is damaged. It's seriously damaged, unsafe, unreliable and dangerous. I've lost three-quarters of the backyard. Now when I got in touch with the SES—they said they—sorry, Services New South Wales—they said they would let the SES know. They rang me to inform me that we're not doing assessments in your area. So it would appear that Redbank Creek is being ignored. Now, I can go out into my backyard and I can look down the creek downstream, and every backyard is damaged.

There is flood damage. There is erosion. Trees have been ripped out. Fences have been ripped out. Nobody's been to inspect my place except the insurance company, and nobody seems to know. When the RAF came to do the cleanup for the debris, the flight lieutenant was horrified and said, We did not know this sort of damage was in this area, or in the Hawkesbury. He wouldn't let his crew actually clean up off the creek bank because it was too dangerous, and he said he would send photos to the council and to other bodies. Now, I don't know the results of that, but I've still got that debris. I've got ladders and I've got bits and pieces and pieces of fence and pieces of sheet metal, dead trees that have been washed in, still on that creek bank.

Now , the extra problem is the lack of knowledge and unavailable information relating to what grants are available to private people who have serious damage to their property. My house is all right, although at the moment the actual retaining wall is, the insurance company is going to have to make safe because it is in jeopardy. Now, what information is there? I've been banging my head on brick walls for about two weeks now as to what grants are available for private landholders who have had asset damage. They are my main issues, and thank you very much for— I'm actually very upset about it, but there's nothing I can do. Thank you for hearing me, and thank you for allowing me the time to talk to you.

Thank you.

We now have—is Mary Reed in the meeting?

No. We'll go with Stephen Boots.

Hello. Yes, my name is Stephen Boots. I live in the McGraths Hill. I've been here since 2017. When I bought this property, I was advised that this was in a one in a hundred year flood. Since 2017, obviously there's been a flood for 2020, 21, and this year. When I started looking into the details, I noticed when the dam was built in 1961, there was eight major floods. Since then, in the last 60 or so years, there's been 13 major floods at significant levels. Before I address the two points I would like to make, I would like to sincerely thank everyone here for your time and to share the issues here today. I'd also like to sincerely thank the council, the SES, Fire and Rescue, and Air Force, as well as the neighbours who did a sterling job after the flood to clear Boundary Road in one day.

So thank you very much. The two questions I'd like to bring to the attention of yourselves is, we know the water is a precious commodity for the wider Sydney community. However , we don't have a second facility to capture any excess water from the dam. As we know, it just goes to waste and floods all the lower levels, causing risk to properties and life. So I'd like to bring that attention and like that to be considered. The second point I'd like to bring to your attention is, can the New South Wales Water Authority, the senior management, explain why the dam water wasn't released? Knowing we have a major weather event coming our way, all these things contribute to floods, and I believe we need to focus on the causes and also to acknowledge the actual additional measures like safe roads, great communications, and appropriate sandbags in areas.

These are just my two questions I'd like to bring to your attention. Thank you.

Thank you.

Our next speaker is— sorry, I don't know how to say the first name, but Julian

Julian Lin. Not with us at the moment anyway. Bill Sneddon

Thank you for the opportunity to speak. I'll start off by wishing you all, in attendance, a happy East Coast low outside. These are predicted to be more frequent under the prevailing climate change that we're living in. I personally have done things to be carbon neutral myself. I hope you've all done similar. I've spent the best part of $200,000 doing it as well. I also own a five-year-old electric car that runs off my house solar. I've done 44,000 kilometres up to just recently. My comments start. For the second year in a row, we see significant flood damage across the Hawkesbury, this time with a double peaking inundation. But we are still below the 1 in 100 flood level. So all of what you've heard tonight regarding affected and sad residents, et cetera, people that can't get insurance, this is not a 1 in 100 flood.

It's a 1 in 20 or possibly a 1 in 13, depending on who you talk to. The flood signatures change in areas. So again, I'm hearing various figures as to localised effects of the water. A resident mentioned change in pattern in Rickaby's Creek. I'll come to that shortly. From my residence at South Windsor, just above the 1 in 100 flood line, I've again been treated to views of what I call Lake Rickaby, looking across to the racecourse and showground over Cox Street that you had mentioned, I just back onto some houses that— That resident is possibly talking about trying to get sandbags and people that can't get out. There are about five houses along just over the back of where I live. Sadly, this is not the first time I've seen this view in the 40-odd years I've lived here in Church Street.

I get residents telephoning me on a regular basis during the flooding to get my visual flooding reports on Rickaby's Creek floods. I had friends that used to use my reports to tell them whether they get out of Parramatta to come home at lunchtime or wait that they can get home in the evening. Whilst it's clear from the damage reports on council—I'll now go on to council assets. I'm covering some different things to the other people. I commend all their views. What's clear from the damage reports on council assets in this is that a new paradigm or a new normal is required in managing many of these areas that council and other people use on the lowlands. Many assets are always potentially in harm's way if they're below the one-in-a-hundred flood level.

Sewage assets, especially McGrath's Hill, and our pump stations and rising mains, etc. We also have major damage to the main, I believe, going across South Creek. I'm seeing sullage tankers, and I hate to think how much we're paying for that. Fortunately, we have a reserve fund that's put away for emergencies and unexpected expenditures in the sewage fund. But I was horrified to be told a couple of days ago that under the Fit for the Future that was brought in about five years ago, there was a serious proposal that the sewage reserve fund should be paying a twelve-and-a-half percent dividend annually. Complete madness. Fortunately, I'm told it didn't go ahead. We also have many council assets that are going to go under no matter what: roads and causeways, sports facilities and grounds on flood liable lands.

And because Hawkesbury is both blessed and cursed with our lovely facilities that are built on what are sacrificial lands below the one-in-a-hundred flood level, with nil potential now for residential development. In the old days, we've allowed people to build in harm's way, and we're hearing from it. Residents in the paper complaining, two years in a row down at Harris Street. Should I get out? Can't afford to pay $30,000 insurance. Don't any of these people understand what the insurance fees are about? It's the odds of the insurance company having to pay out. If you can't pay the premiums, then you shouldn't be choosing to live there. Benson's also now with sportsfields. Benson's Lane, Macquarie Park, and privately on sacrificial, what I call sacrificial lands, we have two privately owned polo grounds and three golf courses, to name but a few.

These will regularly go underwater in future flood events, as per recently, and in this case the owners pay for the damages. In regard to council assets, the new normal approach is required. Assets need to be flood-hardened to tolerate inundation. Certainly, I hope that there's more done with some of our sewer assets from that money that we have put away to do those sorts of things. A firm mandate is required to not allow vulnerable assets on council lands. So sporting organisations need to work with this new normal. Ratepayers should not be expected to regularly replace grandstands, lights, vulnerable facilities and buildings, etcetera, on regularly inundated council lands. Sporting groups regularly love their canteens, their on-site storage, etcetera, etcetera.

But we really need a new paradigm where these items need to be mobile at the grounds and not be at council's risk, i.e. the ratepayers pay the damage. Private fields also now take the same risk, but at their own costs. Within the consultant's report in the first part here, I find it commendable, but sadly continues my 40 plus years' experience in the valley. Do we never learn? Most comments are in the collected comments at the back, as per previous.

My house gets inundated, et cetera, et cetera, but we are still below one in a hundred. Can you imagine the screams we're going to get with a one in a hundred flood, let alone an 1867? Do we never learn? Most comments, previous as I said, if you can't afford insurance, then there must be a reason. You shouldn't be living there. That reflects the risk. In commerce, I was taught if you want to know good odds, don't go to a bookie, talk to an insurance company actuary, because actuaries like to stay in their job and they want their company to make money.

That's what they're paid for. I

Would commend the consultant's report that new councillors get full briefings on disaster management, both flood and fires. And tonight we're only talking about the floods. We haven't touched the fires that's coming up in the second item. Time

Did expire a while ago

So thank you Could I just briefly say our submarine bridge and Jacaranda ponds, we are allowing a new suburb contingent on a bridge that goes underwater regularly. It's madness, politely. Thank you.

