14 June 2022 - Ordinary

Good evening everybody and welcome to tonight's meeting. Get

Some feedback. Is that better now? Okay. I'd like to start by acknowledging the Darug and Darkinjung people as traditional custodians of the Hawkesbury and pay respect to Elders past, present and emerging, and hand over to the General Manager for the procedural items.

Thank you, Mr Mayor. Members of the public attending the meeting 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'd also like to advise that in accordance with Clause 5.3.3 of the Code of Meeting Practice, meetings of the Council are recorded. 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 meetings are recorded to assist staff in compiling the minutes of the meeting and to enable the podcasting of Council 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 such persons where that access is in accordance with the relevant regulations and the recordings

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For the benefit of those persons who will be addressing the Council tonight, 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 to both your address to Council and any answers given in response to questions from Councillors. Finally, it is also requested that any persons participating in or attending the meeting has a mobile phone that they either turned off or switch it to silent. Thank you, Mr Mayor.

Thank you. No apologies. Are there any declarations of interest?

No declarations of interest. I'd like to start this evening by acknowledging and paying respect to the passing of former Councillor Paul Rasmussen. Paul was a very long-serving Councillor here, and we all knew him well, and most of us had the opportunity to work with him. We were going to have a formal condolence motion next month so that we can properly pay respect, and we can hear from some of his colleagues and other people that he's worked with over time. But I didn't want to let tonight go past without mentioning that and acknowledging that. We also have another condolence to pay respect to Mr Sid Kelly. We're going to hear from Councillor Wheeler and then from Mr Harry Grange.

Thanks, Mr Mayor. I've got some words here from one of Sid's good friends and Rotary colleagues, Rob Stally, so I'll start by reading those out.

Sid Kelly was a great friend to many people in the Hawkesbury, a larger than life character with a can-do attitude. Sid's father was a drover up north around Tenderfield and once was saved from dying of thirst by a man named Sadley, so he named his first son after this good Samaritan. Sid will be remembered for many things, including his great family, his strong faith, and his love of sport, particularly horse racing. But perhaps Sid will be most remembered for his charity work. Sid was passionately involved in fundraising for many charities, including San Miguel, Starlight, Variety, the Australiana Pioneer Village, Windsor Rotary, and many more. For his charity work, Sid was recognised with an OAM in 2008.

Sid was survived by his devoted wife, Carolyn, his children Bernadette, Peter and Paul, and a bunch of grandkids and one great-grandchild. I was lucky enough to have been a part of Sid's journey. He got me involved with the APV, the Hawkesbury Race Club, and Celebrate the West, Your Town. I shall never forget the influence that Sid had on my life. I speak on behalf of the many mates that regard Sid as our leader, our hero and our mate. Sid will be sorely missed by many people in the Hawkesbury and beyond. Rest in peace, Sid Kelly.

When the friends of the Pioneer Village wanted to take on the lease, Council told us that we should stick to our knitting, and they were the words used, and that we couldn't run a chook raffle. We were told to find some proper business people to take it on. So Councillor Christine Payne suggested Sid Kelly, and that's where I met him. He had a big personality. He was unflappable, always encouraging. He was quite comfortable with people who had different views to him, and he and I had different views on lots of things, but always maintained a good respect for each other. Sid always met me with a smile and a kiss, even when he was really ill, and he handled his illness with a lot of determination and grace.

He was devoted to his wife Carolyn, his children and grandchildren, many of them redheads like Sid had been. He was very down to earth. The rebirth of the Australiana Pioneer Village was plotted around the Kellys kitchen table at Rybikroft, the colonial home Sid and Carolyn painstakingly restored, and they were always noted for their hospitality. Sid was mortified when the ABC footage of the council decision to lease the Pioneer Village to the community listed him as a multimillionaire. He thought that everyone would think he was a wanker. Sid loved football and horse racing. We agreed on the Parramatta Eels and disagreed passionately about horse racing altogether. Sid bred horses at Rybikroft, what his wife referred to as a very special breed of very slow racehorses.

They were certainly very spoiled racehorses. Sid was a fixer. He saw solutions. When Rotary wanted more grants, he got me in to explain how to write grant applications, and the money flowed in. When fires hit the Hawkesbury and we heard that families could no longer afford fuel for their generators, I rang Sid from the train on the way to work. I said, Sid, I need a favour. What do you need, kid? Done. He always called me kid. I think I was 50 at the time. We had lots of those conversations. Sid didn't tolerate fools. He had a great sense of humour and was very proud of his wife, his family and the life they made together. The friends of the Australiana Pioneer Village erected a plaque honouring Sid's part in saving the village during his lifetime.

He was a generous, hardworking man who did much to make his community better, and he will be sadly missed. And I'd like to give my deepest condolences to his wife, Carolyn, and his family, who will miss him greatly. Thanks.

Thank you. And I think we're going to also hear from Mr. Harry Grange.

Yes, please.

Can you hear me? It's an honour to speak about Sid.

I first noticed Sid probably 20 years ago. We entered the same church, St Matthew's Catholic Church, and he sat on the left side of the church and I was on the right-hand side, and we never sort of associated with each other till I joined Windsor Rotary, and he shortly afterwards joined as a member too, and we became very good friends. We had a sort of a mutual understanding of each other. We both liked to drink. We both liked to play golf. And I'd sit down in the cart and play golf with Sid every Wednesday. And unfortunately, due to his illness, that stopped so many months ago. I've never known a man who put up with so much but was such a fighter. He never gave in. And whenever you talked to Sid, I'm fine.

There's no problem. You talk to Carolyn, said, Talk to me if you want the truth. But Sid was a great guy. We went to Tenterfield a couple of times to meet his family and his friends. He used to tell me about the big bashes he used to go on with the Variety Club when we were playing golf on a Wednesday, and they got up to some rare things. And I think a lot of it's been said here before. I got up, but I'd just like to say that whatever he did, he did with a whole passion. If you were his friend, you were his friend through thick and thin. And I'm very proud to be stood up here today as a friend of Sid Kelly. And I'll miss him sadly, and a lot of people will too. Thank you.

Thank you. Anybody else wish to say anything? No.

Thank you.

We'll move on then to agenda items—sorry, the confirmation of the minutes, if somebody wanted to move those. Moved Councillor Lanes Buckett, seconded Councillor Reardon. All in favour? That carried.

Agenda item subject to public address. We have three items subject to public address, the first of which is item 101, and our first speaker is Gillian Wilkins.

Councillor Conolly, Mayor of the Hawkesbury City, Councillors, General Manager, ladies and gentlemen. The Committee of the Hawkesbury City Estateford would like to thank the Council for providing the venue of the Windsor Function Centre for the Estateford over the last 41 years. This year is our 70th year. As a result of the funding, tens of thousands of children of the Hawkesbury and surrounds have opportunity to perform. The Windsor Function Centre was a building funded jointly by a grant from the Federal Government and the Hawkesbury ratepayers as a community facility. At the time of leasing of the centre, we sent a number of letters to Hawkesbury Council and Honorary Kevin Rozoli expressing our concerns as the outcome.

One concern was that the increase in hiring charges would lessen the availability to the community. We were advised that in no way would the use of the centre jeopardise being denied community access from Mayor John Horrocks in May 2000. The Hawkesbury City Council then resolved that an annual donation of $1,000 would be made to the Hawkesbury District Estateford Society and that Council would subsidise the Estateford Society for the use of the Windsor Function Centre on an annual basis, John Horrocks. The hiring charge for the Estateford has since risen from $1,000 to $35,700 in 2019. The dramatic increase is the result of rental increases as we predicted. We receive no direct funds from the Hawkesbury Council.

We pay the excess not covered by the Council. In 2018, we paid an additional $5,954, and in 2019, we paid $11,185. The Estateford Society is the facilitator of this event, not the beneficiary of the funding. Over 70 years, children of the Hawkesbury have participated in the Esteddfod. We are part of the Hawkesbury's rich cultural history with individuals and schools using our stage to polish their skills, engage their progress in the performing arts. There would be many people in this very room who have attended the Esteddfod as a participant or a spectator. We offer a great diversity in events from dance, music, singing, speech, school groups and more. The Esteddfod provides a forum in which participants display their skills in a friendly environment and a much admired venue.

Students develop a range of skills including talent, confidence, perseverance, sense of achievement and leadership, skills that equip them for life and provide priceless memories. We have become renowned for the quality of the competition. This year, we have a total of 58 schools participating. On the day of school events, the Windsor Function Centre is at its capacity. This year, we have planned 14 days of competition with 3,500 entered in school events, 1,400 in solo events and 2,700 in dance troupes. A total of approximately 7,600 individuals will cross the stage this year. Add spectators and you will see that this is a major cultural event, the largest, we believe, in the Hawkesbury. The logistics of this event require a significant financial outlay by the society.

For the Esteddfod to continue with certainty, we need assurance of the funding for the venue. These expenses before the Esteddfod begins include insurance, medals, ribbons, trophies, certificates, copyright licences, printing, equipment and more. In 2019, our expenditure totalled 52,600. This does not include the Council's grant. Our committee is made up of seven, committee members, one's 92, one's 80, and then the rest of us fall under that umbrella. We're all volunteers. We come with a wealth of experience, and there are numerous others who come to help us run each day. We all work in a non-recapacity, only the adjudicators are paid. In 2013, the same issue was taken to Council and it resolved to put us on a five-year contract, which gave us some certainty.

This was renewed in 2018. Over the past two years, COVID, floods and fires have disrupted all of our lives. As we gather entries for the 2022 Hawkesbury Steadford, we are very proud to see an unprecedented level of support from an exceptionally resilient community. Our purpose in addressing you tonight is to inform you that the benefits and complexity of the Hawkesbury City Steadford, and request that you consider to continue to provide for the venue. We need your support more than ever to resume this event and provide our children with the opportunity to shine. We cannot survive without the council's support and funding. Thank you very much.

Thank you. Are there any questions, councillors? Oh, sorry, any questions. Councillor Lyons-Buckett.

Thank you, Mr Mayor. Thank you, Ms Wilkins. I'm a big supporter of the Steadford. I'm just wondering though, just asking, that's quite a hefty cost. Do you seek other sponsorship from businesses or from grant applications or anything

Else? We haven't actually done the grant applications cycle, something that we probably should be looking at as well. We do have certain sponsors who sponsor for trophies and financial prize money for the competitors in different genres.

Okay. Thank you. Any further questions? Councillor Wheeler.

Thank you. Thanks, Mrs Wilkins. On the grant writing front, I think council can provide some advice and contacts for grant writing. We've run, I think our staff have run some workshops quite recently, so it might be worth having a look at council's Facebook page and looking at that for potential opportunities. Last time I think we discussed the Steadford, we were made aware that there were very few of these left in the...

Correct. A lot of the Steadfords have closed, especially because of the pandemic as well.

Right, so this is becoming a fairly unique event. Yes, yes. Thank you . Okay.

Thank you.

Anybody else? No? Thank you.

No further questions. Thanks. Oh, sorry, Councillor Dogramaci, you had a

Question? Yes, a couple of questions. There is no doubt that, you know, you are doing an extraordinary work. I don't know what you are doing, but what you are telling us in here is a fine, extraordinarily good thing that you are doing. Now, what is your budget, and what's the short—how much would you be needing?

Sorry, if I could just ask you to turn your microphone back on. Sorry about that. Thank you.

Sorry, the amount we would be looking at is purely from, governed by the people who are the lessees of the function centre. So whatever they charge is then what kind of council put—have been putting at least half to that. We don't know what the figure is going to be yet because they haven't given us a total amount. They haven't given us an invoice, and they haven't given us a total idea of how much it's going to cost. And that will depend greatly on the number of days we use, the times we use. We go from 9 a.m. to 9 p.m., but it could be that we could be having extra days because we have an unprecedented

Oh, previously? I will have to refer to my learned colleague

Press again. Oh, yeah. About 35,

000. About 35,000, yeah.

So is that the total amount, or is that the amount that total? So if you want, you know, half of it, that's about 17,500, something like that, from the council.

Last time, which was 2019, council paid 24

500. Yes, last in 2019. The council paid 24,000.

That's their chicken feed. So I support you. Maybe we should give you 30,000 if we have. If you have. I'm all for it, if

You have. Otherwise, we make up the shortfall, and that

Depends

On door money, that depends on who comes in, that depends on auntie, uncle and everybody else. Well

Considering the money that, you know, we are wasting, so I think you should get more than 24,000. Thank you.

We'll close questions there. Thank you for your time. Okay, thank you. Thanks. And just for clarity, councillors, just to avoid the question that will come up, we've in this year's operational plan, we've contributed, or allocated, 22,500, same as previous years. Next speaker is Mr Michael Want.

Good evening, councillors. I and many others who support the NRDCAA are supportive of the recommendation on rates and charges contained in the business paper at page 12 at 4A. And the reason I'm speaking is to discourage any councillor from amending the recommendation to increase the base rate from 30% to 50%. The community is well aware, when the Liberals on Council had the numbers previously, they supported the 50% base rate and implemented it to the detriment of the owners of lower valued properties. And I noticed in the gallery tonight is filled knobs over there, and we had a big meeting in North Richmond in relation to the rates, and there was about 100 people at that meeting, including some of the councillors sitting around this table, and were opposed to it then, were opposed to it now.

That was changed when a more progressive and representative council was elected in 2016. I think the Liberal representation in 2016 on the council went from six to four councillors. The community members who I have spoken with are very concerned when two options, without any apparent transparent prompting from the Liberal councillors, appeared in the business paper, April 12, 2022, at Table 4. There was no recommendation from staff on the 30% option or the 50% option in April. In the minutes of that meeting, the two options appeared in Resolution 89, moved by Liberal Councillor Veigel and Reardon. That was carried with the casting vote of the Liberal Mayor, Councillor Conolly. If this council had odd numbers of councillors, we would not have this situation where one councillor gets two votes.

If my memory serves me correctly, when considering the Redbank development, at least one of the hurdles that development had to jump to eventually gain approval was carried on the casting vote of Mayor Bassett, and I'll say no more about that sad story. Councillors, 50% of you rightly, in our view, voted against the inclusion of the 50% base rate option for the exhibition period, and councillors' submissions from the community were 100% opposed to the 50% option at page 21 of tonight's business paper. The 50% option supports the highly valued property owners at the expense of the less valued property owners. Councillors should support those who struggle based on social justice, at the very least.

The business paper tonight at page 12 at 4A, the recommendation is for a 30% base rate. All councillors should support the recommendation. The Local Government Act, at the role of councillors, is for you as councillors to represent the residents and ratepayers. The community has spoken. Should the Liberal Councillors use their numbers to amend the recommendation, then they have learned nothing from the results of the Federal election and the Seat of Macquarie in May 2002, if it pleases.

Thank you. Any questions, Mr

White? Councillor McMahon.

Thank you, Mr Mayor. Mr Want, you referred in your speech to a meeting held in North Richmond. What year was that in?

I think it was around 2016, but I can't be 100 percent sure.

If my memory serves me correct, and happy if you tell me it does not, was that the public meeting where pictures were put in the Hawkesbury Gazette online where you set fire to the faces of Liberal Councillors on a poster?

I'm not aware of that at all.

Yeah, there's pretty much pictures where you've set fire to Liberal Councillors

I did. No, no, no,

The meeting that you're referring to. I'm just clarifying.

Phil and I have not. Oh, you did

Oh, so my memory does serve me correctly. Oh, lovely. Perfect. Nice to know that that's what you stand for. Thank you very much.

Any further questions for Mr Want? No further questions. Thanks, Mr Want. That was our— Mr Want was our final speaker on that item. Councillor Kotlash.

Thank you, Mr Mayor. I'd like to move a motion that I sent to the staff earlier today. If we could have that up on the screen. It's essentially the same as the recommendation in the business paper with some changes to points two and three.

Would you like me to talk to it while they do that?

Yes, there has been seconder to Councilor, so is there a seconder for that?

Yep.

Seconded, Councillor Calvert.

Thank you. Yes.

Thank you.

I think it was this time last year that we resolved to start working on a natural environment conservation and restoration strategy for the Hawkesbury. Since that time, I've been giving a lot of thought as to how we can achieve this goal with our limited resources. The changes I've proposed we adopt in the environment and heritage section of our strategic plans are mostly geared around this goal, although I have brought the heritage aspects of the plan to the forefront as well. The changes have fixed some errors, used simplified language, and rearranged the objectives and actions to make more sense and to give us a clearer path forward. I've sent all of you some notes around the more specific reasons for these proposed changes, and I must point out that the changes, if adopted, will not alter the actions in the operations plan.