Thank you. Any questions? That's okay at the moment. Our next speaker is Marie Fain.

Yes, hello everybody, and I'm certainly happy to be here today and be able to speak to all the people involved in this massive disaster that we're all going through. I work for Peppercorn. I'm a member of the Flood Recovery Support Team, and at the moment I'm at the Disaster Centre. And the devastation, I understand that the people have spoken before me. I see their faces, I listen to their stories, and, you know, everyone is just devastated that we're going through this yet again, twice within 12 months, within, sorry, within two years. I just wanted to say that what I'd like to address, it's not about criticising anyone, it's about giving feedback so you know exactly what's been seen through the eyes of a support worker in the Disaster Centre.

Now, prior to the floods, that was on the Wednesday, we actually were able, because we were still under contract with Resilience for the prior floods, we had our client list of all the people in the area, so we were able to get onto 650 people. We got all the staff in, we got onto all those people. We called them and said, Are you safe? Do you have a plan? What are you in need of? And sandbags came up. That was one of the things that came up. And so we were able to speak to people and to let them know that someone was out there, that we knew they were there, and they were happy that we knew they were there. So that was one plus with us being there under Resilience, under that flood recovery from the 2021 floods.

But just some feedback on the things that have happened through the floods. The evacuation centre, the one that was at Currajong, we had a lot of complaints about the facilities that were up there. They were put in rooms that hadn't been cleaned. I believe that the facility itself hadn't been used for 12 months. Prior to these people being put into the centre, and people saying they were cleaning cobwebs and things like that, had cockroaches in their room. But this is just feedback I'm giving to you that the evacuation centres seem to be a last-minute thing, and it didn't seem to be suitable for a lot of families. The other thing was that people couldn't take their animals. Now, especially the older people have a lot of companion animals and things like that.

A lot of people slept in their cars because they didn't want to go to the centres because they couldn't take their animals. So that's something that maybe needs to be considered. And the older people was something that we did consider because we know that they didn't want to leave their premises, which caused a lot of extra work for the SES that had to rescue them at the last minute because they stayed in their home until the last minute. And so that was something that perhaps needs to be looked into in the future, that older people are given the opportunity or are encouraged to get out of their premises before they have to have the SES come in a helicopter to get them. So that was something that we've had a few people experience.

The food delivery that was done for the people over in, when the ferry was cut off, was a great service. But the trouble is, I don't think the SES—the trouble that we had coordinating some of the people getting their parcels is that apparently they have different sections, and so Wisemans has a different SES to Lower Macdonald. And so we had put in the orders to go to certain residents, and one lady, it took seven days to get her food. Now, she's an 80-year-old woman. She didn't leave her premises. She stayed with her two cats. But she was without food. I had to ring Karen Subtle, who runs Mountain of Joy. She was able, through some contact that she had, to contact, I think it was an area commander.

And they were able to get her food. But to me, that was far too long for her to wait for her food. This same resident is having trouble with her garbage. She has took her garbage out to the registered with the council to have her garbage picked up and put it out on the street. Bush turkeys ripped it to pieces, and so it was all over the street. So she went down and bagged it all up again. It took her all day to bag up this rubbish and took it back up to the house because of the bush turkeys. So then she saw a truck going past and went down and said to the garbage man, Can you take this garbage? He said, No, you're not on my list. So she's there with 16 bags of garbage and can't do anything with it, and the garbage man couldn't take it because she wasn't on the list for that day.

Now, since then, I rang the men's shed. At Wilberforce, and I've tried—one of those guys will go over and get the rubbish for her as soon as, because she's on Settlers Road. And so Settlers Road seemed to be an issue because there was some problems, and that was holding up the collection of garbage. But he said as soon as he's able to go over there, he'll get the rubbish. But really, she'd registered to get her garbage taken, and she's—an 80-year-old woman is taking 16 garbage bags up and down her long driveway. It's not good enough. It's just not something that she should be doing at her age either. The other thing I see that Transport for New South Wales is there, so hello, Bruno. I just wanted to say to you about taxi vouchers.

One of the problems we've had at the recovery centre is that people have been given temporary accommodation over in Penrith, but they needed to come back over to Windsor to go through housing and the various people that were there to help them, and no transport. So I said, can we get some taxi vouchers? Now, they've been working on those taxi vouchers for two weeks, and we still haven't seen them. So I don't know where they are in the big picture of life, but that would make life a whole lot easier if people had transport. Peppercorn has tried to book in transport when they can, but we're limited because we do a lot of the transport we do in the areas for medical and take older people shopping and things like that, so we're having to fit that in between what we do.

So that is definitely an issue. The other thing—what else have I got on the plan? Taxi vouchers and rubbish. No, I think that's me. I think that's all I wanted to say. But like I say, it's been a massive, massive job, and one of the silver linings has been that we have been there for the people when they come in. They've been our clients from the prior floods, so we're able to show them a familiar face. We're able to say, We've got you, and we greet them as, Hello, Joan. You know, it's a terrible thing you're going through. You know, how's your husband? He was going in for an operation. You know, did you get somewhere to put—have you got somewhere you put your dogs? Like, we can talk to them on a personal level, which makes them feel like they're not just a number that they are with people.

But I would like to also congratulate the people who have put the hubs together, the disaster centres, because those people are very dedicated, been wonderful ears to the community, and the people have really felt like they've been supported. So I thank whoever has put all those people together, and I think it's resilience that get the credit for that. And all the workers sit with the clients, listen to them, help them fill out their paperwork, and we're there to support them as well. So it's really been a better experience for people, if you can have such a thing as a better experience during disaster. But, yeah, so thank you very much for listening to me tonight. Thank you.

So, Marie was our last registered speaker. Just checking if Mary Reed is in the meeting? No? Okay. All right. Is there anyone else, any other members of the public who wanted to speak that haven't spoken yet, either here or on audio visual? Just call out now.

No? Okay. We'll move on then. Thank you to everybody for coming in and taking the time out to give us that information on your experience. We're now going to give each representative of the agencies that are here a chance to respond to any of that feedback, but also tell us, just give us a rundown of what they're doing if they'd like to. And then my intention, councillors, is that there's a recommendation before us. For this item, which essentially is at point 3, we identify matters for further action or resolution by Council. Just to broadcast ahead of time, my intention would be that we use this as a debriefing session. We just try and get out, make sure that every part of this feedback is recorded.

The next stage from here is a full report back to Council, potentially with staff commentary around the items that require action, so that, you know, I would suggest that rather than try and solve every issue tonight, we just record everything, get it all on the public record, make sure everybody knows that we've heard what needs to be done, and then a report will come to the next Council meeting that will allow us to prioritise and decide on the actions required for different matters. But that's just my thoughts, but I wanted to broadcast that so that everyone has a chance to consider what they want, like, included, whilst we're listening to the representatives from various agencies. So,

Go first to Infrastructure New South Wales. They're both representatives in audiovisual, if somebody from Infrastructure New South Wales did want the chance to speak.

Hi everyone, my name's Emma Whale. I'm the Director of Community Resilience. I don't have any specific updates, but just wanted to thank the residents for their feedback. And obviously we are the custodians of the flood strategy, so that feedback is really useful for us in determining ways that we can improve and refine the strategy, and I really appreciate the people taking their time.

Thank you. Next I might pass to Superintendent Karen Clower from New South Wales Police, if you wanted to mention anything.

Thank you. I'd also would

Like to thank all of the members who shared their stories with us today. And as the liaison of the local area, that is definitely something that I will take into account for further times that the Emergency Operations Centre stands up when working with each of the agencies to try and ensure that we can deal with the issue before us and move the community back to the best working conditions that we can as quickly as possible. In relation to the current flood, the Emergency Operations Centre was up from the 2nd of March and only went into standby mode this Monday. However, obviously is very much aware of what's happening at the moment with the current weather and East Coast low and the spilling of the dam. So we are on standby should we need to stand up the Emergency Operations Centre again.

Thank you. And I should mention to members of the committee there'll be a chance to ask questions after this once the agencies have all addressed us. I'll let everyone speak first. Karen Hodges from the RFS. Is there anything you want to add?

Good evening, everybody. Yes, I would just like to say on behalf of all the volunteers in the RFS at Hawkesbury, they worked extremely hard over those, the last few weeks. They actually attended well over 700 tasks on both sides of the river, and we're still assisting members of the community as required every day, just helping out people, welfare checks and things like that. So I'd just like to say thank you, a huge thank you to all the volunteers and to all of the agencies that have been involved in this flood effort. I think everybody's come together, and I just would like to say thank you.

Thanks, Karen. Kevin.

Thank you. From the SES's point of view, it's good to hear a lot of the things that were brought up tonight from our speakers that relate to SES. The heartening thing for me is most of them we've already identified as we went along. There are lots of issues that were fairly obvious straight away. We haven't really gone down and done proper after-action reviews with all the different levels of SES because SES Hawkesbury, we are part of the community. We're volunteers, and we are just like everyone else here, living and surviving in what is always a beautiful place and sometimes not so good in the flood context. So we definitely have the best interest of the community there, and I would have to commend the community for the way that they reacted and got on with the job of dealing with the flood.

And I know it's never easy to be in that situation. You can rest assured that we have our best intention for the community at heart. Sometimes we don't get there with some of these issues, but there's always room for improvement. I'd also like to thank all of the other services and the EOC, Local Emergency Management Committee and Council for all the support they give SES. It's a huge task. It's a big problem. And SES statewide was also dealing with lots of other stuff happening in other areas, and so we were lucky to get as much support as we did out of SES. We got lots of incoming resources coming in where we had shortfalls. Things like the sandbags and other things like emergency alerts are all issues that never work perfectly, but we're putting things in place to try and improve that all the time.

And

Just a very rough amount of numbers, the number of requests for assistance that we got, including people wanting to be moved across the river for medical reasons, whatever, was around about 700 requests for assistance over about two or two and a half weeks. Forty-odd of those were flood rescues, and that's a vast improvement on the one last year because there was about 150 last year flood rescues where people drove into water and needed our assistance to get out of there. But this time was much less, and that's a huge credit to the community for taking notice of the messaging because I think the conditions were probably worse this time, and yet we had less of those sort of incidents. So that's pretty much it from me.

Thank you. Anyone from

Transport for

New South Wales with us that wants to address this? Yeah, good evening, and hello everybody. Just from Transport's perspective, there was a lot of lessons gained from the previous event , and we actually had new operators, new maintenance operators came in at the 1st of July this year—sorry, last year—and this is their very first event. And I've really just got to call out to them. They had over 120 members in the field throughout 24 hours a day assisting with all of the road closures and assisting the police and SES and everybody else within all of the agencies too. keep

Either the roads closed or assist with the reopening of the roads in a very timely manner. And I'm actually happy to hear that Marie was on from Peppercorn. Marie, I'm not sure if she was aware or not, but with Jessica, you may be aware that community transport is a Transport for New South Wales service, works under a current contract. I was able to work with Jessica at Peppercorn, and a massive shout-out to Peppercorn for all of the work they did outside of contract. On their behalf, we managed to speak to the contract team and actually allow them to operate in this emergency service or emergency event, and they were actually transporting people to and from certain locations within the North Richmond area.

Not to mention assisting health, where they were able to move 20 of the health staff collectively over a 24-48 hour period on their events of change of staffing. So I think that's a massive shout-out to Peppercorn as well. That's about it from me at the moment, thanks.

Thank you. And Dean Betts from Resilience New South Wales. Yeah

Thanks, Mayor. Dean Betts from Resilience New South Wales, and I'm the appointed recovery coordinator for Greater Sydney, but primarily the Hawkesbury Nepean, just for people's information. From a recovery perspective, our team with all the different government agencies and non-for-profit agencies have been supporting recovery and trying to lead that since the start of really the EOC here with the police, to really get that good understanding of what recovery looks like. So in that meantime, we've got two recovery centres that have been up and running for nearly three weeks, been at South Windsor and Wisemans Ferry, that have been operating seven days per week. And if we look at some of the attendances, South Windsor was averaging about 90 to 100 people a day.

It has started to drop off a little bit now, but it's still been quite consistent. And Wisemans Ferry is obviously not quite as much, but still 40, 50 people have been coming a day. Moving forward, those recovery centres and other various hubs, as I guess we'll call them here from a council perspective, will be continuing. Additionally, I chair the regional recovery committee and also sit on the state recovery committee. Obviously, I can take—we have that committee that meets weekly, and there's local government updates, but also government agency updates, and supporting the waste collection, clean up with PWA. Understanding what the issues are, particularly the Hawkesbury, but also Greater Sydney.

And in support of that, the local recovery committee has been stood up here, led by Hawkesbury Council, with Will Barton here being the chair. And I think even from the feedback we had our first meeting yesterday, you can start to understand what that local lens is and those local trends and issues. And for me, understanding what those gaps are and how we can plug them moving forward. So it's still a long road ahead, and we're really only starting the recovery space. But that's just for everyone's information, we are not going away anytime soon in that regard.

Thank you. And then someone from Fire and Rescue NSW. Yeah, thanks, Mr Mayor. Firstly, I just want to acknowledge, obviously, the impact on the community and thank those community members for their comments tonight. I also just want to acknowledge the cooperation, coordination and camaraderie across all the response agencies in the Emergency Operations Centre. It was clearly a well-run job. As an agency, we contributed over 2,000 jobs and, as a networked service, brought resources from as far away as Mona Vale, Menai and Mount Victoria into the area to support the community. And that's what we're here for, and it's that great sense of cooperation that enabled us to do what we did on the ground. And also to thank the community for the way that they interacted with and supported our people in the ground when they were out there trying to help you. Thank you, Mr Mayor.

Thank you. Just a reference, attention, just to make sure everyone's aware, we have, in addition to the nine submissions we've just heard this evening, we've got the 93 that were circulated prior to the meeting in the initial business paper, and then an initial 10 that were circulated in writing that we received after that was compiled. So there's an extra 103 submissions there that will all be on the record. There was some, I think theoretically we could read those all out, but I'm going to suggest to the committee we don't read out all 103 in the interest of time, and that we've had those to consider, and they'll also appear on the record.

So we'll go to questions. Councillor Lance Bucket.

Thank you, Mr Mayor. I was just wondering if we're going to have an opportunity to have asked any questions of the speakers. I thought that was the intent in these meetings, that we could engage with the public to ask them questions. But I guess the opportunity's gone because we weren't able to do that at the time.

If it's a question you have, you can raise that, and if the person's still in the meeting, they can answer it.

All right. I did have a question for Peter Ryan, and then perhaps for Kevin as well, for Kevin Jones, and it was around the actual purpose. What is the understanding of an emergency evacuation route? This is something I don't quite understand. Is an emergency evacuation route something by which you would think that people would be evacuated and then that was it? Or is an emergency evacuation route an alternate route for people to be using back and forward? This is something that I think we need to clarify, and I'd be interested both in what the community believe something that's called an emergency evacuation route is and what the SES consider, because in some instances I think when there's an evacuation, people are moved and that's it.

They're not going back. They're going to an evacuation centre until it's safe to go back. In the case of, I think in Pitt Town, it was that it was more an alternate thoroughfare, so people were coming and going. I'd just like some clarity around that, because I think that this is something really important that we need to understand when we're discussing how we get people out. Are they going out, or are they going out and in and out and in frequently? And of course, they were going out to obtain sandbags and so on. So that is a

Question. Okay. So Mr Ryan, if you wanted to answer that, and then we've got, I'm not sure if that's for Mr Jones or the Acting Superintendent to answer that one,

But I'll let you both think about it while Mr Ryan answers. Thank you for the question. We believe the emergency evacuation route is when an order is given that we have to evacuate, and I believe that is when the river is predicted to go to 15.85 metres, or there's a fault in Warragamba Dam. And saying that, we have very little time, and Kevin could correct me here, I think we have 11 hours to remove everyone from Pitt Town, and that's with, we do not have any leeway in that. And that's why we're so strong on having those evacuation routes so well done. And in one section we have what's called Airstrip Road, which we use before , during the flooding times, and that's regularly, it's pretty much opened all the time.