They will just need to be rearranged under the changed objectives, and as such, I believe we will not have to do another round of community consultation. I commend these changes to you. Thank you.

Thank you. We're just trying to get them up on the screen.

I can... Anybody got the question? We've got it there. We're just...

A bit of a struggle for some reason. Anybody else who has seen the changes wish to speak in the meantime? Councillor McMahon.

Thank you, Mr Mayor. I think it's stuck on that a bit. Thank you very much. I have seen those amendments and I do support them, Councillor Kotlash. However, I would like to— sorry, that motion. I would like to move an amendment to that motion, Mr Mayor, and that is to take on board those changes and amend part 4A the base rate from 30% to increase the base rate to 50%.

Is there a seconder for that? Seconded, Councillor Reardon. Discussion, Councillor McMahon.

Thank you, Mr Mayor. I think that that does not come as a surprise that we would be moving the— I would be moving the amendment to increase the base rate to 50%. During the last council term where I was elected, I voted against the operational plan for five years in a row based on the very unfair assessment of the 30% base rate. Now, when that was introduced by a few councillors in the last council term on the premise that they were making things fairer, it in fact left a section or a portion of our community paying absolutely exorbitant rates, to the point where some rates— and I've got multiple copies of those rates notices. I collected them at the time after people willingly sent them to me.

Some of those rates went up overnight from $1,900 to $4,100. There has been extensive debate over that time, and I stood up physically in my chair during one of those meetings with a packed gallery of people who were extremely distressed during that situation and told them I would continue to stand up to make it fairer. I hope tonight that with my amendment, there is support in the chamber to fix that inequity that has existed over the last few years. I think that it's no secret that doing this tonight has occurred because it was something that the Liberal councillors and as the leader of the Liberal ticket, we talked to the very last election in December, and we received quite a good proportion of the vote based on that premise.

So in giving that to the community that we intended to raise the rates 50%, the opportunity comes up tonight in the adoption of the operational plan, and I'll be moving that amendment. As I said, very happy to do so after five years voting against the 30% base rate. Thank you.

Thanks, Councillor McMahon. Further discussion on the amendment?

Councillor Lyons-Buckett.

Thank you, Mr. Mayor. I'll vote against the amendment. It wasn't a few councillors. It was a majority of eight to four that voted to change that structure at the time, and that was after much workshopping around the various scenarios that occur when you make a change to the base rate. So we had looked at that extensively, and a majority, a clear majority, which is eight to four, said that we wanted to make that change at the time. That did happen to coincide with very extreme land valuation increases in certain areas that neighbour the growth sectors. So we had very big increases of land value in the Oakville area in particular, which of course translated to increases in those rates, which would have occurred whether they had a 30% or a 50% base rate.

And that is played out by showing that with a change back to it, they will not go back to the rates they had before. They'll get $600 or something a year off for some of them. So it wasn't that that caused their big increases. They, of course, are in a precarious position because they have a lot of uncertainty from the state government around what's happening in that area with the land values, and I feel for them on that front. However, the valuer general chose to increase their land values to that point. What we see now is if we were to make this change is that any landowner whose value of property is under the median value for the residential rate will have an increase in their rate. So that's our lower value properties will have an increase, and anyone above that median value will have a decrease.

Some will be minimal, but for the highest value properties, they'll have quite a big decrease. As well, we'll have a decrease because of the flow-on effect from that. The bigger businesses, people who, the big landowners in our business rating areas will have big decreases, and some of our farmland properties will have increases. I don't consider that to be fairer. I don't consider the whole local government rating system to be particularly fair overall, but we have to work with what we've got. And I think that this year we had the state government change the way they apply the rate peg to councils, and we were given a very low increase, and so we have had to apply for a special rate variation as well to take that figure up to cover some of the costs.

It's most unfortunate that local government as a whole has real questions around its financial sustainability moving forward when we see what we're confronted with in terms of natural disasters and so on. We also know that we will be heading for harder economic times as interest rates go up , and we want to— I don't think it's fair to make this change at this point. I think that it will— Hopefully there will be a correction. I think it's also unfortunate that we're making this decision when we haven't got the most recent land valuations, which will come out at the end of this year, and we may well see a redistribution of how that land is valued. There's been a lot of areas that have now had increases, and I think what many people don't understand is that that will then have flow-on effects to people who had an increase last time might have a correction or a reduction.

Other people will have an increase. So without having those land valuations, then I don't think that we should be making any changes at all. We've done a lot of work around this , and I think that we should stick with the situation as we have it. And I've only spoken—it's unfortunate that there's so much actually in this because I've not had a time to address Councillor Kotlash's changes, but I'll speak to that if that becomes the motion. Thank you, Mr Mayor.

Thank you. Anything further on the amendment? Councillor Wheeler.

Thanks, Mr Mayor. I'm speaking against the amendment.

As Councillor Lyons-Buckett says, there is a great deal to cover in a single item, and I think it would have been preferable had these come as three separate items to us so that we could have dealt with the delivery plan, the operational plan, and the revised CSP as separate items. This is too much to do as a conglomerate, and it makes it too difficult to cover really important topics going forward. I'm very pleased to see that we're continuing to fund the estedford to some degree, because I think there were moves to stop that. There's a lot of information that's come back to us regarding the works program, and I think much of that is really useful. If

I'm pleased to see that Mitchell Drive is in the mix at last. The Director of Infrastructure and I met with residents at Mitchell Drive earlier this year, and they handed me letters that they were given in 1995 saying that that road would be fixed. Finally, we're getting around to it. I think they'll be quite relieved. We urgently need to discuss a community solution to sewage in Bowen Mountain. We can't keep kicking this can down the road. This is not financially sustainable for the residents who live there. It's also not financially or physically sustainable in the long term. And I'll flag that I'll be bringing something to Council to try and advance this beyond the talk fest that it has always seemed to have managed so far.

There's some odd stuff in some of the submissions, including the fact that King Road needs to be addressed from the butcher up to Grono Farm Road. King Road has been substantially rebuilt from the butcher to Coburg Road. It cost millions. I can't see us doing it again. I've got real concerns about Wheelbarrow Ridge Road, East Kurrajong Road and Tennyson Road that I would like to flag for further discussion. Those roads are now clearly unsafe. We've got lots of comments about flood recovery jobs, and I think we need to make it really clear as this information goes out to the public what the difference is between our normal program of works, of improvement works, and the fix-up works that we're doing after flooding.

The submissions show that that isn't clear. The sewer , and we also need to, I think, need to run a bit of an information campaign about sewer and water, which are not the responsibility of councils. They are the responsibility of state government, and we do them because the state government doesn't, in terms of sewer connections. Water, people who don't live on town water and who claim that they pay rates and get no services from us are unfortunately unaware that council is not the service provider in this instance. There's also a call for extra council pickups, which again I don't think is a useful thing for council to do. We have in our CSP that we're trying to help people minimise their waste by allowing them to have what they would like.

What some people would like, which is 10 free pickups a year, which is what Blacktown Council said, we will be drastically increasing the amount of waste that we took to our landfill. That's not happening. So I think we would be better to look at increasing, say, the garage sale trail, which was enormously popular, or some sort, or swap meets of things that people don't want, organised council pickups perhaps where everybody can put their stuff out the front, people can take what they want, and the leftovers go to landfill instead of this full-scale dumping of what is effectively waste that's not taken into account by the people who sell the stuff to begin with. I'm still really concerned about the money that we give to the sports council, where we don't have details, and I'm dismayed to read in the answer to questions that we don't have minutes from late...

The minutes that have been uploaded haven't been— sorry, the minutes haven't been uploaded since late last year. I'm really concerned that we are handing $1.3 million worth of public money and we don't know where it's being used. We need far greater detail about this. I've been flagging this for years. I want that review to come to Council, and I want details of where we're putting this money. In terms of the 50% base rate, I think one of the submissions said it best: it's appalling, unfair and unjust, and I couldn't agree more. We've seen the failure of the New South Wales Government on the rates review, with the failure to bring in improved capital improved value. We've all seen the maps of how the 50% base rate will play out.

Every property below the median property value across the LGA will pay more, and every property above will pay less. That is not fair. Rates are not a direct fee for service; they're a tax where property value is used as a proxy measure of the capacity to pay. If you don't like that system, that's unfortunate because it's the system that we've got. But it does not mean that we need to charge people on our lowest value properties, and some of those are very low value indeed, more so that people on high value properties can pay less. They will not pay substantially less, and that's the thing that needs to be brought across. You are lying to these people if you're telling them that their rates are going to come down.

They are not. They are still going to be in excess of $3,500 because of the disparity in property values. Thanks.

I'll just speak to the amendment myself briefly. So what was the only difference between the amendment and the motion is whether or not we have a 30% or a 50% base rate. So that's the portion we should be speaking to at the moment. The question here is one of relativity. We are told by the New South Wales government that between 50% and 100% of council rates should be calculated based on the land value of the properties. That's the situation we're in. That is the system that Councillor Wheeler mentioned. We have to choose what's most appropriate, and what we're talking about tonight is whether 50% of the rates should be calculated based on land value or whether 70% of the rates should be calculated based on land value.

So both those numbers are, of course, completely arbitrary. There's no magic science behind either of those numbers. And of course, therefore, if you move the number in either direction, the logical result of that is that properties above and below the median value go up or down, depending on which way you're moving at that particular point in time. So it is a question of relativity. So yes, if you move it, if you make the rates based less on land value, of course, therefore properties with higher land values will have a decrease. But unless you've got some logical explanation as to how we landed at 30% being such a great number, then I don't think that that increase or decrease is particularly relevant.

I look at this and the reason we took this to the election. And said to everybody before the election, if we're successful and we have the numbers in support of Council, we will move to a 50% base rate, is because I do think it's most appropriate that everybody who is using Council services, everybody who is a member of this community should be paying something based on the fact that they live here and have a property here. And yes, 50% of that can be based on land value, and I think that's the best balance. We did see increases. I think it's actually a bit dismissive to say, oh, there was increases due to land value changes of up to $2,000, so $600 came from us changing the system. That's inconsequential.

To a lot of people, $600 is consequential, especially when they're also having a $1,500 increase due to the land value increase. I think it's dismissive of us to just say, oh, well, you would have had a $1,500 increase, so why not have a $2,500 increase if we change the system at the same time, and that shouldn't matter because you're really wealthy because of where you live. I don't think that's appropriate. I don't think it's compassionate, and I don't think the result ends up being an equitable result. And that's why I've always supported a 50% base rate, and so it shouldn't be any surprise that I'll be supporting that tonight, given that that is what we expressly said that we would do before the election.

I was elected, and I need to keep faith with my community and go ahead and do that. I hope a bit more to say on the rest of the item once the amendment's been dealt with. Councillor Zamprogno.

Thank you, Mr. Mayor. I'm, like you, speaking only in relation to the amendment to move the base rate from 30% to 50%. This is something that I sought re-election on. I took it to the election as a policy and it was duly returned. In response to Mr. Want. I would suggest that if this passes this evening, then he should concede that there was a majority of Hawkesbury electors that were prepared to return a council that's prepared to enact this policy. And in response to Councillor Wheeler's recollection that land value stands as a proxy for the way that we should tax people, that's true. But the Council Revenue and Rating Manual, the book that we're supposed to follow, says effectively that every inhabitant of a district should be made to contribute according to their ability and in proportion to the benefit that they receive.

The problem that we deal with in this chamber is that there has been a progressive decoupling between land value and income and the benefit, the service that people receive from Council. So what we've attempted to do by moving the base rate back to 50% is to reintroduce an element of fairness. I am here proudly to represent the thousands of rural residential landowners whose rates have risen so sharply and in disproportion to their income and to the benefit that they receive in terms of services from Council is that they voted very clearly last December for a change. Rural residential land values in the northwest of Sydney rose by 20.3% in only the last financial year, which really just drives home this progressive decoupling.

Some figures that are relevant for us to consider are that in 2016, prior to the election of the previous Council, Oakville, to use an example, represented 2.4% of dwellings, but carried 3.2% of the rating burden, in other words, a third more than they deserved to. After the previous Council's various tinkering and the move of the base rate to 30%. They represented 6.6% of the rating burden, in other words, two and three-quarter fold what their population ought to represent. And at the same time, in Bligh Park, which represented 9.3% of residents, they used to carry 7.4% of the rating burden, and now only carry 6.8% of the rating burden. Now, I know that this is only one measure among many, and I freely concede moving the base rate to 50% doesn't fix the inequities that are in the system.

I agree with Councillor Wheeler that the state government has let us down by not providing guidance notes so that we can enact the various other rating models that were foreshadowed in IPART's rating review. I'm hopeful that maybe if we readdress this question next year, we'll be able to do more to move towards a fairer rating system. But what we can do tonight is to move the base rate back to 50%, and I think it's high time that we got on with that job. Thank you.

Thank you. Any further discussion on the amendment? Deputy Mayor.

Thank you, Mr Mayor. Yes, I want to speak against the amendment. I've been involved in this discussion for quite a few years, and you asked, Mr Mayor, how did we land with 30% in the first place? My recollection is that we had a couple of meetings of councillors, and we decided that the fairest thing to do would be to aim somewhere for the middle, not one end or the other, but for the middle, and that's how we came up with 30%, because we thought that was about as fair as we could get. As several councillors have pointed out, the system has so many problems in it, and no matter where you put that figure, there's going to be problems. And what we thought at the time was, well, we'll put it somewhere in the middle, share the burden around as best we can.

That's how we got 30%. Now, the thing that has come up at some of these public meetings is a number of members of public have said, Well, 50%, that's not too bad. That's halfway. 50% isn't halfway. We have the option of moving the base rate between zero and 50. Halfway is actually 25. 50% is 100 %. That's as high as the base rate can go. And so there's been many, as we've heard here tonight, many public meetings and lots of public discussion about this base rate. And there's been discussion in both directions. I've been to meetings where people have felt very strongly about the 50% base rate and wanting to go down to 30%, and there's been other meetings where people want to do it the other way.

By choosing 50%, what you're actually doing is choosing one side over the other. You are choosing a certain group of people who feel that they should be treated differently to everybody else, and I can't support that. And to say that 50% is a fair option is actually quite misleading. A fair option would possibly be 25%. The other thing is this has gone out to the public and the public has responded, and all the public responses supported the 30% option, not the 50% option. I think it would be very brave of councillors to go ahead now and support a 50% option when the public has quite clearly stated they don't want that; they want a 30% option. So for all those reasons, I won't be supporting the amendment, and I'll save my discussion about the rest of the motion should that come up later.

But just let me say that I fully endorse the changes that Councillor Kotlash has put forward, and I hope the rest of the Council does as well.

Thank you. Just note there were seven submissions received relating to this question. For anyone who might have thought 100% was a bit misleading. Councillor

Yes, I...

Okay, yeah. I'm one of the newest councillors, and I always tell people when I meet them that I got in by accident. Now, I don't know what was my primary vote, and with the help of two councillors, I got in. I have absolutely no idea how this council works, or any other council. I'm not a politician. I don't want to be a politician. I'm here as a small, tiny businessman, and council somehow is a business . I don't know whether it's been run properly, or bluntly saying that maybe sometimes was run by drunk drivers. I don't know. So I look at the way from a different perspective. When the question comes, 25% or 5%, how about we don't charge residents at all? And then who is going to work? Who is going to collect the garbage?

Well, at the moment, we are suffering with the potholes and everything, which I'm proud to say that, you know, I'm alerting people by distributing letterbox drops. I completed every single one of the roads in Grose Vale and Grose Wold. Now, what power do we have when the fuel prices, when the petrol unleaded goes over two dollars? What power do we have to bring it down? Life is tough. Certain groups stop us progressing . Building, employing, always against, and this is what I have noticed in this council, either right, left, middle, or whatever it is, when somebody says white, the other one has to say no. Instead of working together for the benefit of the people, the unemployed, single dads, single mothers, teachers, firefighters, ambulance people, I don't know what kind of support we give.

Things are wrong. What power do we have to correct? I don't know, 25%, 30%? How about we do something that comes from the other part of the world? Set an example. How about we, or I, move a motion that every single one of us donate our fees, whole fees, and we work for free? And then we set an example. 50%, I have no idea. 25%, I have absolutely no idea. Then who is going to close the gap? Where are we going to get the money from? We are bound by authorities outside Australia. I don't know how many of you are aware of our national debt, I mean if we want to expand. I'll be more than happy to tell you that, as a nation, in our national budget, we are in deep trouble. 1.3, 1. 4 trillion. That's 12 zeros.