But this time there was so much local water, and I've never seen it before, that road was closed very, very early in the situation before we got anywhere near the 15.85, or we didn't get there. So the emergency route had to be opened. And now that was only supposed to be opened when we were all going out and no one was coming back. And it's only about one and a half car width wide, we saw that, and it actually failed. Perhaps that was from all the heavy vehicles, but we really have to get that emergency evacuation route 100% because if we lose a tree— An accident. We're stuck and we could

Drown people

In cars trying

To

Escape. Has

That cleared it up, Councillor? Thank you . And

Then, is it? Yep.

Peter's 100% right. The intention of the evacuation route is purely and simply to have one-way traffic leaving in an emergency evacuation. But I think in this case, because of the local flooding, it was pretty obvious that it needs to be more than that. And so all the points that Peter made about that, I agree that we do need to look at something which is going to facilitate people coming and going in the earlier stages, because it was essential that they did that for lots of reasons. And it's clear that the evacuation route, from looking at the video, is just not up to that two-way traffic, because it was never built with that intention. So, thank you. Further questions, committee

Members? No. If not , then I might address the meeting on that item. I just

Also wanted to, on behalf of Council, pass on a huge, huge thank you to all the agencies involved. I know everyone was at the Emergency Operations Centre round the clock for quite a long time there. Huge, huge operation, and I think just on behalf of our community, we need to say again thank you so much, especially when you all stood up, you know, again this time last year and then back there again. Everyone went above and beyond their call, but I think it's important also to recognise the role of the RFS and the SES, particularly as volunteers who step into that role at that time. These are people who have jobs, other jobs to attend to, other parts of their lives they should be at, and they drop everything and sit in that room and get out there and do those rescues and so on for a good two or three weeks.

So thank you in particular to the SES and the RFS. As I mentioned at the start, I think that we've had lots of issues raised here. My intention would be that we just need to start recording these under that 0.3, identify matters for further action or resolution by Council. But I'll seek a motion so that we can have a debate there about what we should be doing, have some discussion. Somebody could just move that recommendation, which would enable that. Moved Councillor Sheather, seconded Councillor Ridd.

Councillor Sheather, did you have anything you wanted to chuck on the end there?

Mr Mayor, while all the things that have been spoken about tonight are pretty important, there's a couple of things that I think need to be addressed. And one of them is the lack of maintenance, I guess, over many years of our creeks and waterways that service more frequent rain events rather than riverine flooding. The rain that we had on last Monday night was a good example of things not coping. To the degree, and as one of the speakers mentioned about Brickaby's Creek down here at the bridge, it was only half a metre under it. The river's about six metres lower than that, and it's only 150 metres away . And that's not the only—Burrendong out at Pitt Town, similar. Currency Creek at Sackville, or Addy's Creek, whatever they call it there now, and Bushes Lagoon at Wilberforce, they're all the same.

And while all the things that have been spoken about tonight are really important. And they're being dealt with. We've got pharmacists and that that aren't here tonight and haven't spoken , and properties that have water on them for weeks and weeks and weeks. That's unnecessary . And they can be rectified with the floodgates that were put in place for the very purpose of flooding and the like when you get riverine flooding that minimises the amount of water that goes back into the swamp areas and the low areas, like behind the RAF base, areas like that. And I've spoken to the staff about it, but I think that you were at a meeting, I think on Monday or Tuesday , and I've met with some of the other residents in other places, and you've heard the comments that were made.

While all that was spoken about was serious, the majority of them come back to looking at the everyday occurrence of flooding that's unnecessary. And Mr Ryan has spoken about Pitt Town, and there's a road alongside the sporting grounds there at Pitt Town that if you spit in the drain there, you've got water over the road on a regular basis. Now the road was never built like that. It's got pipes under it and it's got a drain there, but it's full of rubbish and weeds and even trees. It's been that long since it's cleaned. And so that a shower of rain that should might interfere with someone's activities for a couple of hours is carried into weeks. And with a lot of the turf farmers and stuff like that, vegetable farmers, if it goes under for more than a couple of days, then you're looking at a great loss.

So, and with all the support that the services have given, these people live on a floodplain. They're happy to live there. They don't mind a bit of a kick in the pants occasionally. But there's things there that need rectification, and I believe it's our responsibility to do that, that would minimise their problems for everyday life. So I don't know what's necessary to go into this, Mr Mayor, but my view would be that the council review it's the drainage and stormwater systems that make these low areas operate, to come back to council at a later date

So I think if we just, for the benefit of those taking minutes, I think the intention would be go under point three, just add the word including, and under point A, the management of drainage on creeks

I'd also like to suggest another point to the resolution, if Councillor Sheather and Councillor Ridden are open to it, which is that council staff compile the feedback from the submissions, refer feedback relating to other agencies to those agencies with those referrals and any responses received to be reported back to the committee, just as a way to capture all of those submissions that relate to other agencies and make sure that feedback isn't lost. Happy with that, Mr Mayor? Yep. Councillor Lyons-Buckett.

Thank you, Mr Mayor. I was just going to suggest something along those lines, but possibly something a little bit to give a little bit more clarity, because I think that this isn't really a forum where we can hear from the public and hear the feedback on a specific event and then actually do anything about it, mainly because of time constraints and also because we have specific, you know, it would have been good to have the energy people here tonight, for example, to ask them questions and so on. I think that what we really need to do at some point, and we did have a resolution from the last meeting we had of this committee, which was six months ago, and that was to have a workshop around certain things, and we've never had that workshop.

But I think what we need to do is we need to categorise these various issues into whose jurisdiction they fall within, so that we can then focus on what things are actually council responsibilities and which ones we have the role of advocacy about. Because we've done this sort of exercise before, and it hasn't, I mean, individual agencies have made some changes, but we haven't got the clarity around it in terms of what the council actual responsibility is and what we can be devoting our time and effort to doing in terms of addressing these issues that keep arising. I think that, you know, we know some are state issues, and somebody has asked on the chat who will address the Water NSW question.

So we need a mechanism that is delivering for us to go forward with this. Now, a lot of these things are operational, and they will be done either by our staff or by the agencies involved. We still have no clarity around our real role as councillors, and that's what we resolved to do after the fires and then after the last flood, and we've not yet done that. So we need to do that so that we can be really working in the areas. areas where we can be making a difference. Not these things are great to hear from the community, and we've got the submissions we had in the last meeting. I know it was raised a motion, I think that Councillor Richards raised about getting the emergency management officer.

Now , I believe someone was employed, but we've not heard from that person tonight, and that was a specific position that we had identified that we needed to have in our council, but we haven't heard from that person, and that is a council-based position that I would have thought that we would be getting some feedback from what they may have been doing and what that feedback is. Going over the individual issues, I think is we know what these issues are. We've seen them. We've been emailed directly. We've seen them coming up all over the place, and we know the vulnerabilities still exist for various people. It would be really good if we could engage in either a workshop type of situation at some point where we can, without time constraints for people speaking and so on, where we can have these real conversations, because this is what I believe we have lost when we've lost our previous committee system, that we could have back and forth.

In this case, we get to speak once and we say something, and then the next person goes on. And I think that people need to have the engagement to come up with the resolutions. That we're trying to reach to make, you know, to make the difference that we want to make here, and to ensure that we've got a level of preparedness that is going to make our community safer. It's going to make the jobs of the agencies easier if people are as prepared as possible. And I think that on this item, I would have had a lot more to say. But what I would like to see is for us to implement the resolution from the previous meetings, and to move into, and when we discuss item two, I'll also raise something around that.

But I would most definitely like to see the issues categorised into who can actually address them, who can make the differences around them, and for Council to focus in on what we're capable of changing here. And there's a lot we can do, whether that's voicing much more loudly to the other levels of government. But I think we're sort of missing the point a bit by just having a lot of feedback that's just taken in and then it's not actually being addressed to make the differences we need to make.

Thank you. Thank you. I think that is probably the difference, and it is the challenge we've got. We can either have a committee of five people, and we can have that conversation, or we can hear from 115, but it does become hard to have an individual conversation with each one, so we probably need to find a way to do both.

Representatives from the community.

We have the 12 representatives here, but I think everyone deserves a voice with these things. In regards to the emergency services coordinator, I couldn't tell you the reason that that individual isn't here tonight, and I don't know that that's appropriate. But we do have Jackie Carr, we've got Will Barton, Megan Ang, and the general manager, who have all spent some time in the EOC. So if there's any questions, I think don't hold back. Certainly if you had questions for Phil, someone else will be able to take them.

It was more a perspective because we identified it as a role that we said last meeting, we said we really need this person. Whether they delivered that back through a director, but I would have thought that that— That that would have been a really important element of feedback if that's a specific position. That's all.

Okay. All right. If you do come up with any questions, feel free to stick the hand back up. Councillor Wheeler.

Thanks, Mr Mayor. I want to thank the speakers for taking the time to come and address us, particularly those that have travelled long distances, people like Paul Bryant. That is a hell of a road at the moment to be travelling at any time of day, but particularly now going home in the dark. So thank you very much. Your input was invaluable. One of the things I think that has become, and Councillor Sheather spoke to this as well, that's become really evident, particularly with this last flood, is the changed pattern of flooding. And I'm not sure entirely what's to blame. There's a lot of conjecture. What I'm really hoping is that we get far more information from the last three incidents that we've had that allow us to examine what's really going on here and therefore to deal with it.

What I would really like is some flood mapping of what has happened each time, the extent of road closures, and the other thing that I would really like to know is who gets stuck where and for how long, and how we access those people. Because regardless of whose responsibility it is to get them food, water and fuel, someone needs to know. I think it was really helpful to hear from Ms Fain that we've got this now ongoing database of people who were impacted last time, and I can see that that's a real benefit. We need to expand and hang on to that, because it's those individual moments of contact, I think, that can be the difference literally between life and death for some people. And that's what we're seeing in Lismore.

I think we probably should be enormously grateful that we're on the Hawkesbury-Nepean floodplain at this point and not Lismore, where things are much, much worse. I watched someone attempt to get a 13-year-old kid lifted off his roof for two and a half hours in Lismore yesterday, and it was just heartbreaking. The fear wasn't that the water would get up to his roof. The fear was that the house next door that had come off its piers was about to smack into the house that this kid was sitting on. That's the sort of weather events that we're dealing with now, and we have to be able to react to them. We've got increased flash flooding. I know it's Turnbull Avenue in Wilberforce, for example, considered to be a high point of Wilberforce.

We know where our low bits are here. You don't expect to get flooded in the middle of Turnbull Avenue, but it's flooded twice in a month. There's real questions, I think, about the infrastructure, both public and private, and its capacity to cope, particularly around drainage and surge events, and that's part of what we're seeing, I think. Runoff, overland flooding, the impact of development and rain volumes, I think, are things that we need far more information about the impacts of. What concerns me now is three flood events on, so four natural disasters, and I'm still, as a sitting councillor, not really clear on who does what. What I would like to, what we need to have now, and we should have, is a set of actions on who does what when.

They need to be clear. They need to be public. They need to be well known, and they need to be highly predictable, and that's what we should be relying on: a set of standard operating procedures that we can all rely on to get people through these events. And people should know what happens, who to contact, what will happen next. When the river hits this point, what happens? Where is my house in this scheme of things, and what action should I be carrying out? If we can't do that for people, we're falling down on our collective responsibility. We've heard that we've got issues around emergency preparation, really basic stuff like sandbags, evacuation centres and road closures. And I really hear Peter Ryan talking about, you know, just the police tape.

Even if you put out road signs, we had people driving over the road signs in Wilberforce so that they could drive down and really have a good old sticky beak at the bottom of King Road where it was wet. There were a lot of rubberneckers this time around. It's really offensive for anybody who has some sort of media profile in these events, and really needs to use that as an opportunity to tell people to stay home. Don't come gawping at people's damages. It's really, really off. Look at it on Facebook, watch the news, go away, come back with your gumboots when we need some help. Basic information that needs to be out to the public, not just on Facebook and not just via text message. We have whole tracts of communities that can't see, that don't have telecommunications, often beyond a small transistor radio or the radio in their car when these events hit, and we have to prepare people for that.

We need to get hard copies of information into food drops and fuel drops and at specific points. I urge you to have a good look at what's being done in Mullumbimby, where people are working off whiteboards to work out, with information that people need to know. It's working really well. We need better gauges and reliable gauges. Colleagues have gone out again. They're back to using the stick. I think it was fixed yesterday morning. Telecommunications are a huge issue. Warnings and evacuation routes. These are really basic things to keep people alive. And then we need to talk about recovery, mental health, and longer-term resilience. We have to get out into these communities. I would like to see us making regular visits to these communities with our recovery teams to talk to people.

We've heard from Paul Bryant that people in Colo are exhausted. We managed to go out there during the fires. It was really valuable. We need to do that for floods as well. We can't expect people to be driving a two-hour turnaround to come and talk to a recovery centre at South Windsor. We have to get into these communities, the same as Port Stephens and Lower Macdonald. And then we need to have a robust discussion about longer-term resilience around insurance, and I notice that there's the potential for a government back scheme being discussed in federal parliament at the moment. We need to talk about grants and standalone power systems and evacuation routes that really last for the long term.

What I would like to do, Mr Mayor, is potentially add a couple of points to the recommendation. One is that this committee be reconvened within six weeks to continue this discussion. And the other is that we have a specific discussion around the concerns of remote and rural communities as part of our emergency response.

Okay. Thanks. I think we're just going to keep adding it and then assuming there's nothing anybody violently disagrees with, we'll just go with it at the end. Mr Mayor, can

We see the list?

Yeah, I'll just give them a minute to type it up, but then, yep.

Yeah,

When it's

Available so we know what's on it.

Yeah, we might just try and put it up for, you know, a little while and take it down again so we won't see each other. And at the end we'll have it up for everyone to look at. I might just ask somebody to comment on the recovery hubs, where they're operating and when. It might be a good opportunity to put that on the record and when some people are watching.

Hi, I'm Megan Ng. I'm the manager of the Community Planning and Partnerships team here at Council. We have a recovery team now that sits with Council, who's actually led by a Resilience New South Wales-funded community recovery coordinator and a team of about six workers funded under various joint state and federal funding, who are employed by Council to deliver a range of community recovery initiatives in areas. As Dean mentioned before, they have been operating as community hubs for some time now, and post-flood in 2021 and also post this flood have also been offering outreach recovery services in outlying communities. So the regular hubs are facilitated at Bilpin, St Albans. Colo and Wilberforce.

We have also had pop-up hubs just over last weekend at Walmsley Road and at Ebenezer. And as I understand, the intention is also to move out to Upper Colo and other outlying areas in the coming weeks. We're really fortunate that we've got the support of Resilience New South Wales and a range of other state-funded services. So we've had Service New South Wales providing outreach, and whilst it certainly doesn't offer people the same suite of access to, you know, the full range of services available at one of the recovery centres, the aim is to address some of the barriers to accessing services and supports really early in the piece. Also really fortunate to have a partnership with Give It, where we're able to distribute fuel vouchers, just again to assist to overcome barriers to accessing recovery centres.