A child is born today owes the rest of the world $47,000. Doesn't matter whether you like it or not. We have 47% of the world's uranium underground. We cannot utilise it because someone in Geneva says no. We cannot extract minerals underground. We have to send it overseas. Life is tough. Like, you know, somebody says many, many decades ago, young councillors may not remember, life wasn't meant to be easy, okay? Bring the rates down to 20% or 10%, then who is going to close the gap? We don't have the money. Life is tough. Everything is going up, and we don't have the power to say stop. So, in all fairness, which I have suffered, my business suffered immensely. I'm not a rich person. I still pay my mortgage, but this is the reality.

So I will be supporting the 50%. Thank you. Thank you.

Councillor Sheather. Yeah, thanks, Mr Mayor. It's our job to look for options, and Councillor Zamprogno and Councillor Weir have both said we should have done it, and they're dead right. There's always options, and it's something we should be looking at. Now, I don't know what the outcome will be, but we won't have to sit around here wondering whether we should have done something else. We've got people here amongst us that can advise us that, and if they can't, we can ask them to get advice from the state. Because the things that sort of happened in Oakville and the like, it's grossly unfair. We don't get any extra money for it, but it drops somewhere else. And in relation to people with low incomes, I can guarantee that some of the people out there have a lower income than some of the people that live in smaller dwellings .

Not only that, if they want a packet of cigarettes, they've got to drive for 20 minutes to get it. South Windsor, you can walk for two minutes to get it. If you want to build a granny flat or put extension on your house, at South Windsor you can do it. Try doing it at Oakville. So why we say they're valuable properties, let me tell you the opportunity, in some cases, in what we call a low economic area, you move out of your house and you can make money out of it. Not everywhere, but lots of places you can, and the same situations in Oakville and other places. The graph that we looked at in relation to the rate increases, when we looked at it a couple of months ago, it indicated the small variation in the rates in different locations, in suburbs in different locations.

It was minimal, but it's a bit of a balance. But the balance between $1,000 and $6,000 or $8,000 is , on one end it's a few dollars; on the other one it could be hundreds and hundreds of dollars.

And it's all right to say, well, if you can't live there, sell it. That's a really unfair approach. We're here to represent the people who live in the Hawkesbury, not the ones we want to get rid of. And so the options that we're talking about, the 50% isn't a reduction, as you indicated. The lower is the worse off you are, and so this does bring a balance. But, you know, I agree with the two councillors I just mentioned that we've got an opportunity to look at it before next year, and there needs to be some balance and things put in place. Councillor Mary Lyons-Buckett said, chops and changes. Will you tell me more than a couple of years where it's never chopped and changed? Property values or variation in rates, whatever it is, the chops and changes, and no one's going to be happy all the time.

It's our job around here to try and get it right. And obviously, the last three or four times it's been messed with, there's community issues. One, because it hasn't been addressed, addressed properly. I mean, we discussed it, but we really haven't sat down with people and discussed it. And one other thing, it's really good to be enlightened with the amount of people we've got in the gallery tonight, because then there'll be some understanding of just what we're doing sitting around here.

So, Mr. Mayor, I support the 50 percent on the basis of what I spoke, and I also urge fellow councillors to move in a direction to look at some realisation on what the options could be. And when we look at that, to have some sort of public discussion where you or the general manager can go through some of those options and see what they think about it. It's not a big deal, but at least they'll know what's going on. There was comments by Councillor Wheeler. There's a couple in the operational plan that I won't speak about it, but there's been some minor adjustments done, and when I say minor, I'm talking about words. There's one in the community plan, I think it is, boat ramps in the city. If you can tell me more than two, I'll be enlightened.

The comment that was made by Councillor Wheeler about the sports council and the funds. Last year, the council copied the minutes of the last 30 meetings of the sports council. It was made available the same day they were asked for. Why haven't they been distributed to the council, to the councillors, or the information to Councillor Wheeler after?

I'll take that on notice, or does somebody have the answer to that now? Okay, we'll lose the question because Councillor Wheeler seems pretty concerned about it, and it concerns me because that's very, very close. And to have the books audited twice a year and then come to Council and be audited again, the minutes are made available to Council every meeting. We've had a Council representative on that committee since it started , and

Councillor McMann, were you ever asked what was on it? No. The information is readily available. We've got a Council officer that sits on the meetings, and occasionally we have one of the directors sit there. There's no secret, and to suggest the money's not spent properly—we, when I say we, I'm very involved with it.

Your time has expired a little while ago, so do you want to

Wrap up on that point? Sorry. Yep. We get 1.2 off Council and spend about 3.5. That's how much the community put with it, and all that information is available.

Thank you. Was there any further discussion on the amendment? If not, we'll put the amendment. All those in favour of the amendment, please raise your hand. Favour are Councillor Conolly, Councillor Reardon, Councillor McMann, Councillor Vargoul, Councillor Sheather, Councillor Dogramaci, Councillor Zamprogno. Against? Councillor Wheeler, Councillor Lyons-Buckett, Councillor Djuric, Councillor Calvert, Councillor Kotlash. Declare the amendment carried. Amendment becomes the motion. Is there further discussion on the motion?

No, we'll go— oh, Councillor Wheeler.

I'll move a procedural motion that we take this motion in seriatim.

Right. I'm just not sure how that would work. I'm assuming 4A is the contentious point, and what do we do if we vote no?

Well, you'll all vote the same, surely.

So what's the point then, Councillor Lyons-Buckett, just to make a show?

No, because we may— no, it's not to make a show.

Well, I'm asking then what happens if the vote is no.

Well, the vote for that section will be yes.

Then why are we doing it? Well

We might want to vote no on something else.

Yeah. Okay, well, it's a procedural motion. I'm going to vote against it, but we'll put the motion. All those in favour?

So the motion before us is that we should vote on this in seriatim, one item at a time. My concern is that to vote no on 4A then renders us without a rating system and back to the start again, so I'm not inclined to do that.

Could I make a— Could I—

No, actually no discussion on a procedural motion, sorry. Can I ask a question Yeah. Yeah, I guess, yep.

Could we do a procedural motion on points 1 to 4 and not point A? Is that what you meant?

Well

In seriatim it could be every—

No Okay

Yeah. No. So we've got a procedural motion. I'm going to call for it to be put. So we'll put the procedural motion to vote in seriatim. All those in favour? Councillor Wheeler , Lyons-Buckett, Djuric, Calvert Kotlash. Against. Councillor Conolly, Reardon, McMahon, Veigel, Sheather, Zamprogno. Declare it lost. Is there any further discussion? Councillor Wheeler.

Yeah, I'd really like to have an opportunity to speak to Councillor Kotlash's changes to the Community Strategic Plan, and I'm really disappointed that this ideological push to have a 50% base rate is overriding everything else on what is the most important suite of documents to come to this council for the entire 12-month period, and in fact the CSP

For the entire term. Sorry to interrupt.

Just to clarify, this is now the motion before us. You're entitled to discuss any matter of the motion before us.

That's fine, but there is a lot of stuff here, including two pages of changes to the Community Strategic Plan that I would really like to be able to discuss in a rational fashion without having to be bludgeoned over a 50% base rate. Unfortunately, we haven't had enough chance to discuss this in detail. I would like to support some of what's in this motion, but I can't support the other parts. So that leaves me in a difficult position. I'm not entirely happy with the wording changes that Councillor Kotlash has put forward. None of them are dreadful,

But some of them are a bit clunky, I think, and I think we could probably massage them so that they read better for a document that is this important. But we haven't got the—I would like, for example, I can see what Councillor Kotlash is doing here in putting recognising the value of biodiversity, but I think by— Pulling it out where it was a separate point and adding it as a clause onto two of the existing options, I think it loses some of its power. There's some minor wording changes I would like to make. The change in the long-term objectives to land-based environment rather than natural environment, I think misses out , takes away from some of our riverine environments. I think some of the inclusions are useful.

Adding value as well as protect and enhance, I think is helpful. I'm not comfortable with the success indicators. I would have liked a further discussion on this before I could support it.

I'm going to attempt another procedural motion to move us into committee of the whole so that we can address this particular point, Mr Mayor.

You're actually open to discuss it now, and you've still got quite

A bit of time left. I don't know how I can possibly do that under the code of meeting practice with the additional items that need to be discussed. This is two pages of changes that came to us this morning that require some wordsmithing for us to be all comfortable with this document, and

It's not possible to do that in this format

I'm just concerned as to how long we think that might take. Not disrespectful, but you spent the first two minutes of a five-minute speech talking about the fact there's not enough time. I'm wondering how much time you think is required to cover those points.

Mr Mayor, may I ask a question? Does the community strategic plan have to be adopted tonight?

Is there a timeline on that, General Manager? Director City Planning.

Thank you through you, Mr Mayor. Yes, the intent is it's adopted post the election, and it was to be adopted by June. An alternative would be you set a delegation of councillors who are interested to work with me to work on the amendments, because the intent isn't necessarily changing, it's just more some wordsmithing, from what I can understand.

I'd be perfectly open to delegating that to the General Manager to make amendments to the wording to the objectives, if Council would find that a better way forward.

Councillor Kotlash, are you happy? That wasn't your— Councillor McMahon. Sorry, no, Councillor Kotlash, are you happy with those changes, with that?

I don't quite fully understand the change that will be happening. We're giving the General Manager the delegation to change the wording of the CSP without changing the intent.

Yes, the intention being that a meeting of at least yourself, Councillor Wheeler, Councillor Lyons-Buckett, and anybody else who wants to attend will occur to get that right.

And will that come back to Council?

The intention would be that the General Manager would have the authority to then adopt that. However, I would point out the CSP can be changed at any time, so if someone wasn't happy with the outcome of that, you'd just bring a motion to the following meeting to change it back to how ever you wanted. And

Just to clarify, Mr Mayor, it's only one section. It's the Environment and Heritage section, and it's wordsmithing, it's not change to intent.

Okay. I can't see another way forward unless we don't take any of the changes and then I bring this to another— Well

I mean, we're allowed to vote on this tonight. We're just speaking quite informally right now that some councillors aren't comfortable with it. It's up to Council to decide whether Council is comfortable to proceed with this motion or wants to delegate authority and talk about it more.

I'd like to get it done tonight.

Okay. So

Yeah.

So, Councillor Wheeler, did you want to move an amendment?

No. No. Okay. So can I continue speaking?

Yes.

Yeah. So look, I'm disappointed that, firstly, I'm disappointed that this has come to us as three items shoved into the one item. This is too much in an environment where we cannot discuss things and workshop them to everyone's satisfaction. Because of the delay in the council election, I understand that the CSP needs to be done in a really shortened timeframe and that we don't have time to sit around and discuss things. But I don't think that this reads as well. I understand the desire for these changes. I think that there is some benefits to them, but I think we are now left with a document that doesn't read particularly well, that is being adopted as the community's strategic plan. I am deeply disappointed by the change to a 50% base rate.

I think you are— you're selling the community a lemon, frankly. This is not fair. This is— we've talked about Bligh Park. Bligh Park has some of the lowest property values in this community. People choose to settle in Bligh Park usually as young families because they can afford it, not because they— they have made choices to live there. This is the council going back to its former neoliberal ideology of user pays. That is not how rates work. This is not a reasonable and fair change, and we are taking a step, I think, in the wrong direction. And I'm deeply saddened to see it.

This wasn't the decision of a few councillors in the previous term of council. There was real concern in the community that the rate system that we had was deeply unfair to those people who had the least.

Eight of us made a decision to change that last time, and I remain comfortable with that decision to change it.

The big disparity hasn't occurred because of the difference between a 30% and a 50% base rate. The big disparity has occurred due to property values. We can't fix that. This will not fix that. This will not alleviate the rates burden that's paid on our highest value properties. This will not be a big saving for Oakville, but it will cost the people of South Windsor and Bligh Park and our towns where, and McGraths Hill, our towns where people are already dealing with the impact of flood, with massive insurance premiums. And in Bligh Park, the cost of increased sewer costs as well. I will flag, though, that we must do something about the Bowen Mountain sewage situation because this is intolerable.

What I really want to see, and I'm going to continue to pursue, is the uncoupling of sullage fees from from rates, so that people understand when they pay their rates that they're paying their rates, and when they pay for their sewer or their sullage pickup, that's what they're paying for. Because at the moment, people in Bowen Mountain think they're paying five grand for their rates, and they're not. And I understand why they're up in arms over it.

Thanks, Councillor Wheeler. Councillor Lanes-Buckett.

Thank you, Mr Mayor. Unfortunately, I'll have to vote against the motion, although I did. I think it's a really sad opportunity that we can't resolve into the committee of the whole and have a discussion around the proposed amendments that Councillor Kotlash brought forward so that we could look at it and change it to get the best outcome in that regard. I'm really concerned by the misleading way that people speak about the 50% rating being applied to a category called rural residential. It is not. It's to high-value property. Some of those properties are in town, some of them are out of town, and some of our poorest, lowest values are people who live in the most remote areas. Now, they are cut off.

They've had no roads, they've had no bridges. Now they're going to have a rate increase. They're in places like Bowen Mountain, where now they've got either $2,700 a year or $5,400 a year extra going up for their sullage payments, whether they're on fortnightly or weekly. So they've got increased burdens on that, increased rates. And you carry on as if Oakville is the only place that is subjected to this sort of. They were subjected to a land value increase, but some of our most remote people who do not have services—they don't have street lights, they have to travel a long way to the library—and I'm tired of hearing that things that Councillor Zamprogno in particular raises, that these people are hard done by because they don't have certain services.

Many people in the townships don't have services. Many people around where some of us live don't have water. We don't have sewer. We don't have anything. We've got to travel everywhere. We've got bad roads, and people out around the Colo area, they don't want to pay their rates because they feel they're not getting anything for it. And some of them are either farmland, and they're going to get an increase. Some of them— Or they're people on low-value properties. They're not people in the high-value ranges, and they're going to get a rate increase. So I think it hasn't been thought out. I think that not many councillors looked at what the impacts really were going to be, and I think that you'll be surprised, and you might get a bit of backlash, particularly from some farmers.

I think that in regards to the other issues on there, I had a whole list, but I agree with Councillor Wheeler. It's very unfortunate that these really big items come all lumped in together and get consumed over the issue of the change of rates, which should be a separate thing altogether. In terms of, I think it's really important that we capture from the submissions that we got the various suggestions for the future capital works, and that we put that, feed that into the system, because some of those are very valid points that people are raising, and they may have emerged at new things, and they need to go into our system so that we can consider when we can deliver to these people who've been so hard done by.

It's very, very unfortunate that we have a contradiction in there, which says that we're working with Sydney Water to put more houses on sewer, whereas in another item in our business paper, we're told that Sydney Water are not expanding at all anywhere . So I think we need to be upfront with the people who are currently paying these higher sullage payout rates that they will not be likely to be getting the sewer on any time, certainly not soon. In terms of the various OLG benchmarks and our financial situation, I think that we, I was going to call perhaps on either the financial officer or the director of infrastructure to just explain why there's such a big capital works. Amount coming in the coming year, that the ratio is way up because I think we've held over so many projects, and I would like some sort of publicly acknowledged explanation around why so many of our capital works weren't done and just the situation of why there's such a big discrepancy in that particular figure.

Would that be possible?

Yeah, we'll take that as a question, but did you want to finish speaking first?

Okay, yeah, that would be good if that could be done. I've got stuff all over the place, sorry.

I do think that in that regard, it's particularly unfortunate that the capital works, and I do understand, and I think the public understand, but it's very unfortunate for the people of Wheelbarrow Ridge Road and Upper Colo Road that this won't be delivered until the 23/24 year because we know that they've suffered a lot. It's good that the design works will be done in the following financial year, but I really want to stress that we need to update these people to ensure them that what they believe is going to happen is what will really happen, because some of those roads out there have been scheduled for a long time and they keep being hit by either disaster or by being moved in the priority list, and I think that we've got to really be honest and out there with the community, telling them when they are likely to actually see the improvements that have been promised.

I think that's all. Thank you.

Thank you. We'll go to the Director of Infrastructure Services for an outline on the capital works program.

Through you, Mr Mayor. In terms of the building and infrastructure renewal ratio, the underspend in previous years is the primary driver for the increase in the benchmark that we're projecting to meet in the 22/23 financial year of 136%. It is a fluid number, and it depends very much on the value of the road network and how it is valued when it is revalued. So it will chop and change from valuation to valuation. With respect to the future capital works and particularly the road network, there's the intention to undertake a condition assessment of the road network. That's going to provide us with a lot of useful data on recasting the way forward in terms of what's needed to not only meet with the expectations of the community wherever possible, but also to put downward pressure on the maintenance costs and use that as a driver for directing our investment as part of that process of determining what goes into and comes out of the capital works program.