Those hubs, as I said, have been operating for some 18 months, and they'll continue to do so. And, yeah, we're just trying to work with the, you know, needs of the communities in those complex spaces, and with respect to the various access needs and significant mental health, financial and other pressures that, you know, people are feeling out in those communities. So Liz, the community recovery coordinator, has also been responsible for coordinating a whole range of information so as to overcome issues for people who can't get to the hubs or aren't able to easily access it. You'll see a mail out from the mayor, you know, coming out in the coming weeks, and also postal drops in those areas just to try and keep people abreast of where they can go to access information and support through a range of mechanisms.

Perfect,

Thank you. I might just suggest a couple of things. I think it's hard to, it's sort of hard to talk about the entire experience and bring that into a few things we need to look at, but I think I just want to make sure we have captured all of the key things that have been brought up. I think— One point that I'd like to add is that I think Council should ask Water New South Wales to be doing some sort of community education or briefing session. I think there's many, many people over the last few weeks that have given me feedback about how they think the dam should be managed and what they think the solutions are. I think it would be helpful to have Water New South Wales actually provide some information, some rationales to what they are doing and why they do it, and also to be able to hear feedback from the community about what could be done better from the perspective of people who are downstream of the dam.

Yeah, I might leave it there for the moment if we've got other hands up and we'll come back. Councillor Lyons-Buckett.

Thank you, Mr Mayor. I'm just wondering if we can add again around the electricity. I think that we do need to deal about that. We need to speak to Endeavour about, so people understand what the situation is with why areas are being cut for safety reasons and so on. I think that we need to have that conversation. It was raised by some speakers tonight, but I think we have raised it previously, so I think that would be a good inclusion. Yeah,

Thank you. I'd also like to put a point in there about the Pitt Town evacuation route in particular. Yeah, that's been coming up a lot, so I think that should be added on there. I also had a question for the Acting Superintendent, just in regards to some commentary earlier around, is there any confusion, I guess, in the local plans about who does what and when, or is that information all well known and perhaps we just need to work out a way to make sure everybody else is confident about that?

It is articulated quite well in the plans, both state and local . And I'm sure that should there be any additional queries once that information has been reviewed, each of the agencies would be happy to provide any further detail. Okay,

Thank you. Maybe we can, not for the resolution, but maybe at some point we look at a separate briefing just around that to make sure that councillors are across what those plans that operate in an emergency situation are. Councillor Vigel. Yeah, thanks, Mr . Mayor.

Can I just add to point 3, maybe A . Our first speaker identified the bridges at Richmond Road at Rickaby Creek, South Creek's at Issue 2, and it's clearly when I had a look at that bridge when I was peaking around about 13.99 on that Wednesday morning at the last flood, there was water starting to push under the pavement there. And if you go and have a look at the approaches and the exits there, it is damming the water on South Creek , and he's dead right when he was looking down there at Rickaby Creek, down where the tip was.

The reason it should be raised in cases of infrastructure improvement and linear roads when it comes to repair and/or bridges, I think .

But I'm quite happy to, you know, to take advice on it, though. And just lastly, I'd just like to thank the public speakers and the services as well. So thank you from me.

Thank you. I'll come to you in one moment, just before I forget something, Councillor Sheather. Just in, I think it's part of probably part of point C, but I think Council should have some specific consideration of, and we did do this via a notice of motion from Councillor Lyons-Buckett a couple of months ago, but some specific consideration of how we do restore access earlier to communities like the Colo Valley. How do we get out there quicker? How do we authorise local works? I think those things still need work, clearly. Councillor Sheather

Yeah, thanks, Mr Mayor. Just a couple of comments that's made in the letter that you're proposing to letterbox the residents. There's been a couple of speakers and letters we've got in relation to people that aren't on the web or internet and all that sort of stuff, people that are in that situation, that you might be able to put in that letter in some form. I think it was the lady from Infrastructure New South Wales that rang that five or seven hundred people, or something she spoke of, that that sort of thing, that those people can ring someone to book, I guess, in the situation that someone can check on them if that particular area's been inundated, either by fire or flood. There's nothing else that might get to them. A letterbox drop, though, will be in their letterbox, where other the newspaper or the like may not reach

Them. Thank you. One other point, I just, sorry to keep bumping in, but there's a few things here I'm just going over multiple pages. The other thing I wanted to bring up was also just around the provision of emergency food and supplies. One thing that became evident during this flood in particular was that it was over an extended period. There's many people who didn't have access to emergency food and supplies, and the SES did a great job of getting those out, but they were provided by local charities, in particular by Mountain of Joy and Hawkesbury Helping Hands, but some others as well. And I think that needs to be looked at, whether that's a model that's sustainable and fair. That those charities, you know, I fear for what would have happened if those charities weren't there, in terms of what that would have done to response times.

And I don't think it's a good enough plan from the state government's point of view that we're just waiting on, just assuming there'll be charities to fill that gap. So I think that needs to be looked at. Councillor Richards.

Thank you, Mr. Mayor. And the irony of the way things work, you just touched on something that I wanted to bring up. And I do believe that the two larger charities of Helping Hands and also Mountain of Joy, who did fill those gaps, they aren't represented here tonight, and I don't know if that's whether they are busy or they had something else on, but I do believe that in whatever direction we take this matter tonight, that their feedback is gathered as part of the report and part of the process, because from working very closely with both of those charities over the last couple of weeks, they have suffered significant exhaustion. We had volunteers sourcing how to get food to people who were isolated.

And no matter what level of government you are, right, we need someone in government, no matter what level they're on, to actually take some sort of responsibility for that, because relying on our volunteers to the point where they are mentally and physically exhausted and traumatised is not okay. And I know as councillors, as elected representatives, we also... Took that burden as well. People feel, well, I guess the coalface, the most easily approachable people in these kind of emergency situations. And we received so many calls for help from people as well, and of course that's our job to do that. But there does need to be some level of coordination. I guess even in my role, when people were contacting me quite urgently and frantically for food, and it was a new process for me to have to learn how that I had to go, or someone had to go gather the food and get it to the good guys at the SES to do the difficulty of making the drop.

And, you know, they're things that we are learning. And I guess on that point, I just wanted to say that if we're going to try and maybe have a positive— From this flood compared to last flood, and every single emergency we go through is a learning experience. I think the community does need to be congratulated for that little bit more resilience that they did have this time around from last year. And there was certainly a, even though there was a higher flood and a greater impact, there was more calm in the community and an understanding of what was about to happen. And I know that only comes with going through something previously. And we had, you know, almost 30 years of complacency where people had moved into the area and knew it flooded and knew we were a floodplain, but didn't understand the impacts.

And no one will ever understand the impacts till the water's either at your front door or you are isolated and cut off. And I do think the community has learnt a lot of lessons from lived experience from last time. And I do think it's important that we thank the community for that sense of, different sense of calm that they brought to this flood, even though it was certainly traumatic. There were a couple of things I did want to raise and put on the public record in relation to the motion up on the board. I would please like to add riverbanks. Now everyone knows I've gone on and on about riverbanks, and I was at three properties today with some state government representatives as well, significantly damaged riverbanks.

Now, most of these private property owners know that it is their financial responsibility to pay for the riverbanks, but what they need is a streamlined process. Now, last time we didn't get that far, and within that 12-month period, people did not have the opportunity to fix their riverbanks, or if they just decided to go fix them without getting any planning approvals, they did so anyway. And as we well know, that opens the door to a whole range of greater environmental concerns about what's going into our river when people are getting fill and doing things like that, because they are in a state of desperation. And we're not going to criticise those people heavily; they're desperately trying to retain their properties and their riverbanks.

So I would like to add riverbanks onto this point three, please, because I believe that we need to give priority. You know, we've had people, I've had people come to me in tears. They've lost acres off their property. We need to actually give priority to riverbanks. The last thing I want to put on the record is not something I think that needs to be added to that, but just a question for staff. As councillors, we get a lot of feedback and a lot of questions about potholes. Is there a plan? What's the plan? They are everywhere. It's no one's fault. It is the reality of the situation. Can you just please maybe let us know what the plan is to fill these potholes, because they are absolutely everywhere.

Do we have extra resources? Do we have extra teams? What are we doing? I do not live my life on Facebook, but Facebook is just absolutely raining down on council at the moment for potholes, and I think it's unjustified, and I go and say that. We're all human beings. We're all doing our very best in our jobs. But I think if we can have on the record what the plan is for potholes, even just a couple of minutes response, that would probably be really good things.

Thank you.

Thank you,

Councillor Richards. Yes, potholes are a big issue. The steps taken immediately, or actually during the flooding, was to bring in additional crews via contractors. So council has a number of contracts in place with road construction companies. They were activated, I think, as the floodwaters were still rising. Since then, we have reduced them to an extent, but with the ongoing rain have had to bring them back up. We've also had crews working overtime over weekends. Unfortunately, we aren't the only council experiencing this, and we are, as an industry, facing material shortages and personnel shortages. The issue recently has been compounded with the breakdown of some key plant with one of those contractors, and I understand those repairs are underway. In essence, it's moving material as quickly as we can to where they're needed, using the available resources.

Thank you. I think it's important to get that on the record that people know staff are working hard to get that done, and the job is mammoth. There's no way of sugarcoating that. So I want to thank the staff as well. I guess we all thank the public, and thank you for coming in with your feedback. We thank the agencies, but thank the council staff as well. You are going above and beyond what is your day job and what you are employed to do with natural disaster after natural disaster in this local area. So thank you. Thanks, Mr. Mayor.

Thank you. Councillor Reardon.

Thank you, Mr. Mayor. I'd just like to raise the issue of who is the authority for lowering the handrails on the Richmond Bridge, and what disciplinary action is going to be taken, because this is about the third time it hasn't happened. And I know the member for Hawkesbury, Robyn Preston, has written to the minister urgently about it.

Did Transport for New South Wales— is that something for you to comment on?

Yeah, good evening. Thank you. Thank you for that question. If I just may say that, as I mentioned earlier, we did have a new maintenance contractor engaged in this event. Of the last event, I understand that the rails were not lowered , and it took a significant amount of time for the road to be reopened due to the amount of debris that was tangled up in the railing . However, on this occasion, whilst we only had a very, very short time to know that the water was about to come up over the bridge at the time, there was only— Kevin may be able to agree or that— I think it was only a two-hour— we only had a two-hour window to understand that we had water was going to be going over the bridge.

Our crews were already at capacity doing other parts of the work. However, what we did do is we turned that around, and to ensure that whilst the running was not down, we reopened the road in the absolute quickest manner that we absolutely could, and I think we achieved that. So rather than try and fix those railings, those railings were taken down. They were all absolutely damaged, and we reopened the road without pedestrian access on that bridge quite quickly. So I think whilst we ask about the railings being pulled down, that is a contractor's responsibility, which is part of Transport for New South Wales. We just look at the recovery part of that and see how quick it actually was to actually have that bridge reopened without the impact of the railing not being brought down as it was in the first event.

Thank you for that. And look, I don't want to pile on, and I understand everyone, this is a natural disaster and no one's planning on getting anything wrong. But I think RMS or Transport for New South Wales should understand the significant damage to its reputation in the community when these things happen, because it's highly visible. I've had lots and lots of questions as to why something that we all know in the community has to happen didn't happen. So, like I said, I think we've just got to take the learning out of that, that it's something certainly that people weren't happy to see, that kind of waste. Yeah Deputy Mayor.

Thank you, Mr. Mayor. Look, I believe the New South Wales Government is going to embark on an inquiry into the floods, and I'm just hoping that the information that we've got here tonight and future meetings is going to be included in that inquiry. So maybe with point four in the motion, we could say something about the information being passed on to the New South Wales Government inquiry.

Yeah. Yes, I think we need to just change that to staff compile the feedback from the submissions and refer them to the relevant agencies , and the referrals and responses be reported back to the committee.

And then certainly, yeah, that would form the basis of our submission, I guess, into any inquiry. Any further discussion or further items to be added, questions?

No, we're sort of just working on a whiteboard format here, and we're going to move it at the end. We're going to get a big list together, as long as no one's disagreeable with any of it. Councillor Lyons-Buckett.

Mr. Mayor, the list just went, but I didn't see—it may have said—but did it say evacuation centres?

No.

On the list. I think that we've also, we discussed this after the fires, and I understand that some of the decisions around these things, of course, the decisions around where they're to go at a particular time, come from, you know, the emergency management coordination that's running whichever sort of disaster it is. But in terms of having evacuation centres ready and in a state that are fit to be used, that is a council responsibility, I believe. And I know that councillors can't do much about it, but can we have it on there so that we boost that process along so that before anything else happens, we've got that sorted. Thank you.

Yeah, I think it would be good to get clarity on that because there certainly seems to be different versions of that hanging around in terms of whose responsibility that is. General Manager, you had a comment on the resolution.

Through you, Mr Mayor, thank you. Certainly, we would be more than pleased to report back to this committee on the range of really serious and important issues that have been outlined by the committee this evening. I would simply request, however, if the committee is amenable, that we report back within eight weeks. It's fair to say our energies at the moment are solely on the ground and actively fixing a number of these matters. And if we could simply, I guess, get the extra two weeks, that will also mean that the date of any reconvened committee wouldn't then also coincide with the May council meeting as well. So that would simply be my request, Councillors. Okay.

Yeah, in company with that, Councillor Sheehan and Councillor Reardon. Yes. Councillor Willard, I mean, it's just because it was your idea. Are you happy? Is that okay? Yeah,

More than happy with that, yeah.

Stephen Boots, did you wish to address the committee?

Stephen's raised his hand.

You should be able to speak now.

Yep, I can hear now. Thank you very much. Looking at the minutes and the meeting, one of the key things, and Lyonbrack mentioned about clear communication. The communication came for evacuation, but there was nothing about clear information about once you've evacuated, you will be unable to return back. What basically happened in McGrath's Hill, some people chose to stay, and then when they went to go and get food, they were not allowed back into their home. And they had a wife and two children, as an example, down my road. So that that communication, when it comes out to evacuate, must really emphasise. Excuse me.

Excuse me. Clear evacuation. And what does that mean by evacuation? Yep

And the other point really is, I heard earlier, Yourself, Mayor, you mentioned about the communication from the Water, New South Wales Water, very important, and would like that to be included in the minutes clearly so we can consider what their thoughts and consideration and the communication to the wider people in the Hawkesbury area. Thank you very much, and sorry for the coughs

In between all that. We'll make sure we capture that feedback as well as part of what we refer to the SES, just in regards to the clear communication that you can't return home after an evacuation till you get an all clear. Was there anything further we wanted to add, councillors, to the resolution?

If not, we'll put the resolution to a vote. So we'll just bring it up on the screens so everyone's quite clear, and then I'll make you take it down again. Sorry, but yeah, give everyone a moment just to make sure we know what the resolution has ended up looking like.

And so just for clarity, the intention now is that this passes, this will be reported back to the next council meeting with information. Around these matters. Sorry, yeah, the next council meeting,

With some of it coming back to the next community meeting, depending on what the point says. All right, so if we can take that down, thank you. All those in favour? Yeah . Against? Declare that carried.

We have a second item in the business paper this evening.

Somebody wish to move the recommendation or something else, Councillor Lyons-Buckett?

Thank you, Mr Mayor. I'd like to move the recommendation that's in the business paper with a couple of additional points. Okay I did send those through earlier to Tracy.

Here they come.

If I have a

Seconder, I'll speak to that.

Seconder? Councillor Wheeler.