Thank you. Any further on the motion? Councillor Sheather

Yes, Mr Mayor. I was away for the weekend. I got back just after lunch and I've been reading since then. And I come to a meeting and there's two additional pages. What might be on those additional pages? Because I haven't got them. You're referring to Councillor Kotlash's

Amendment. I'm referring to the comments that were made by the two ladies over there. Yes, the changes proposed to the Environment and Heritage section of the CSP by Councillor Kotlash that she emailed to us. The changes to the Environment and Heritage section of the CSP and Delivery Program that were emailed to us by Councillor Kotlash , emailed earlier today. It's essentially to the wording of the objectives.

Anything further?

Deputy Mayor. Thank you, Mr Mayor. The question about 50% or 30% base rate, I think, has been decided by the council through the amendment process. Although I don't agree with it, that appears to be council's position. I do agree with the rest of Councillor Kotlash's motion, and I'd hate to see it appear that I don't support her motion. So because of that, I will be voting for her motion, even though I must specifically say I do not support the amendment that's been made for A, but council has made that decision and I think I have to wear it.

Thank you. Councillor McMahon.

Thank you, Mr Mayor. Just a few remarks, I guess, on the debate that has taken place across this item tonight. It was interesting to hear the line ideological push. I found that one fascinating. A difference of opinion is not an ideological push, and quite frankly, the 30% base rate debate last term could clearly be called the same thing, an ideological push for the 30% base rate. To me, what has sort of transpired tonight, and I guess over the last five years of the last term, is a debate, quite frankly, encouraging class warfare, and I think we all should be more mature than that. We just need to stop it. To stop the class warfare, stop the division, and I will not sit here and be lectured to by those across the chamber who are intent on wanting to divide our community through class warfare.

I think it's time to stop that one. I think there— There was also an argument, or a line said, to those people who had the least. Well, was there a consideration to those people who had the least when a blanket more than 30% rate rise was put on Hawkesbury ratepayers by those eight people who supported the 30% base rate last term, regardless of capacity to

Pay? Sorry, Councillor McMahon. Oh, I'm

Watching. It's so

Juvenile. Sorry, Councillor McMahon. Sorry,

You're not an elected representative. Stop calling out in council meetings.

Councillor McMahon— Sorry, just in order for a moment. Could Councillor Lines-Buckett and Councillor Wheeler please stop talking to each other during Councillor McMahon's address? We all need to approach these matters with an open mind and listening to our colleagues, and if you're constantly talking to each other, it's not only disrespectful, but it indicates you're not listening as well. Councillor McMahon has the call.

Thank you, Mr Mayor. It's like high school, watching high school teenagers. It's quite crazy. Thank you for addressing it. Regardless of capacity to pay, regardless of the community, and let's be frank, when that rate rise was voted on by those same eight people, that was actually against what the majority of the community wanted. They supported an option to raise rates over 30% in complete disregard to the majority who responded in that community consultation. So I find that fascinating as well. You touched, Mr Mayor, on a very important point, and I'm sorry, Deputy Mayor, your 100% of responses regarding the rates during the community consultation for this specific item does need to be addressed.

It was seven people in the community out of a population of over 68,000. Let's just get that very much on the record. And I firmly am someone who definitely believes that we have an issue when it comes to community engagement. And I've said it multiple times. People don't care about council. They want to know we're doing our job. They really only respond when it's hitting their hip pocket, or they've got a pothole, or something that affects their or their family's lives. Seven responses out of a population of over 68,000 is not something that we can cry about in terms of setting a precedent that we all must follow. So, I think it's, oh my gosh, we've literally gone back to 2016, 2017. I mean, just the people in the audience just need to grow up.

I think that, I don't think other councillors in here should be lectured to from a place of supposed morality. When comments made on this 30%, 50% base rate item over the last term of Council, and I can't quote it because I don't have it specifically unless I replay the tapes, but we heard arguments such as to people who had a higher valued property, but of course had no one in this chamber had any idea about their capacity to pay, which are two very different things. If you can't pay your rates, sell your property, or you shouldn't be making money off your property. Well, unless you're living under a rock, that's the society that we live in, where sometimes people make money off their properties and sometimes people don't.

But to lecture people about their capacity to pay has been something that over the last term of Council, it was absolutely one of the poorest things that we had to listen to by people who, of course, are obviously making money off the property market themselves. So thank you, Mr Mayor. I do firmly support the 50% base rate. I am very happy we're here tonight. I'm happy we have a majority of councillors here tonight who will do that, and we can put this debate to bed for once and for all. Thank you.

Thank you. Go right of reply, Councillor Kotlash.

Thank you, Mr Mayor. I've just had a— I'll start just by saying that I've just had a note from the staff that they've changed the wording of my motion. It doesn't change the substance of the motion. It just makes it easier to record. So I'll just note that that's been changed.

I think we've had a really interesting debate. I don't think it's been very fruitful, and I tend to agree that in future it would be very advantageous if we didn't have the three of our most important strategic plans

Put together in this way, because I think it is hard to have this debate with them all lumped together. And I know I haven't made it any easier by putting possibly the biggest amendment or motion up in this term. So sorry about that. I did try to change things, and Councillor Wheeler and I have spoken about the wording of the Community Strategic Plan before, and I have actually taken on board some of her earlier suggestions. So I don't think all's lost in the changes that I've made. I think the changes that I've made, I think, are an improvement, and I think they needed to be done.

As far as—I am very like-minded with my colleague Councillor Calvert in the fact that I don't agree with the 50% base rate either. I think 30% is what the staff have recommended, and that has been as a result of an enormous amount of number crunching and an understanding that at the moment that's our best position that we can offer our residents, using not a flawless structure. So, like Councillor Calvert, I want to support this motion because it has my changes in it, and I think they're important. But likewise, I have to make note that I don't support the 50% base amount, even though I will support this motion. Thank you.

Thank you. We'll put the motion. All those in favour, please raise your hand. Favour are Councillor Conolly, Councillor Reardon, Councillor McMahon, Councillor Veigel, Councillor Sheather, Councillor Kotlash, Councillor Calvert, Councillor Dogramaci, Councillor Zamprogno, Councillor Djuric. Against? Councillor Wheeler, Councillor Lyons-Buckett. Declare it carried.

Our next item is 103, and we have one speaker, Carol Eds.

Mr Mayor, Councillors, staff, gallery. My name is Carol Edds. I'm probably known to most of you, but I'm addressing you tonight as the chairperson of the Hawkesbury branch of the National Trust. And our branch thanks Council and Council staff for the support that they've given the community in actually implementing an interim heritage order on number 3 New Street, Windsor. And obviously, I'm here to recommend Council support the recommendation in the business paper. By way of background, the Greater Sydney Commission has recognised Hawkesbury and identified our towns of Richmond and Windsor as two of the five original Macquarie towns as having significant heritage values, including some of the oldest buildings in Australia, and an emerging tourism base focused on local history and rural character.

In 2018, the Hawkesbury Town Centre's 2018 Place Score ranked local history, heritage buildings and features as number one with a 71% ranking. You've just had a lot of debate, and I'm hoping you've adopted, because I couldn't read anything on the thing up there, but you've adopted Council's draft delivery plan for community outcomes objectives, and the objectives are to value and protect our environment and history, and I hope you haven't changed that too much, Amanda. Okay. And those values are to value, protect and enhance our built environment as well as our Aboriginal and non-Aboriginal history. Our planning actions, and that's what this IHO is about, will ensure that Aboriginal and non-Aboriginal heritage are both integral to our city.

To encourage and implement progressive urban design, which is sensitive to environmental and heritage issues. And I think the outcome of what is being presented tonight meets that objective really, really well. And to promote sympathetic, adaptive and creative uses for heritage sites and buildings across the city. And again, the IHO will, if it's supported, will ensure that that happens. The councillors here will remember, should all remember, the National Trust identified priorities for local government, and we wrote to, or I wrote to each of you, or to your representative before the election, on one of the things that the branch feels is most important for this city. And that was the completion and adoption of a city-wide heritage study to ensure that the identification and protection of Hawkesbury's heritage, its places, its rural character, its Macquarie towns is administered through a reviewed LEP and DCP to guide future development enabling cultural tourism.

So I'd like to take this opportunity to thank those 10 councillors, 10 councillors who are here, and some who actually weren't elected to council, also indicated their support for the National Trust priorities. And it was really great to receive a letter from the mayor acknowledging that the, confirming that the completion of the Hawkesbury Heritage Study is a project critically important task for this council, and the work plan which you've adopted, and work for part of your newly appointed heritage officer.

By way of background, the Hawkesbury Branch of the National Trust was established in 2000. This was an era when real estate agents were advising property owners who wished to further develop their land to arrange for demolition of the buildings over the weekend when council was not in a position to stop work. We were losing then, in 2000, a lot of heritage items, or potentially heritage items, in our towns and some of our rural properties. And that was one of the things that actually encouraged me, or I guess it was one of the rationales, as someone who's obviously spent a lot of her life working in the heritage area, but also in the development area. I used to teach real estate agents. So there is a need to really educate, still a need to educate some of our real estate agents about council's values for its heritage.

And they should be encouraged to advise potential purchasers of the financial advantages available to heritage owners, such as rate relief, access to heritage incentive clauses in council's LEP, and to seek free advice from the heritage advisor prior to signing contracts. Until Hawkesbury City Council completes a comprehensive city-wide heritage study, you may receive more requests from the community for IHOs. And so I am hoping that in this term of council, this particular council will see a heritage study for the whole city finished and adopted and items included in the schedule. So , in conclusion, on behalf of the Hawkesbury Branch, we thank council and thank council staff for the support that you've given to the community, and it was a community request for the IHO, and we recommend that all councilors support the Recommendations in the agenda.

Thank you very much.

Thank you. Any questions? Councillor Sheather. Yeah, thanks. Thanks,

Carol, for the work that you and your husband do to look after our city. If the study was done that you spoke about with the trust, this house would have been listed and the owner well aware, or made aware, of the future. Yep. Yep.

Because that's, I mean, the report by NBRS is an example of what is needed to be done when you haven't got a completed heritage study. Yep. And this council hasn't ever completed a heritage study, unfortunately, and that's an indictment on all councillors for an awfully long time.

Yeah, I was one of them. Not good. How long would that sort of study take with the information that's available?

Well, there's a study, a committee-based heritage study currently funded by council, and—but it has stalled, and the trust is pushing to have it finished as soon as possible. But we've had several attempts at studies. We've had the first one—oh, I've got a diary here of studies that have been done over the years. It covers two pages. But unfortunately, council has funded studies, including one that I was personally involved in. Ratepayers have paid for those studies, but they've never been adopted by council, and the items recommended for listing have not been included in Schedule 5 of the LEP. And that's the situation that the Hawkesbury finds itself in.

So they've been finalised and not adopted. Yep. I need to talk to you later.

I can give you a whole page of, and I mean, sorry, she's not here, the general manager, I've spoken to the general manager about this, but I can tell you that the National Trust, before I broke my wrist, I was actually going through our files, and you tend to forget because you just do things and you do things. But amongst them is letters, records of minutes, meetings with general managers, meeting with various mayors over the years. The Trust has been pushing this heritage study, and in fact it took many, many years to even get to thematic history, which is now published on Council's website. I think it took about five years of arguments before that document was actually adopted by Council.

The Hawkesbury is so rich. We are so rich. We had 500 or so items listed. Let me go to my notes. In 1977, we had 209 items listed in 1977. They were listed by the State Government through some early studies. And today we've only got 526. We've got hundreds more. And I think this has been a learning experience for Council, how expensive it is when you've got someone who buys a property with a lot of goodwill based on advice which is correct. You know, it's zoned for development, but the community says no, there's more to that site. And it's lucky in this case that the person who purchased that is supportive of it, because otherwise it could have been a lot. More . Money would need to have been spent a lot more time.

So I urge all of you, and thank you, Mr Mayor, for your letter of support. But it is really crucial. This is—we haven't had the development pressures. Our floods and our bushfires, unfortunately, help us in some ways like that. But we just need to recognise, to give the development industry—and I'm part of that. I've taught builders, I've taught real estate agents, I've taught building surveyors in my academic career. They need certainty. And until a city-wide heritage study is done, they just don't know what the community is going to respond. The community is going to fight for its heritage, and they are. And I'm proud to be part of it. Thank you. Thank you.

Councillor Dogramaci? Yes,

Thank you, Madam. I had the pleasure of meeting you about a week ago, and I understand, again, the window that I'm looking is different than many other councillors. I look at it from a different perspective. Everything you do is great, and one doesn't have to be a genius to ascertain what kind of a person you are and what you want to do. Anyone, anyone who does not agree with you is a traitor in my book. In my book. When a question asked how much money you would be needing, you did not give us a figure. Now, what I suggest, I mean, I'm a councillor, but most of the time I have problem of putting two words together to move a motion or whatever. So if any one of the councillors.. . Respective councillors, put some kind of a motion to give you whatever the amount of the money that you want.

I will support 100%, and you can approach me directly outside, and I will support you as much as I could within my powers.

Thank you, Councillor. That's fine to do another time, but for now we're going to focus

Well, like I said, because of my inexperience, that, you know, I don't know how to approach these things, so— No , I'd rather we

Just focus on— I'm for you 100%.

The interim

Heritage order and whether or not we should continue that.

Council has funded

A study, and the

Okay, sorry. Council is already funding a study. Well, we have to give you more. Now, the National Trust won't be doing the study. We will just be contributing through our membership and through all of those interested in the heritage area, but we don't need money. We don't need money. Sorry, I shouldn't— Well, let us give you support then.

Thank you. Whatever you want. Thank you. Thank you. We'll wrap it up there. Councillor Wheeler. I'll move the motion. Okay, thank you. Thank

You. Thank you very much. Second, Mr Mayor. Sorry, the motion in the business paper, with an additional point three, which is that a progress report and timeline for the community heritage study be brought to the first meeting of the Heritage Committee, which I think is slated for the end of July.

Second, Councillor Lyons-Buckett . Any discussion?

Yes, please, Mr Mayor.

Yes.

So firstly, I want to thank Mrs. Z for outlining really what— What is quite clear is the implication of not getting our heritage listings sorted. Now, this item was part of a suite of listings, more than 400 listings that came to Council at least 15 years ago, I think, when I was a member of the Heritage Advisory Committee, and Council refused, holus-bolus, the whole lot chucked out, no way. Since then, many of those items no longer exist, and that's one outcome of not listing these items. The other outcome is that when the community is up in arms because they get wind that something is likely to be demolished, and it's usually when it changes hands, that for sale sign out the front is a big red flag to watchful community members that something is about to happen.

There's the possibility of an interim order, and you can see the process that ensues. It's very expensive, and it takes a slab out of the budget that could have been used to list multiple items, and in this instance has been used to list one. It's while we've saved this one, we've wasted money and time that could have been spent listing a number of equally vulnerable properties. And it's these properties, these post-war properties, the California bungalows, and this one is a particularly good example of its type and rare for the Hawkesbury, common in some other areas, and now really under threat. They're rapidly being demolished across the Sydney Basin to make way for higher density living.

If we don't save these particularly good examples, they'll be gone, and you can't get them back.

The thematic history, I think, was one of the first acts of the last council to finally get that out and published. And people were really excited to see it. I'm very keen to see the community heritage study. A lot of work has gone into it. There's been a lot of input from community organisations, and that's the point of a community heritage study, that community organisations are able to flag properties that are important to them that may be overlooked or that people just aren't aware of. And we've had really good input through the Heritage Advisory Committee on a number of items across the LGA. It will be a very large number of potential listings when it comes to Council, and I urge you to support it when it does, because it saves us doing things like this.

But what it also saves is that sick feeling when you drive down the road, like Wilberforce Road, just near the old bridge, and you realise that the absolutely magnificent slab barn that you drove past every day for years, substantial timber vernacular building, incredibly important and increasingly rare, has been chipped and is lying in a pile of pulp because we didn't have any protection on it at all. And that's on us. This is our responsibility. We are giving lip service to heritage on this Council at the moment, and we need to change it, and we do it by listing. So when that comes to us, and I hope it comes to us in the next six months because it has taken a while, we need to embrace those listings, or another Council will be back in this spot again, wasting public money trying to save a building, holding up an owner who bought something in good faith because we didn't get our act together when we were supposed to.

Thanks.

Thank you. Any further discussion? Councillor McMahon.

Thank you, Mr Mayor. Absolutely supporting the recommendation tonight. It would be foolish not to, but— The one thing that Mrs. Eds touched on in something she spoke about, and these were the words that encompass this whole sorry saga, is that the current owner, we were lucky in this case he agreed to keep the building. Had that owner not agreed to keep the building, I would be significantly concerned about the predicament that we would be in now. Because, as Councillor Willer touched on, the owner of that building bought that land in good faith of what his solicitor, his conveyancer, everybody said was permissible to be done on that site. Now, I don't know this owner from a bar of soap, but had this owner invested all of his financial eggs into that basket, into buying that block of land, at a time where all of the investigations done on that land about permissibility, and then this occurred, and he did not know it, and had that been his family's financial future, we would really be in a terrible situation right now through no one's fault, particularly.

And yes, as I said, we are sitting here able to pass this recommendation tonight, not sweating over the fact that the owner of that property doesn't want to fight us on that issue. We are significantly fortunate that that is the case. A few other things have concerned me with this one in particular, and that is the fact that we have this list of over, what I've heard tonight, 400 properties that need to be listed as heritage. Now, as someone who obviously has been watching and involved in the restoration of a heritage building, it's a fascinating process, but it's not cheap. I don't know. What process, and I think we will have to have briefings on this, happens to those over 400 property owners in the Hawkesbury if they don't want to comply with that?

You know what I mean, if they've invested all their financial eggs in that basket, in that house that they've just purchased. It's a really perplexing situation. I think we all need to be briefed across this community heritage study, not just the heritage committee. I think that we all need to be aware of what these properties are. And I was just as alarmed to hear Mr Zed's mention that there were a list of properties—I think they're the same properties, I'm happy for staff to confirm—that didn't make it into the new LEP review. Now, that LEP review process, we get one shot at, you know, every couple of decades. It's really, really important. I'm glad we haven't adopted it yet because there are so many significant problems with it, and I don't want to be party to a document that is so fundamentally flawed.

If this is something that needs to be inserted into that, and again, someone piece it together for me, then I think we need to have a look at making sure it's part of it when we get our one shot at passing that document. What this has highlighted here is the fact that this is exceptionally piecemeal, a significant amount of money on one property.

And the other thing, I guess, is if we're moving towards this direction and we have a council consensus on this, we also have to address the elephant in the room, and that is the fact that we have owners of significant heritage properties in the Hawkesbury who jump on the saving heritage bandwagon but have their own heritage property falling into a complete state of disrepair. And when they're talking about they want to save heritage, but their own heritage property is falling apart and flaking, and there's gaps in fences, and the bits are falling off roofs, and there's bushes growing out of the gutters. We have to have a look at saying to people who also own those properties, it's a huge responsibility to have one of those properties.

Don't just scream murder about other people putting orders on other people's properties. If your own property is a complete mess. So there's a whole range of issues there, in a nutshell supporting the recommendation, but thank your lucky stars the owner was happy to go along with this because if he wasn't, we'd been a whole big mess. Thank you. Thanks.

Your right of reply, Councillor Wheeler.

Thanks, Mr Mayor. Just a couple of items that might be able to shed light on. It is fortunate that we've got the owner's agreement. I think it's a real balancing act. You know, you hope that when an owner buys a heritage property that they have both the will and the resources to look after it. I own two heritage properties. They are not significantly more expensive to maintain than an ordinary property, and they certainly require specialist advice. They are not beyond the capability of a skilled handyman . What they require is good information about the materials and techniques that are involved in their care, and Council provides that to owners of heritage listed properties. Being listed isn't necessarily about outcome for the owner of the property.

For many, many owners, and this is something that Council has been at pains, and I think we've been very successful in the last six years at changing people's opinions of what having a heritage listed property means for them. So where people, and our own heritage advisor reports that where he would be walking up the street and people would go inside and draw the curtains because they didn't want him, so that they could pretend he wasn't home. They weren't home when he called. They're now coming out into the— they're actively asking for him to come and give them support and advice. In fact, he's booked in minute increments. His time is so valuable to the community. So listing can reduce your rates.

Because it means that you can't do anything else with the property effectively. So sometimes it does decrease your rates. It can increase the value of your property. It opens up funding opportunities, and it opens up council's free advice heritage advisory service, which is really valuable. And if you had to pay for it, it would be quite expensive.

And there is a community responsibility that comes, I think, with owning these assets. Listings can be added. We don't have to have these listings completely sorted before the LEP. The bulk of the rewrite of the LEP goes to the state government. We can add these, and if you look on our LEP, there's a whole lot of listings that are added at various points in time. And even when we do this raft of community listings, we probably won't get everything. And we shouldn't let the perfect get in the way of the good in the case of these listings either. We should take this large suite of listings and get this happening rather than stumble in the hope that we will eventually be perfect. We cannot force owners of heritage properties to look after them to our satisfaction.

The legislation for local listings isn't strong enough. The legislation for state listings isn't strong enough either. And people, in my view, are permitted to do things to state-listed properties that don't fit, I think, with some of the principles of heritage conservation. And we've seen locally, we've seen heritage protections completely turned off for Windsor Bridge and Thompson Square. So we have to be, I think, cognisant of the capacity of listings to protect. And to provide any sort of stick for heritage owners, we work under a carrot and stick approach, and that carrot is the Heritage Advisor additional advice and also the Heritage Assistance Fund, which will now be open for this owner.

This isn't stopping him developing his property, but it does change the way he is able to develop this property. It's not as good an outcome as a suite of listings, but it's better than this property being demolished, and I think that's something that we should celebrate.

Thank you. Put the motion. All those in favour, please raise your hand. Favour are Councillor Conolly, Councillor Reardon, Councillor McMahon, Councillor Vial, Councillor Sheather, Councillor Kotlash, Councillor Carver, Councillor Dragojevic, Councillor Marchi, Councillor Durant, Councillor Buckett, Councillor Wheeler, Councillor Zemprogno. Next item.

Item is item 109. We have one speaker, Joel Westlake.

Nope, Mr Westlake's not here. Move ahead then with item 109. Move something . Move the recommendation. Councillor Kotlash, seconder for that. Seconded, Councillor Vigal. Any discussion?

No. We'll put the motion then. All those in favour of the motion, please raise your hand. Favour, Councillor Conolly, Councillor Reardon, Councillor McMahon, Councillor Vigal, Councillor Sheather, Councillor Kotlash, Councillor Calvert, Councillor Dogramaci, Councillor Durick, Councillor Lyons-Buckett, Councillor Wheeler, Councillor Zamprogno. Declare it carried.

We go back then to items on block. We have a few items on block. Moved, Councillor Lyons-Buckett, seconded Councillor Zamprogno. All those in favour? Declare that carried.

Then we go to item 104, draft Hawkesbury City Council Destination Management Plan.

Councillor McMahon.

Sorry, Mr. Mayor, I was just ticking off the items we had just done on block. Thank you. I would like to move an amendment, a different motion, please, and that has been sent to staff.

Find where I wrote it.

Is that coming up?

Yeah, I just wait for that to be brought up on the screen. So points one and two per the business paper

As per the business paper, and point three, which I'll just read out. The council receive a report detailing the process and feasibility of seeking expressions of interest for an operator to

Develop a

Holiday park at Macquarie Park, Windsor. The report should be built on the river precinct concept as detailed in the Hawkesbury Horizons Proposed Future Actions Report. Now, the reason I want to bring this up— oh, sorry, I need a seconder. Seconded. Councillor Veigel. Yes. Sorry, Councillor Veigel. Okay, thank you.

Thank you. Just a few brief words. I think people know how much tourism obviously means to me in terms of what it does for an area, obviously with, of course, back to Bilpin, something I'm exceptionally proud of and what that did for Bilpin, but— I'm going to be pretty blunt. And obviously, sitting on the state government-funded Hawkesbury, the Rivers Just the Beginning tourism campaign that, during the last term of council, very happy to be council's rep on that board. And, you know, it's positive and negatives to come out of that. But at the end of the day, when have we had three million dollars delivered to the Hawkesbury to concentrate on tourism? And it came up with a concept. We had a bit of a logo.

All the local businesses were brought on board to sort of buy into that. And look, it was something different to what we've ever experienced before. The Hawkesbury was showcased throughout Sydney through train stations on billboards, on motorways. It was, to me, some level of a success. And we then had the back of house put into place where we could measure the clicks on the Destination New South Wales websites and things like that in terms of visitor engagement. So I think that that was quite successful. Having this destination management plan come up today is a good thing. How to flick through it. It says all the right things that we need to say, and happy to support it. However, I think in this term of council, it's a shorter term, and we need to start being visionary is my word for the next couple of years.

We need to start putting together, to the community, projects that are going to encourage more visitors to come, experiences for people to do. And of course, you know, Tree Tops was a great example of that. It gave people something to do in our local area. We are significantly lacking that in the Hawkesbury. We are significantly lacking decent and proper hotel accommodation. We're just lacking numbers of rooms available for people to come and stay across all range of budgets. We need, therefore, to be encouraging private investment. We don't, as a council, have the capacity to do that, and nor should we. It's not part of our roles or responsibilities. So. We need to be putting forward visionary ideas.

As part of Council's Tourism Committee in the last term of Council, this very idea in point three was raised by the former General Manager with the support of those on the Tourism Committee. It was kind of shelved with everything else that was going on at the time. Now, something that the Hawkesbury just does not have is, and I'm not talking a caravan park where you take your caravans and people live there, absolutely zero permanent residency. But I'm talking a Big4 or an NRMA, a visitor experience, mobile only obviously due to the location, basically concrete it all so it can be washed down again in a flood and you can move everything out and move everything back. But we do not have an experience for grey nomads, if you want to call them, or for holidaying families in caravans to come and stay in the Hawkesbury.

We don't have one. And for me, with a swag of kids in my household, we look at holiday parks. We look where those holiday parks are across New South Wales, across Queensland. They're a cheaper form of accommodation and they provide great fun for kids with swimming pools, water features, games rooms, and predominantly those places are built on water, whether it's a river, whether it's an ocean, anything like that. That's where those holiday parks are. And the fact that there was a somewhat mediocre consensus amongst the Tourism Committee in Council's last term was something that I was quite inspired by because I thought, well, the people on that committee were a range of different positions on the political spectrum, but were kind of okay with that.

Back to my word visionary, I really hope that in the next two years everybody on this Council, not just for tourism but for anything, we start getting big projects into the Hawkesbury. There's no more room for housing. We all know and acknowledge that. No one wants extra housing. We want things to do. I want my kids to have employment opportunities in the Hawkesbury. in the Hawkesbury. We need to be encouraging that private investment. So people say, you know what, I want to build X, Y, Z here. So people go, I want to visit X, Y, Z in the Hawkesbury. I want to take my family there for the weekend, and while I'm there, I'm buying fish and chips from that business, and afterwards an ice cream from that business, and the whole Hawkesbury benefits.

So that's why I'm adding point three to this one tonight. Thank you for the work done on the DMP. It's a good document. Let's start expanding on it and start building the Hawkesbury and attracting visitors. Thank you.

Thanks, Councillor McMahon. I'm very supportive of this motion before us tonight. I think that the draft Destination Management Plan is one of a number of strategies that Council has done, looking at what we can do in the medium and long term to promote our area. We've been, in my time on Council since 2012, many iterations of branding the Hawkesbury, of product development in the Hawkesbury, of playing a facilitator role in tourism in the Hawkesbury, and I think all of, you know, to varying degrees of success, if we're being honest. All of those things are important. Having this Destination Management Plan is important, but I agree with Councillor McMahon, I want this term of Council to be one where we can actually look back and say, no, we actually did something tangible.

Yes, we looked at the future, we looked at the strategies, but we also, rather than, you know, this came from the Hawkesbury Horizons strategy that we did back in 2015-16, rather than just let that be, we actually say, no, we're actually going to implement something. I think this is low-hanging fruit, as was identified in that proposed future actions report. This project was identified as the most feasible project of all those that had been progressed to that point. Because it doesn't require significant capital investment from Council, it just requires Council to be supportive of the idea and to facilitate a private operator to make that investment. And because, as Councillor McMahon said, it just makes sense.

You know, it's the exact kind of location that these holiday parks are generally located at. If you look around the state, that's where they are. This just makes perfect sense. It's a piece of land that isn't, you know, I'm sure all our open space is valued by the community, but McQuarie Park is not one of our premier regional park spaces. It's land that I think would get most community value by doing something like this. So tonight we're just calling for a report to come back to us on what we need to do next, and I'm very supportive of that. Councillor Lyons-Buckett.

Thank you, Mr Mayor, and of course I'm very supportive of it too, having worked on it in Hawkesbury Horizons back in the beginning. And actually, I don't know what happened to a lot of the information, but I did actually forward on information back in that council term, the one before the last, around various information that I gathered when at local government conferences around some of these very easily movable structures and so on, particularly solar operated ones. So I'll try and find a record of that. I think that also it's in our foreshore management plan as well, and I think that there's some potential to do something there. In fact, it was one of the things that I had hoped maybe would be in the liveability plan, but it was not included in that.

The draft Destination Management Plan, I'm really keen to hear what comes back from when it goes out on exhibition, and I really hope that we can, and I know you will have a strategy of some sort, but we really need to get it to the people that we really want to hear their feedback. So I'm not sure what the strategy around that is, but it's a shame when we hear that somebody hasn't heard about it and they've missed their opportunity, and we see that come up from time to time. So I guess just really targeting the specific and relevant people that really need to be giving an opinion on it would be really good. So it's good to see a framework. I think it'll be interesting to see what ideas and so on comes back about that.

We need much more than just quick short-term activities to enable us to build a brand, and people will identify and ultimately return because of the experience that they have. So there really is a lot that can be done in that sector . I think that a little bit, the comparison to Bendigo I thought was just a little bit problematic, just in that they have the very good cycleways and connectivity, but of course they're a town, and we just don't have the luxury at the moment of having that level of connectivity. But hopefully the push to get more cycleways and to connect people will be a part of all these strategies going forward. It's well overdue that we have this, and we know that there was a section of council some years back that basically ditched tourism and didn't do anything with it, which was unfortunate.

There was somebody did raise with me around the lack of including the Pioneer Village as a museum in, you know, various attractions for people to come to, because it is, of course, a replica of early days and a good place for people to go. And I think that including, when we're talking about heritage and history, that that could be included as another facility. I mean, we have so many things and they're quite varied . It is a balance around when we're talking about things around accommodation. So, of course, we know how problematic this can be in that we do need more, particularly we need more affordable accommodation for visitors, particularly that would drive our sports tourism sector, which is a really big opportunity for us.

But then again, we have these issues where we have the current issue in Kurrajong Heights, where someone has proposed accommodation and there's a huge backlash against it. So it's a really fine balancing act about where it's suitable to put additional accommodation, what sort of accommodation it is, and I imagine that's probably a whole separate conversation aside from this actual destination management plan. The other thing that I would like to see go hand in hand with this is that we need to look at the associated public infrastructure that goes around these drawcards to getting people in. So we saw previously with the influxes of people to Bilpin, there was not adequate public amenities.

So we need to be mindful that as a council, we're deciding where we will upgrade parts of public space and things to be ready. for when we have these drawcards and we bring people here. So at some point we need a corresponding plan of how we would deal with that. And I know that we have our capital works and we have all those things done, but sometimes something emerges that we really need to address because we've got an unexpected or a new phenomenon that's going on. So I think that it will be really interesting to see the feedback that comes from people operating that space, as well as people who are, of course, the people who do the visiting or going out on the weekends. So I'll look forward to that and hopefully it gets well advertised to the people who we want to give us their feedback.

Thank you.

Thank you. Anyone wish to speak against? Councillor Reardon

Yes, I'd like to say that I'm very supportive of this project. As a former travel consultant, and I was very inspired when we were doing the Hawkesbury Horizons here. I hope that something more would come of that. So it'd be lovely to see these tourism things. Great

A few speakers in favour. Does anyone want to speak against? Councillor Zamprogno. Not

So much speaking, well, a note of caution, put it this way. A weekend recently spent up at Piccolben in the Hunter simply reinforced for me the potential of having a destination management strategy. My goodness, they're really going well up there with all of the wineries and function venues and so forth. So no objection to that. With regards to Council and McMahon's additional point three, I suppose I want to be guided by how council staff are going to pass that request, because a report detailing the process and feasibility ranges from something belted out on the back of a napkin on a long lunch all the way through to very elaborate— Feasibility and business plan that can cost thousands of dollars, and I presume the point of this exercise is to find something that moves us forward. But somewhere in between those two points

I imagine

Yeah, well, I'm cautious about endorsing this without hearing from council staff as to how elaborate and costly that report could be. Could I get it? Okay, refer this to the

General manager

Through you, Mr. Mayor. Thank you, Councillor. I would envisage that we would bring a report back, really outlining process initially, any initial hurdles, impediments that we would see to the proposal, really a report around process as much as anything else, and that we would be able to do that within existing resources.