Thank you, Mr Mayor. I was pleased to see this in this paper. I think that I had a notice of motion last meeting around a working group to the committee, but I'm pleased to see that potentially we may be able to set up this working group to look at these particular flood studies that are underway and the review of our floodplain management plan . I've also added another working group there to act as an advisory group on matters relating to resilience and preparedness, preparedness-related initiatives. This is mainly coming from a community perspective, of course, not an operational perspective, but I think that there's a lot of work to be done around that. And we heard Mr Bryant from Upper Colo speaking tonight about how they want to set up and engage with Council.

And I think that if we had an advisory group working around that to feedback into this committee, that would be very advantageous in terms of what we could achieve in looking between committee meetings at some of these initiatives that are out there, not to replicate what is done from a Council level, but as councillors with our engagement and what we see happening and how we can best feed in and get mechanisms around how we translate that into the Council in terms of feedback. The fourth point is to ensure that points four and six from the resolution of the committee meeting of 7th of September are implemented. That was actually around a workshop to see if we should have working groups, but it was also to work with the other levels of government around a couple of issues, and I don't have that now in front of me because I only have one device with me.

I'm away, so I can't see what that other one was, but they were both items that we had come up with. And the final one is, now this is just to get an idea of what cost it would be of employing a flood officer. Because there's a lot of work to be done around flood. There's the strategic planning side of it. There's all these preparations feeding into it. There's the regional and state level planning that's going on with it, and there's a lot of work to be done. And we don't have someone within planning who's dedicated to doing that. And I think that if we could just know what the cost of employing someone, even if it's one day a week, and we could do a shared arrangement with another council who has a flood officer or something like that, I think it would assist us in being brought up to date on all our flood planning and all our various, you know, all our various things that we have to do in that space.

So I think it's really just a motion to receive that information that's there and to perhaps, you know, adopt a commitment to having some working groups to the committee. If anybody's opposed to that still, then perhaps I'd like to hear why or what they would suggest otherwise. But I think it's just really pertinent, particularly in light of the event that we've just seen occur. And as Councillor Wheeler was outlining, we know there's the predictions ahead of many more extreme weather events. We are going to have these issues not just around flood but around fire. And the more prepared we are, the better. And I think that if we can have a couple of groups working around these issues, we can get these flood studies done.

Particularly the people in the McDonald and Colo rivers have been asking and asking for these studies to be completed. Not that we're completing them, but we are part, an advisory committee is part of that process, of course. And I think that would be a really good way forward in light of what we've seen and from what we've heard from the community, which is around, you know, around wanting more done in this space, basically.

Thank you. I have no issue with most of that motion. My only point would be around point three. So the motion before us calls for the formation of two different working groups. One working group, correctly as per the way our committees are set up, is suggested is given set tasks and timeframes, and the other working group just has to act as a group advising on matters without actually referring it to anything. So I think, given that we are in the committee meeting, I'd be willing to support that Councillor Lyons' bucket if you can give us a firm commitment that when this comes to Council, you'll actually have a list of tasks that you'd expect that committee to do with the timeframes they'll report back on.

Mr Mayor, what I would be happy to do would be to remove that if we're going to have the workshop, which we decided on six months ago, in which we were going to discuss what working groups we could set up, and I would raise it in that format in that forum perhaps. Otherwise, I'm happy to go with what you're suggesting either way. But if anyone has a problem with it, because I did just put it in there and send it through before, and it doesn't specify certain things. But I'd be happy to either provide that to councillors or to remove it and to go over it more in detail if we have a workshop in which we discuss the things we had committed to discussing before.

Yeah, I'd be more inclined to, if it's okay, Councillor Lyons' bucket, remove point three and ensure that point sixteen from the resolution in that workshop does occur shortly. I'm not sure why. Yes,

I'm happy with that, Mr Mayor. I think that's really a workshop we need to have, and we could probably produce quite a few really beneficial ways to move forward around flooding in particular in that. Thank you. Okay,

Thank you. So we'll remove the point three. Was there any further discussion? Seems like everyone's fairly agreeable on that one.

Thanks, Mr Mayor. I think point 3 was potentially useful in that it would allow us to, and I think we can probably still do it with 6D . What I think we need is really targeted input from the different communities that are impacted by flooding because they are impacted in different ways. And I know that might sound like a statement of the bleeding obvious, but three floods on, we still haven't adapted well enough, I think, to meet all of those needs. And so I think we really need to hear from people from more isolated spots like Upper Colo and McDonald Valley. But we also need to hear from the communities that we normally don't think of as being, you know, we think of them as suburbia with the usual services and facilities of suburbia.

So places like McGraths Hill, bits of South Windsor, Pitt Town and the Peninsula and North Street in Windsor, where these areas are hit and hit hard. And we really need to gather all of these people to talk about their specific needs in these instances, at the point of crisis and in the recovery phase, and then moving on to greater resilience. And I think it's that greater resilience that we just don't seem to be able to get to because we keep being impacted. And I think we're just going to have to dig a bit deeper so that we can get to that conversation. We need to get beyond crisis management. I'm hoping that the recommendations from this motion can get us to that point, I think. Could we have around — could we have in the new point three a timeline on when this workshop will happen?

Because we resolved that in September last year, and we, you know, nothing. We had an election, we've had— I mean, now we've had another flood. I'm feeling increasingly frustrated, a mixture of frustration and despair that we can't seem to get on the front foot again. And I know it's been a really difficult couple of years, but we have to do this for the sake of our community.

Yep, we can. I guess we've just got to be really, really aware. I know you are aware, Councillor, but just say it anyway. We've got to be really aware that our staff are obviously dealing with a recovery, and we've just asked them for a significant briefing within the next eight weeks on a whole range of issues. So we can put a timeframe on it, but I think we've got to be understanding and realistic of that fact as well.

General Manager, what do you think is a realistic timeframe to get that workshop together?

Just thinking through the process here, Councillors, as to whether, you know, if you want to proceed through to have the next committee meeting at eight weeks and then have the workshop follow that, in that circumstance you're sort of looking at a three- to four-month window potentially, and I think that that's probably realistic given the circumstances.

I mean, given this is a committee meeting rather than a council meeting anyway, Council, we sort of can't bind anyone to anything in that sense. I'd be willing to take this offline with Councillors, talk with the General Manager about the soonest possible date, circulate that by email. Later this week, and then go from there as a group, if that's an okay way forward.

I'm happy with that, Mr Mayor. If you look at point six from September last year, from that meeting, much of that is work for us to do, rather than additional work for the staff to do. I think having it after the detailed briefing in eight weeks would probably be helpful. But I think it would also be helpful for us to know that, say, in 12 weeks, we're going to have that workshop with both the federal and state members, and we can be thinking and compiling information to take to that, rather than relying on the staff to tell us all the time. Some of these are questions for us. What level of engagement? What questions do we get? The staff don't know what questions councillors are asked, because they're not us.

So there is an onus on us not to be passive recipients of information from the staff, but to be proactive tellers of our own stories in this space, and I think that's what we need to set up as well.

Yeah, that's sort of the way I was thinking, Councillor Wheeler, that maybe let's have a conversation as a group about what we really expect out of that, and if our expectations are less than what the general manager might be worried about right now, we can probably do it sooner. Councillor Lyons-Buckett. Yeah,

Thank you, Mr Mayor. I was just going to raise something similar to that and wonder if you could perhaps convene a councillor-only meeting to go through some of these things to assist the staff by passing on, just as Councillor Wheeler said. So I'd be happy with any of that moving forward. I think those suggestions are good, but it is good to have some idea of a timeline just so that we ourselves can get the material ready that we want to pass on and share, and certainly a councillor-only conversation around it would be really good to have a feedback , sort of sharing our feedback of what we've experienced through the floods.

Okay, well, if there's no further discussion, we'll put that. All those in favour? Against? I declare that carried. So that—

That concludes the committee meeting for tonight. So thank you everybody for your attendance. Thank you so much to all the members of the public that took your time out here to give us your feedback, and we'll make sure we continue to communicate on the same channels we've got this meeting out on as to what's happened from here. Thank you to all the agency representatives and council staff for being here as well. Thanks.