All right then, I just wanted to hear that. Thank you. Thank you. Councillor

Wheeler

Thanks, Mr. Mayor. I guess I've got a couple of cautions as well. I think certainly acknowledge that that lack of accommodation is a big issue for us, and it does stymie some of the activity that we see here. I heard it time and time again on the gate at the Pioneer Village, and I think it affects the mix of tourists that we have come out to the LGA. We tend to get day trippers rather than overnight stayers because while there's some boutique accommodation, families who come particularly with children don't want to cough up a lot of money to stay in a place that's this close to Sydney. But they might stay in a caravan park or somewhere with cabins, which would be cheaper. I guess my cautions around this is that it's very specific as to the site, and I know that there was a lot of work done on that site with Hawkesbury Horizons, but it is a problematic site, and I'm hoping that any report that comes to us can deal with that.

So firstly, flooding, obviously, and the impact of flooding on the feasibility of that site. There'll be safety issues, of course. We have enough warning that we can get people out of that area, and so I'm not talking about that, but we've seen the destruction of other caravan parks along the river in the LGA, and two years in a row now, those impacts are really substantial financial costs and substantial waste burdens as well that have to be borne by someone, and that needs to be accounted for in any feasibility study. I'm also really concerned about the risk of additional use, particularly swimming and particularly families, in that stretch of the river, which we know is a dangerous stretch, and where we have had drownings .

With a really unfortunate frequency, you know, it's rare to find a year where someone hasn't drowned in that river at Windsor Beach, and I think we have to be cognisant of that. If we're flagging that site as a place where people might come and increasingly use that river for recreation and cooling off, frankly, that terrifies me. So I think if you're going to put an accommodation facility there with the idea that people would be using that beach for recreational activities, it's going to have to be a patrolled beach, and that's expensive . And I would also need to take into consideration the impact on the sightlines from Windsor, which is one of our key Macquarie towns. And so this isn't a simple process, I don't think.

In terms of the rest of the Destination Management Plan, I think it's long overdue, and I'm really pleased to see it. And in fact, I think it's really fitting that it comes to us tonight. Paul Rasmussen was a really big supporter of tourism in council and worked really hard in this space for years . I think the Bounce Back Mentoring Program has been an excellent and really timely initiative, and I don't think when it was instituted we could have foreseen just how difficult these last few years would be for local businesses. So I'm glad that we've been able to provide them with some support. Could we, in the acknowledgement, remove the word owners? I think it has traditional owners and custodians.

Owners is not consistent with First Nations' view of land tenure in this country. So if we could just stick with traditional custodians, that would be more appropriate. I do like the idea that's talked about of a hub and spoke model, and I think we need to make note of the feedback about a lack of clarity around who drives tourism in the LGA. I don't propose that council be the driver. I think that would be a lost— that's a real loss. I think the far more organic process is good, but I think that an opening, that a, I guess, a more open and coordinated dialogue is probably what we're hoping for. I'm glad Councillor Lyons-Buckett has mentioned the Australiana Pioneer Village, still currently attracting around 25,000 visitors a year.

That's through COVID and floods, so really an extraordinary— and it's a council-owned site. You know, I notice in the CSP we've got that we own one museum. We don't. We own two. We just don't— we just only manage one. We've got to stop undervaluing this resource. It's extraordinary, and people flock here. And that 25,000, that doesn't include school groups and other booked groups. There are thousands of people going through that site, and they come back over and over and over again, and it's a cheap, fun family day out. They're the sort of people who would stay, actually, for the weekend in cheap accommodation and then use it as a jumping-off point. So that's the market we should be looking at.

Thanks.

Thank you. Right of reply, Councillor McMahon.

Just briefly to say thank you for the constructive feedback on that idea. I think that those points should certainly be taken into consideration. But it's good to see that we're moving towards a mentality of, yes, there's challenges, but yes, we need to start doing things and change our landscape a little bit to attract people and help our local small businesses and keep our people employed in local jobs because those businesses are thriving. So great feedback, and thank you.

Thank you. We'll put the motion. All those in favour of the motion, please raise your hand. In favour are Councillor Conolly, Councillor Reardon, Councillor McMahon, Councillor Vaigel, Councillor Sheather, Councillor Kotlash, Councillor Calvert, Councillor Dogramaci, Councillor Djuric, Councillor Lyons-Buckett, Councillor Wheeler, Councillor Zempfrogno. Declare it carried.

Given that we've been going just over a couple of hours and we've still got quite a lot left, I'm just going to suggest now a short 10 minute adjournment, and we'll come back here at 8:55. Thanks.

Okay, so next item is item 105, costings for local contractors.

I'll move that, Mr Mayor.

Moved recommendation, Councillor Lyons-Buckett, seconded Councillor Kotlash. Any discussion?

Yes, please, Mr Mayor. Just briefly, just to thank Director of Infrastructure for moving on this and for discussing it with various people in the community. As we've seen, it's been working quite well in the McDonald Valley, and I think it goes beyond just what the tangible benefits of the physical repairs are. It gives that community a lot more of a feeling of certainty and confidence that they've been listened to and that they've been involved and that they have some, not so much control, but they have some input into being able to restore their access in emergencies, as well as also being involved in the ongoing maintenance of their road network down there, which we know is quite vulnerable, particularly at the moment. So thank you for doing that. I shall not really want you to say a time frame, but I'm going to ask that.

I had asked that question earlier, Councillor Lyons-Buckett, and been told that we will have this in place by the end of the calendar year.

By the end of the calendar year. Thank you. That would be really wonderful, and I've had good feedback from some of the people at Upper Colo who had spoken about this before, and they are very grateful that this is being progressed forward. So thank you.

Thanks. Okay, we'll put the motion. All those in favour, please raise your hand. Favour, Councillor Conolly, Councillor Reardon, Councillor McMahon Councillor Veigel, Councillor Sheather, Councillor Kotlash, Councillor Calvert, Councillor Dogramaci, Councillor Djuric, Councillor Lyons-Buckett, Councillor Wheeler, Councillor Zamprogno. Declare it carried.

Next item is 106.

Move the recommendation, Councillor Sheather. Seconder for that? Seconded, Councillor Veigel. Any discussion?

Councillor Wheeler.

Thanks, Mr Mayor. Look, the cost of this is just extraordinary for families. You know, $5,000 a year to have your sewage collected and your wastewater is really extraordinary. This is unsustainable. It's a big lesson, I think, for Council that we cannot continue to approve development that doesn't come with its own sewer. We can't approve anything that requires sewage collection. It's ridiculous. Unfortunately, one of the faults of the three town sewer system, and there are many, is that it's upped the cost of pump-out for everybody else. Pump-out was not a great system in those towns, but there was some economies of scale.

As I said earlier in the meeting, I would really like to see us uncouple this charge from the rates notice. It means that any discussion that we have around rates in the communities that pay the sewage fee is muddied by the sewage cost. It also means then that when we talk to residents about their sewage costs, they're coupling it with rates, and so none of the discussions are clean and necessarily to the point. We try to talk about sewage and people are talking about roads and parks. We try to talk about roads and parks and people are talking about sewage. It's a shambles. There has to be a long-term solution to this. It's going to have to be a community-based solution, and I think somebody is going to have to provide the bank in order for these residents to put in— Sustainable

On-site systems that treat this waste. Now, whether that's council under some arrangement that we make with the state government, or it's the state government that provides the tank, something needs to be done. You can convert a tank, and all of these people have a tank because that's what their sullage is collected in, you can convert a tank to an on-site system for between $10,000 and $15,000. That's three years of pump-out costs for many of these families. So this is not unachievable. They're finding the money already. But the trouble is they've got to find the money year after year after year. One of the other things that really concerns me is that we're pretty much down to one operator.

You know, we may get a couple tender this time, but last time we had one. And that's really concerning, I think, because if we can't find an operator to do this, we have a public health disaster on our hands, and council would have to upskill very quickly in order to do something about this, because the environmental and health impacts of us failing on this are dire. I see that we've tried to put up a whole lot of different options for alternatives, for less pump-out, for council taking on the job. Council isn't equipped to take on this service, I don't think. Ceasing the service and just letting the market decide is likely to lead to really ad hoc collection timings, and that's particularly problematic in times of fire and flood.

You know, we had big problems in 2019, 2020, when the sullage trucks were blocking access for fire trucks, and fire trucks were blocking access for sullage trucks. That's not workable. And there are real environmental and health risks from spills from unlawful use as well. And we know that if we cut back so that people only collected once a month, for example, then unfortunately we know some people don't always do the right thing. So this, frankly, is a dog's breakfast, and it's something that we're stuck with and we're managing as best we can. But we can't look at this as any sort of long-term solution for the people who live in these communities. We have to make a change.

Thank you. Is there anything further, Councillor Lainsbury?

Thank you, Mr Mayor. I agree with all that Councillor Wheeler's just said. This has been an ongoing issue, in fact for decades, and there have been various initiatives made to try and address what we're going to do with it into the future. As we know from this report in the business paper, because of the contract being up now, we have to make a decision around this. But what I would like to see, and I would ask if the mover would perhaps add that, I think we've dropped off on the advocacy around drawing this attention to the State Government around the burdens that some of our ratepayers have in this regard. Of course, it's a legacy issue from very poor planning over the years that we have inherited this, and that we have such an archaic system, you know, blocking our roads all around the place, and the big cost, of course, to people in areas, particularly in the areas of Bowen Mountain where— You know, it's that you've got trucks going up that very dangerous one road up, one road down, and Kurrajong Heights as well.

I think that there are solutions, and I think that it's inevitable that we will have to work towards those solutions. But, of course, we have to pass something here now to move forward for the coming year, the coming couple of years. Could we add a point? I just think there has to be a way we can draw attention to this. We have got to get some help, either with some capital costs to do some retrofitting or to introduce some other systems. We really are going to have to address it, as Councillor Wheelers says. So could we, and I'm not even sure what form of advocacy this could take, but I think we have to make it clear to the state government that we have an issue. We know that when the numbers diminished in the Blue Mountains area that Sydney Water provided a subsidy.

We have asked and asked for that a number of times, and that has not been forthcoming. But I don't see why some sort of assistance shouldn't be forthcoming when other people have received that. And as Councillor Wheelers says, if we could get some form of capital outlay to assist with people doing conversions, that would have the difficulty, of course, that if we had an even more diminishing group of people still on pump-out, that's going to get even more expensive for them. So we would need a really concerted effort around this, and we need to be educating our people about the possible changes and how they would address any form of transition to another system or another type of thing around the sullage.

But could we add that point around advocacy that, Councillor Sheather, that we engage in some strong advocacy to our local member, state election coming up. Coming up, there might be some chance of getting some attention around it and drawing attention to the burdens that some of our ratepayers have again. Now that we have the confirmation from Sydney Water that they're not intending to expand their network into any existing residential areas, I think that it's time for us to have another stab at what we can do.

Do you mind if I provide some comment, Councillor Sheather, on that? Just to provide my insight, Council has previously resolved, only a couple of years ago I believe, to advocate again for that subsidy. The answer is effectively no, we're not getting that subsidy. That's my take on it, just being frank from the discussions I've had. So I agree that we need help on this, but my word of caution would be I think we need to know what we're asking for. I don't think it's fruitful to go in there and say, you know, we want money for a subsidy for something, or we want capital to bankroll the conversion to something. We need to know, I think, exactly what we need, what we're asking for, and make it something that a state government could actually fund.

All right. I was meaning any help. We'll take anything. It doesn't have to be the subsidy, anything. All right then, well I'll change that to sending it to a committee in the hope that the committee will set up a working group that we can further look at this sort of thing. So I guess the Environment or the Innovation and Partnerships Committee, so that we can set up a group to specifically come up with the things that then would form this advocacy down the track.

Councillor Sheather.

Mr Mayor, what I was going to suggest, that it's not something we need to resolve tonight, that we could get advice from the General Manager that we could be briefed on, as soon as practical, on how we may pursue support for the comments that have been made by the councillors.

You could move that, or we could refer it to a committee and get that advice in the committee and move it forward there, but it's up to you, Councillor Sheather.

I just felt it would be all right to come to a briefing first, at least. Okay, so

You want to add that or

You want to leave the motion as is? No, I'd add the— Okay, do a councillor briefing session? The staff offer some advice in a briefing to how we might advance support from the state government to pursue the issues that have been discussed.

Okay, the seconder was Councillor Vargo. Are you happy with that change, Councillor Vargo? Okay. Did you— Councillor Mines Buckett, were you finished then, or—

Yeah, that'll do

Okay. Councillor Dogramaci?

Yes , please correct me if I'm wrong. On page 46 it says that to adequately service the current customer base, which I think is about 800, the capital outlay would be $2,342,000, which is just above $500,000 per tanker. I don't know where did this figure come up. No tanker would cost that much. I don't know who put that one down, that even one of the largest ones, 20,000, 30,000 litre ones, is not going to cost $500,000. That's number one.

Okay, I have a feeling these might be complex, so let's go and get an answer to number one and then come back to you, if that's all right. Will? Director of Infrastructure Services?

Through you, Mr Mayor, thank you, Councillor. That was for four tankers plus auxiliary equipment such as flow meters and the like.

That's okay. Four tankers is $2,342,000. And the running cost or whatever it is, the overhead is $1,259,000. And if we, correct me if I'm wrong, if my figures confirm that we have 789 customers and about $2,600 per, well, fortnightly, it does not balance. Please correct me. I mean, we're not going to lose, if we do the job ourselves, we're not going to lose money.

Through you, Mr Mayor, it's on the basis of full cost recovery. So the operational costs include depreciation of the plant on a, I think it's a 15-year life of the plant. Staff, we would have to expand our financial accounts payable team to do the monthly invoicing, because presently it's done once a year. So these numbers are based on all those considerations and those factored into it, then spread across. And the number is not too far off what we're currently being charged. So as a sanity check, I think it's reasonably close.

No, I'm sorry, but I do not accept that someone has made a mistake in here. Figures just don't add up. I'll be more than happy, you know, to discuss it further. $500,000, no tanker company is going to charge that one. The maximum is about $270,000, and I can confirm that one, and the brand new truck and the tanker. So four of them is not going to cost that much money. So somebody made a mistake. If I made a mistake, if I'm making a mistake, I do apologise, but the figures are wrong. I'll be more than happy to discuss. Thank you. Thanks

Councillor Kotlash.

Thank you, Mr Mayor. First up, I just really want to thank the staff for this report because this is, as everybody said, this is a tricky issue. And this is, whilst it's not really given us the answers I think we want to hear, it's a good report. And I think that it's fairly accurate about how much this would all cost us if we wanted to get into this market. So I'm pretty comfortable with that. It doesn't move us forward, though, and I agree with Councillor Wheeler that we really have to start to look at how we're going to look at this problem in the long term. And before I go on, I just wanted to ask a question about if we have new houses being built, and I know we're not going to have that many new houses, but if we do have houses, new houses being built, for instance in Bowen Mountain

Do we give people the option of having a pump-out or is that dictated to them about the size of their land?

Further that to Director City Planning.

Thank you through you, Mr Mayor. The type of system is dictated by the land or the size of the land, but ultimately because they don't have access to, you know, Sydney Water systems, then they have to provide a system within their own property. But yes, the type and scale is dependent on what they can afford and also the land that they're on.

Thank you. Forgive me, I didn't have time to look this up, but in the new DCP , have we expanded that so people can... Now have access to more on-site systems and more treatment systems than we did before.

Thank you, through you. That's more not necessarily through the DCP. We are looking to provide educational material to the community about their options around systems. But through the discussions that the staff have with people, it comes down to cost. They understand that an aerated system, for instance, might be better, but it is far more expensive for them to install than, you know, some of the other systems. And that's a financial decision for each family.

Thank you, because I've heard there's been questions in the community about how, you know, we shouldn't allow any more pump-outs. But it seems to me that there needs to be a discussion about whether it's advantageous to have a choice, whether it's better in the long term for us to have pump-outs instead of on-site systems that eventually go into the ground and possibly into the groundwater. So there's, you know, there's a lot of things that I think we have to consider. And I'd like to see us try to send this to a committee and try to figure out how we move forward with this. And it's interesting when Councillor Lyons-Buckett said the Environment Committee or the Innovations and Partnerships Committee, because I think probably it's more relevant to the Innovations and Partnerships Committee, which is probably not the first thing people think of.

So , I'm disappointed we haven't—we aren't able to give these people that pay this extraordinary amount any more options. But I'm glad we've done these sums. I'm glad we've got a clearer position on where we stand at least, and I think it's obvious that Council can't afford to be in this business. But let's not stop talking about our way forward. And I'm sorry, I just don't have any idea about how that will work, but let's have an attempt at it. Thank you.

Thank you, Deputy Mayor. Thank you, Mr Mayor. When Councillor Wheeler was speaking, she mentioned or suggested that the invoice for the sullage services should be kept separate from the rates notice. Through you, Mr Mayor, can I get a response from the staff about whether that is possible, how much it would cost, and if it is feasible, would Councillor Sheather consider adding it to his motion?

So, just before I refer your question, Deputy Mayor, I have asked that question myself over the last few days since we had discussed it at a briefing, and the answer was quite complex. And my feeling would be best discussed in this briefing session because it's possible, but there are advantages and disadvantages of that, and I think we need to be fully across that before making the decision. So, happy to pass that question on if you'd like, but my preference would be we do it in the briefing.

Well, is it implied that that'll be included in point four at the briefing? Yes. Yep. Okay. I'm happy with it.

Can I just ask a question? I thought we had a point about sending this to a committee.

We didn't because Councillor Sheather didn't agree with that, and there was no amendment moved to that effect.

Oh, didn't you? Okay.

Go to briefing first.

Okay. Councillor,

Just a very quick question. Is this the time, and is this the matter that we are discussing apart from the other sewage problem? No. Okay. No, thank you. Councillor Feigl.

Yeah, thanks, Mr Mayor. Just a question on notice: why, if we took option three, Council providing the service, if we had to as a fallback position in the future, that there's a capital outlay for the trucks, why wouldn't we not lease it? But you don't have to answer that tonight. You can just answer it another day if you like. Thanks. Thanks. Take that on notice . Yeah, I'm happy for you to take it on notice. Just seems to me if you went for the lease option , you'd be in a better position. But that's me if, if in the future you...

I think the annual costings are including depreciation was the answer we got, so it doesn't make too much difference. Councillor Kotlash.

Sorry, Mr Mayor, I forgot to ask a question that was really I needed to ask.

If we had some problem with our contractor that we have the agreement with, the contract with now, you know, something happens , all the trucks blow up or something, who's responsible for collecting the sullage? Is it a state government responsibility or is it Council's? Because presumably it's not Council's responsibility to do this, so...

Refer that to Director Infrastructure Services.

Thank you. Through you, Mr Mayor. Look, putting aside any contractual issues that may arise out of that, my understanding is that it's each owner's responsibility to, in a responsible manner, dispose of their effluent or their sullage. So no one agency, I would think, would have responsibility for that task.

So if that goes pear-shaped and people can't.. . You know, I mean, we have a big city.

No,

I just wondered how we deal with that, whether we should... do we have any contingencies if that happens?

I'd prefer not to hypothesise on contract disputes.

Okay. Right of reply, Councillor Sheather.

Yeah, thanks, Mr Mayor.

With the discussions that are in here, I’ll give a little prediction that the contractors will get deer down the track, that there will be limited amount of opportunity, as Councillor Wheeler indicated, for to service individual houses for sure. And places like Bowen Mountain, you can’t do that anyway. Like, everybody — the only person that doesn’t complain is the top house. When you’ve got EnviroCycles, everybody underneath suffers. So that is okay in a 15-year drought. We’ve had a couple of weeks of rain and everything’s that wet, it’s a problem. And, you know, it’ll start growing green. Every night on the news you hear about mould and stuff. Well, places like Bowen Mountain and parts of Wollemi Forest and Kurrajong, they’ve got that problem.

And for us to — well, council won’t do it — to turn around and say to after the community that’s been served like this, Deal with it yourself, because we’ll need about another 20 inspectors to go out there just to serve notice on pumping into the street. Now, you know, and the reality of it is that when it rains, most of those tanks are below ground level. So guess what happens when it rains. They flush the toilets twice, the rest of it's two days of rain, it's full. And so even with fortnightly pump-outs, it's not enough. And you've only got to see the report here to order another one in. It's costly. So there's going to be issues down the track. And the only way that I can see out of it is the further we restrict pump-outs, the dearer it's going to be.

And in the long run, the council will buy trucks and service the surface it, because the community won't allow us to make a decision to say, deal with it yourself. We approved the darn things, or people before us did, and we've got some responsibility to clean it up. So, and that's why I asked about the briefing. We had a briefing the other night to give us some background and stuff to it. The staff heard the discussion, and anyway, that's what he does for a living apart from fixing potholes, that we've got a problem, and we need to look at how we might resolve it. Thank you.

I put the motion. All those in favour, please raise your hand. Favour: Councillor Conolly, Councillor Reardon, Councillor McMahon, Councillor Vial, Councillor Sheather, Councillor Kotlash, Councillor Carver, Councillor Dokramac, Councillor Durick, Councillor Lyons-Buckett, Councillor Wheeler, Councillor Zamprogno. Carried.

Next item is 111, the Community Services Committee minutes. Can we move those?

Moved, Councillor McMahon. Seconder for that? Seconded, Councillor Wheeler. Any discussion? Councillor Wheeler.

Just a couple of questions, if I might, Mr Mayor. There's reference in the Community Services meeting to the Social Infrastructure Strategy. I'm just wondering if we could have an idea of the timeline for that. And the other question is, could we bring the discussion of affordable housing either to the Community Services Committee or to a Councillor workshop, particularly if we're going to do some further work on the LEP before we submit it? It might be useful to have a look at how we could add more affordable housing provisions into the LEP.

For your first question, as the Director City Planning, in regards to the second question, you would need to move a motion that set out the question you're referring to the committee and the timeframe you need the committee to come back to Council on.

I'm

Happy to move that motion, Mr Mayor. Director City Planning. Okay

Through you. So we've just recently engaged a consultant for the Social Infrastructure Strategy, and at this point in time we will have an inception meeting to confirm the timeline. But the intent is to bring that draft strategy to Council within this calendar year, before the end of this calendar year.

Sorry, use your microphone, Councillor Wheeler

I think there's two points to that motion, Mr Mayor. Sorry, I'm just getting it up.

Three.

Three. So a fourth would be

That Council hold a workshop to discuss affordable housing provisions.

Are you happy with that, Councillor McMahon? And Councillor Wheeler was the seconder? Yep. Okay. No further discussion. No right of reply. The motion was in favour? In favour, Councillor Conolly, Councillor Reardon, Councillor McMahon, Councillor Veigel, Councillor Sheather, Councillor Kotlash, Councillor Calvert, Councillor Dogramaci, Councillor Djuric, Councillor Lyons-Buckett, Councillor Wheeler, Councillor Zamprogno. Declare it carried.

This item is item 112, Local Traffic Committee. Councillor Lyons-Buckett. I'll move that, Mr Mayor. Move the recommendation. Is there a seconder for that? Seconded, Councillor Kotlash. Discussion?

The reason I called this up was to draw attention to something, and I did, I was preparing an amendment, or I will now flag a notice of motion for the next meeting. What I wanted to stress, and perhaps the Director of Infrastructure will speak to this as well, is about the purpose of this committee. So it's called a Local Traffic Committee, but it's a technical review of various sort of aspects that occur. And I do get inundated from people who bring traffic issues, and there's not really the scope. There have been a couple of opportunities to speak particularly to the RMS representative about a couple of issues, and it's a very interesting committee in terms of what it is. But it's not really council making these decisions.

It's really a review of technical, traffic, very, very technical things that have occurred. So what I think is that we have quite a gap in both our committee system, but in our drawing of knowledge from the community around issues, particularly relating to not so much road repair, but to traffic-related issues. So I've had people approach about unsafe intersections, about various, well, of course, parking all the time, also around— I don't know, speed, wanting speed limits changed. And inevitably, if we make decisions around those things, they do come to this committee eventually. But this is not the committee where I can go and just raise all of these things. And so, and yet, I think if people were to read through the minutes, they would see various issues on a local sort of level.

So they might see a roundabout near Redbank or a cul-de-sac in Bowen Mountain Road, and they would believe that there was some sort of opportunity to be inputting into it. So what I'm flagging is a gap, and I was preparing a notice of an amendment and didn't have time for it today. But perhaps Mr Barton would like to elaborate on, just to confirm what I'm saying. And I'll bring the notice of motion to the next minute, to the next meeting, to try and address that.

I think the question for the director is, what is the purpose of the Local Traffic Committee?

Thank you, through you, Mr Mayor. So the Local Traffic Committee is a committee not of council, but council is a member. It's convened by us, but its membership draws from Transport for New South Wales, the police, and the local state member or their representative. Pardon me. It's a committee that's required for council to exercise its delegation under the relevant Act, which escapes my mind at the moment, in order for council to exercise its function or its delegation to install traffic regulating devices or facilities. Essentially, any sign which directs a motorist to do something or not to do something, or some facilities such as a median island or a pedestrian refuge, council, in the absence of a Local Traffic Committee, does not have the delegation and cannot exercise a function to install or make a decision on whether to put one of these traffic regulating devices or facilities in.

So it's set out, and the way that it operates is set out under the instrument of delegation from Transport for New South Wales, which is the point that Councillor Lyons-Buckett was alluding to, including the way that business is brought to that committee. In terms of the second part, with respect to the appropriate method, just as with any other service deficiency perceived or otherwise, and we deal with these quite often, we have staff who look at both requests from the community, but also in a proactive sense look at crash data and analyse that to identify black spots and investigate solutions to those things. So there is a method there for members of the community to raise concerns with things like intersections and speed limits and so forth, and we deal with them as we receive them.

Thank you. Any further discussion on the motion? Councillor Wheeler.

Thanks, Mr Mayor. A couple of things. So if we've got a traffic concern, for example, on an RMS road, should we just email it to the Director of Infrastructure Services? Goodo then. Just some questions around the Bowen Mountain cul-de-sac. So the Director of Infrastructure and I met there with a couple of residents from Bowen Mountain to discuss that intersection, and the problem basically is that bushwalkers— the problem has started largely during COVID with people coming up and using that as a stepping-off point into the national park. But lots of vehicles parked around it, and they're not just bushwalkers, but people parking items of heavy machinery, trucks and things. Means that the bus, and particularly, timely tonight, the sullage truck, can't turn around in that space.

How have— so I think those no standing signs have, no parking signs have gone up. Is that correct? And what is the community's feeling on that? And do we anticipate knock-on effects down that street, which isn't guttered and where things aren't laid out? You know, it's just a usual Bowen Mountain road. Do we anticipate problems with all of those people who were parking in the cul-de-sac now parking in the street and causing similar obstructions? Are these questions to the Director?

Through you, Mr Mayor, the—

Signs aren't up yet, so if it's adopted, this would give legal authority to construct those signs. Secondly, staff in parallel have also been looking at the options of formalising parking up there so as not to impede the turnaround of heavy vehicles. And we think that for a minimal expense, but we will have to consider the cost, we can achieve up to eight off-street car parks, possibly depending on the orientation, between five and eight. In terms of pushing the issue down the street, there is a risk that people, of course, will park as they're legally permitted to. There are rules in place to restrict dangerous parking. These can be raised with the police if people park and are in breach of these road rules.

Thanks. Have we spoken to residents about their views on it?

Through you, Mr Mayor, sorry, I forgot that part of the question. Yes, we consulted with the residents of the street, and it's in the report. I can't recall, but it was in favour. Okay,

Thank you.

Thanks. Any further discussion? Anyone against the recommendation?

Sorry, can I ask an additional question? Yep. A timeline for potential parking for those possibly eight cars?

Through you, Mr Mayor, depending on the cost would determine the timeline. So I've got staff looking at it at the moment, and they'll do a very minor design to develop quantities, and if there's an opportunity, we'll try and squeeze it into the capital works budget program at a future... QBR dependent on other priorities at the time, of course.

Okay. No one spoke against the motion. All those in favour, please raise your hand. Councillor Conolly, Councillor Reardon, Councillor McMahon, Councillor Vigal, Councillor Sheather, Councillor Kotlash, Councillor Calvert, Councillor Dogramaci, Councillor Durick, Councillor Lanesbucket, Councillor Wheeler, Councillor Zamprogno. Declare it carried.

Next item is 113, the Disaster and Emergency Management Committee. Moved Deputy Mayor, seconded Councillor Kotlash.

Mr Mayor, can I just ask a question of procedure? If I left the room for both the items in this entire item here, can I sit — I'm sorry, a staff member have to just come up there — can I sit here and pass the minutes, or do I still need to leave the room now if I left the room for that entire meeting?

Do you still have a conflict of interest in whether the minutes are adopted?

Clearly not.

Then I think that's probably your answer. Okay. Yeah. I also wasn't at this meeting, but I'm still sitting in here. So, any discussion on the minutes? Councillor Lyons-Buckett.

Question, please, Mr Mayor. A couple of — I'm not sure if it was in one of these committees or at some point we resolved to have a flood working group that was specifically looking at the McDonald Valley flood study, which is underway. I'm just wondering how that's progressing. We haven't had a meeting of that. The community are very keen, particularly in light of, you know, having had the flood events, and I'm just wondering if we can have some sort of a timeline. Further that to the Director of City Planning.

Thank you through you, Mr Mayor. I'll have to take that question on notice and find the date, but we are looking at a date for the meeting.

Thank you.

No further discussion. Just a quick point

Just a very, very quick point, Mr Mayor, I don't want to labour on this. I did come to that meeting and left for the passing of the minutes and then the number one item, and left both those times with the conflict of interest. But if you look at the meeting, it went for — and I've just lost my page — it went for an entirety of I think it was 32 minutes only, and we got all of these really important people in our community who have so many other things to do, to come to a meeting to pass the minutes and no to report. I— Don't begrudge the Disaster and Emergency Committee meeting. I know we need to have them. The community needs to see that we're reacting and that we're doing things. But I just want to put people on notice that if we're going to have a meeting where we call all these really important people in our community who have volunteered endlessly through these disasters, to get in their best uniforms and turn up to a meeting where we're passing minutes and then noting an item, I just want people to consider that.

I think that that's kind of an insult to waste their time like that, and I think that we should be bringing them into our chamber when we have a more substantive agenda rather than that. Again, I'm not saying I turned up to walk out of the room. We need to show the community we're responding to things, but just take that into consideration next time we have a meeting that's passing minutes and noting something.

I do agree. I think that when, in particular, councils are going to call for more frequent meetings and demand a meeting, the onus is really on those councils to actually have some business to transact at the meeting and make sure that there is something moved of meaning. Otherwise, we are wasting the time of very important people. Councillor Wheeler.

Thanks, Mr. Mayor. Look, I agree with Councillor Richards, and I think this is actually a problem with the structure that we've got at the moment, where we're all still finding our way with the new committee structure. And I think it would be really helpful if we're going to bring— one of the advantages of the Floodplain Risk Management Committee was that there was a report in that meeting from all those agency people who came. And I think if it was possible that we could include a report from those agencies into the Disaster and Emergency Management Committee, that would be really helpful. Because I think often it's the unknown unknowns thing. You know, sometimes we don't know the things that are potentially important for those agencies when they come to speak to us.

I think it would be really helpful if the committee had a section on reports from agencies as part of our general business. And it's highly likely, I think, that they're going to raise things that we need to know that we didn't know we should be asking for. So if I could— I'm happy to bring a notice of motion to the next council meeting asking for that change to the committee's, to the Disaster and Emergency Management Committee. It is a particular committee in that it's a committee of the whole of council, and it's a particularly important subject matter. So I'll flag that I'll do that for the next meeting. What I would like to ask is, I know we, there was, when we passed the new code of meeting practice, there was to be a section in the business paper on items for committee meetings, but I'm wondering if we can use this, given that we're talking about the Disaster and Emergency Management Committee, that we can flag items for discussion at the next Disaster and Emergency Committee meeting when we take these minutes.

I think so long as it's directly related to an item that was, same rules as any other item in terms of notice. If it's related to an item that's before us, then that's fine. If it's a new item altogether, you have to give notice.

So it's related to the Disaster and Emergency Management Committee, so I'll take that as a yes.

Yeah, as long as it's got, I mean, I would think so, that you're not going to introduce something totally out of the box. If it's related to the disaster or anything in the minutes, then I think it's fine to introduce that now.

Okay, so we had a couple of things that were raised at the Bushfire Risk Management Committee that I attended on your behalf, Mr Mayor. One of them was the Gross Wallamai mitigation plan that we heard about some time back. If we could receive a briefing at the next committee meeting, that would be useful. I think it's a particularly, it's a really interesting and important body of work that will, I think, help us understand how that area is being managed for fires. And also I think it's a good opportunity, given that the meeting is broadcast to the public for interested members of the public to view either during the meeting or while it's on record. And I have to say that the other one has slipped my mind, so I'll bring that back next time.

So just to clarify then that the motion before us is to adopt the minutes and to request a briefing from the RFS at the next meeting on the Gross Wollemi mitigation plan. Yes,

Thank you. Yep.

Who seconded? Who moved and seconded that? Councillor Kotlash, happy with that change? Yep, good. Councillor Lyons-Buckett.

Thank you, Mr Mayor. I don't know if we have to add this, and I'm not sure when the next one of these meetings is. Is there an intended date for another one of these meetings, or— I

Don't think we have a date. It was intended that a quarterly frequency was the original intention. Quarterly. But they have chopped and changed a bit because we've had people—

Yeah. I just think that there's so much more we need to do in this space, and I don't think it's translating from our community, the debriefing process. I know there was a couple of people disappointed that they spoke and then that was it. They just said something. There was no engagement around it. It was more like very short speaking times. These committees were sold to the community as being we'd stay as long as ever and engage with people and so on, and it wasn't like that for the people that came to speak. You know, they wanted to know that they were being heard and— I think it's really, I think we really need to have a separate thing if we're going to have a community engagement around that, that may not have the agencies or not have the agencies, but it just doesn't seem to be pulling out the information that we need at this point.

We're all getting it from bits and pieces from individuals and so on, but as a group, I don't think we're capturing really what we can be moving forward with to have our next sort of meeting on this. We heard people speaking, residents speaking at the flood inquiry, and they were raising issues that really we should be dealing with in here, and we're not dealing with them. Things that are absent, things that they feel are either our responsibility or even if they're the state government's responsibility, we need to be discussing and to dealing with these things. We've had disasters that are giving us valuable information about how we can improve, and we have improved, but it needs to be ongoing, I think.

And to what Councillor McMahon said about the agencies , perhaps we can tailor more to who is particularly needed for what's on our agenda. So not everybody has to come every time, but if it's flooding, then we want the SES and we want the people who are involved. It's, I just think that we have some more work to do around that. And maybe when we're having the briefing that councillor—what was that about, Councillor Sheather? We were going to have a briefing about the sullage. Maybe in the same sort of a briefing we could have a conversation about how we maybe— Yeah, I think

If there's things that have come up at the flood inquiry, for example, you think this committee should be looking at, now's the time to get those on the committee's agenda by raising them, putting it on the agenda now so it's on there for next committee meeting.

Yes.

So did you have those there?

Oh, not specifically. Several of them, I can send them in though.

Well, you can't—the way the committee system works is it's got to be directed by council to look at it. So if councillors don't bring the issues forward, it's not going to be looked at by the committee. So the onus is on— Well

They were around the flood gauges, something we've brought up many times, the cumulative overland flood study, the impact of the M7, the development from the M7 down to South Creek. How is that impacting the absence of various committee reports—not committee reports—task force, whatever that's called, the Infrastructure New South Wales task force.

If anyone else was going to speak to—do we want to give Councillor Lyons-Buckett a moment to formulate that into a motion? Is that all right, Councillor Lyons-Buckett? Yeah. Councillor Sheather. Yes,

Mr. Mayor, I agree with the comments. With the flooding, we need to deal with some of the questions now because we're still going to get some reaction from the parties. The gauges run by three authorities, but we get the warnings through the Weather Bureau. The power that went out should not have gone out with the last one. They were supposed to have lifted the wires up 15 years ago. And to my knowledge, they had done. But when I asked at the meeting, they weren't sure. Now these are people sitting around that should know, and so the community chucks a question out, and we don't know.

And the floodplain committee that was set up before had some of those people on, and come from time to time when requested. And there was books that were done to give council information and confirm the responsibilities of the different organisations involved and what progress that they did that. Now I don't know how long ago since that stopped, but we have a flood and all of a sudden things go pear-shaped. The SES, I've been told by a few people that the SES hadn't responded to particular things, you know, fuel drops, food and that sort of stuff. And I spoke to Kevin Jones about that, and I rang him when it was happening. And they've got a process to go through. When they get a phone call, you get a number, and that's registered, whatever the problem is, and they deal with it, whatever that might be, report to police or council, whatever it is.

And so he said they're traceable. If someone says they've got a complaint that something didn't turn up, all they've got to do is mention a number, and they can go straight to it and say the truck broke down or we didn't get it even. So they're the sort of things that the community need to believe in and understand. And, like, when the chap that was on Zoom was talking about infrastructure, and when I asked about the power, it comes across from Cadoy. Now, you know, there could be problems with landslippage along the river, close to the power poles. That could have been the problem. I'm not sure that it was. But if that's the case, why haven't we put power poles up higher and further away from the river? If we're going to do it 15 years ago, it's about time that it was done. Or we do wait till

They fall in. Sorry, Councillor, I don't disagree with much of what you're saying. I'm just not sure why, like, what the point of, like, why is this relevant to the matter we're discussing? Well

To have those people available to find out where they're up to. I mean, they've got other work to do too. So I

Think the point that I was trying to make to Councillor Lyons-Buckett is if we've got a question like, raising power lines is a critical piece of work that needs to happen, we need to refer that to the committee, and that way the staff can get the background and then also give forewarning to the agency we're going to ask that question. I

Agree. But the other reason I mentioned it is that why there's no minutes here about it. There was questions asked and responses given by the speakers that were here. So it is not minuted that way, and, you know, there were questions and the answers were a bit vague in places. But the documents that were done with the floodplain committee are really important, and I don't know how we get to that, because it coming out of EISs in relation to evacuation routes and all that sort of stuff. And so it wasn't just, it was about evacuation routes and— All those things, to make it practical for the community to believe when they were told to move out, there are places to go. But, like destination points is another one.

You ask anybody in the community, where’s the destination point if you’ve got to be evacuated? And I’ll shout you a beer if you can find one. You know, and that’s not right. Our community is affected really bad, and those sort of questions will only come out when somebody’s discussing that and you think there’s a spin-off to that, and so you’ve got a question from the response. And if you’re not there and you can’t read in a book, these people have got to be sincere in what they’re talking about, and you’ve got to know that they’re going to do it. So I don’t know how we work that, but it is important to our community that we do do it.

Thanks, Councillor Wheeler. Just to be clear, the floodplain Advisory Management Committee, that stopped operating in, I think, November 2020, you know, a couple of months before the 2021 floods. So I don’t think that, you know, we can say that was operating best practice and all the problems came because the committee structure changed a couple of months before that. No, but I think a lot of the points there around having confidence and educating and awareness, those are things that are done over a decade or more, not over a few months. Councillor Lyons-Buckett, did you want to move something?

I’ve just given a list of combined of the plan that Councillor Wheeler referred to, the Wallamai, the Gross Wallamai, and a couple of points that Councillor Sheather raised, which were also around evacuation routes and things that were raised within the flood inquiry. Regarding the power, Mr Mayor, the last that we had resolved to do around that was to have a meeting with the local member to discuss that, and I don’t think that ever eventuated.

So quite a bit of this has been, was on the go and has obviously has been changed because of the events that we've had. So really it's updating what we were working on before. So there's just a list, I guess, in terms of making it into some sort of feasible thing to discuss, we can, I don't know how we do that. I mean, I can't write out a whole notice of motion just right now, sorry.

No, so I think if the, looking at this list, which is coming on the screen, I don't know that we could just necessarily refer just those couple words. Well, I'm happy to elaborate

But if they're there as things, I'm happy to send to everybody what I meant.

Yeah, I think if we can, I think if we can, I'm okay with it if councillors, if we just, we resolve on this basis and the staff work those into questions that can be asked of the committee and circulated to councillors before the next meeting. Yep

That's fine.

Yep. Is there any discussion? Seconder was okay with that. And the mover, sorry, Deputy Mayor. Yep. And okay. Right

Of reply. Right of reply, yeah. Thanks. I want to thank councillors for their input into this because I was also disappointed that we called that meeting and then when everyone got there, we virtually had no content. And we called the meeting because a number of councillors suggested that these meetings should be regular and we should have one as soon as possible, and we had one with no content. The content is coming out now and it's great to hear, and that's what's supposed to happen. As councillors, we are supposed to be putting these questions forward for the committee, and the committee is supposed to be called when we have a sufficient number of items to discuss. The idea of the committee was not that we just get everyone every time to sit around the table, but we have items that are being discussed and we invite the right people to come and talk about those items.

And that I think is what's coming out here tonight. And it's really comforting to see that. The committee system is actually working the way that we designed it to. The other point is that the Floodplain Management Committee, Mr Mayor, has not actually closed . It's moved. It's now part of this committee, part of the Disaster Committee. So any of those items that would have normally been in the Floodplain Management Committee can also be referred to the Disaster Committee, and should be. And the items that Councillor Sheather is saying have gone missing or whatever, no, they're still out there and they can be brought to this committee, and I urge you to do that. So thank you, councillors, and I'm hoping that our next Disaster and Emergency Committee will be more successful than the last one because we are now having more input.

Thank you. Thanks.

Put the motion. All those in favour? Councillor Conolly, Councillor Reardon, Councillor McMahon, Councillor Veigel, Councillor Sheather, Councillor Kotlash, Councillor Carvil, Councillor Dogramaci, Councillor Djuric, Councillor Lyons-Buckett, Councillor Wheeler, Councillors then, carried.

Notice of motion, Councillor Lyons-Buckett.

Move that,

Mr Mayor. Seconded for that. Seconded, Councillor Wheeler. Discussion,

Councillor

Lyons-Buckett.

Thank you. Thank you, Mr Mayor. I've brought this forward. It's not particularly something that I necessarily think is essential to do. But, and I think we saw an example of this this morning—earlier, it feels like we've been here since this morning—earlier tonight, that when we don't have enough time around things such as the amendments that Councillor Kotlash brought, that we don't have a facility to really understand and to deal with these things. So I recall in previous terms, as it is a statutory thing that we have to decide the number of councillors, or we look at that, and we are, through the Local Government Act, we have to make a decision on whether that's just going to remain or whether we change it or whatever.

So, and that has to be done at least a year before the following election. So it has to be done by 2023. So in the past, I recall that we would just get a report very close to the time. We would just have to make a decision there and then. And I think that in view of— The reduction of our role, perhaps it could be said, since we don't have planning powers. But as Councillor Zamprogno said earlier, we may have a return. If we had a change of government, we could have a return to those planning powers. So, but currently, when I look back to the amount of work that we had before us in 2012, when I first became a councillor, and we had site visits, we had DAs, we were always doing things. And it seems now that we don't have a lot of those functions.

We only have one meeting a month. We have briefings. We don't have many committee meetings, and we don't really do a lot of civic things anymore. We don't have business greeting, meeting and greeting. We don't do engagement with the community in meetings. So I think that it's just responsible of us to have a report. This is only calling for a report that outlines the impacts of what a change, and it doesn't have to be nine, I just put a number. I think that we really have to look at whether there's a change in, if there's a financial impact, if we should be looking at the changes around this. And it was really just to get the process started, because I'm concerned that decision-making for many things in local government, and sometimes that's because the state government forces something on us.

Like we didn't have very long to deal with a recent agritourism thing. We had to look at that quickly. It's trying to get things out so that we can start to consider it, so that then if we have to put this to the community, that we've had some time to consider it. It's not rushed. And in saying that, I don't want to place a burden on the staff to be doing this really rapidly or anything. That's why I've put it forward now, so that it can be done in time, so that we can get the feedback from the councillors around that, that we can understand what the process is. That we can compare to other councils around the ratio of councillors to population, and that we can look at whether we need to make a change coming into before the next election, which would be around a referendum, I understand.

Thank you.

Councillor McMahon.

Thank you, Mr Mayor. I was just wondering if Councillor Lyons-Buckett would be happy to expand on her motion and not just have nine, but have seven, nine, eleven and thirteen.

Happy to. Yeah,

Just only because — Yeah, that's why I'm saying. I heard you say you picked a number, so I thought, well, I think we all agree we need an odd number. So if we could have seven, nine, eleven and thirteen included in the report, that would probably give us a bit more food for thought. And secondly, so if you could, are you happy to do that? Yeah, okay. And secondly, if there was any feedback from staff regarding whether this is something we vote on as councillors or whether it does need to go to a referendum.

Refer that to Mr . Mayor.

Through you, Mr. Mayor, it would require a constitutional referendum.

Thank you.

Further discussion? Councillor Wheeler. Thanks, Mr. Mayor. I'm glad to see that this has been expanded. I'm not particularly wedded to nine. I think the number is immaterial. You can have three really good councillors who are probably more effective than twelve fairly ordinary councillors. You know, the meetings might be faster , or they might not. The three people might argue all evening. Who knows? But the issue is, for me, is always with the fact that we have an even number of councillors because of the problem of the casting vote. And I— I have a fundamental problem with the casting vote. It's too much power in the hands of a single individual, and it's not democratic. And I don't think that it fulfils the community's requirements for a democratic decision-making process either.

We are not a government. We don't exist with an opposition and a government. We should be able to have a far more nuanced capacity to make decisions where each person brings their views based on what they've told the electorate they will represent when we go out to them in an election, and then equally have a say in reaching a decision. Obviously, my preference would be for a more consensus-style decision-making, and at our best we have done that in the past, even with an even number of us in council. And I think the community has appreciated when we have behaved in that fashion. I don't think they appreciate this adversarial log ahead and then the casting vote decides the matter style. It doesn't sit well with anybody.

I think depending on which side of the fence you sit on at the time that the decision is made, the casting vote either looks like too much power for a single person and an undemocratic decision, or it looks like a great deal of pressure and the blame all falling to one individual. And we have seen both of those in this chamber. And I think it's something that we need to be mature enough to move away from, regardless of whether we go for a greater or lesser number of councillors. Thanks.

Thanks. I'm happy for this to go forward on the basis that I don't think it's too much work to ask staff to write this report. Very cautious of the fact that whilst I think it might have merit to go to an old number of councillors, I don't think most ratepayers would accept that it has merit given the cost involved of a referendum. And that, I think, is something we'll have to bear in mind when the report comes back. Maybe we'll come up with some other option we haven't thought of, but I doubt it. But given that the report is probably not too difficult and all information easily at hand, I'm happy to support it at this point.

Further discussion? Councillor Zamprogno.

Thank you, Mr Mayor. It's not as though I have any in-principle objection to there being an even number of councillors and therefore the consequence that the mayor often has the casting vote. My own philosophy about this is that a deliberative mayor would use the casting vote in a judicious way, and if a matter was so evenly divided as it required a casting vote, they should take that as a strong signal that the matter requires more deliberation, more consultation, so that there can be a clearer majority in the chamber, rather than the mayor repeatedly voting with his casting vote in the way that his team would demand. But that's up to the individual judgment of a mayor and the way they use the casting vote.

That's the way I would do it in that circumstance. The question about whether we're best served with 12 councillors or less than 12 councillors boils down to whether the representation this number gives the broader community has value. It's not merely just having a certain number of bodies around the table. It's what we do out in the broader community. If there are 62,500 residents of the Hawkesbury... Does it take 12 councillors to reach every corner of the Hawkesbury and to engage? I mean, we've spoken a lot among ourselves recently about how well we engage with our community, and it's often remarked, mostly by me, that when we pool all of those methods of consultation, surveys with rates notices, phone polling, town hall meetings and so forth, they still only manage to get to a small percentage of the people that are affected by any given decision.

The role of going out and explaining and advocating and persuading and educating the public sits with us. Now, I'm up for the task, whether there's nine of us or 12 of us or any other number, but I rather think that so long as we're all earning our keep, the stipend that we're paid yields a dividend to the community because it's all the more likely that somebody from a particular suburb has somebody driving the same roads as them, who are sending their kids to the local soccer fields, who understands what it's like when services are cut or delayed, and they can go to that person as their local person. I think with fewer councillors, there's less opportunity to do that, but again, it really depends on us earning our keep.

I have no objection to this report coming back to council, but I'm as sceptical as the mayor is about whether the community thinks that changing that number is worth the cost of a referendum, which is likely to be very expensive, even if it were to be bundled in to the next local government election and therefore wouldn't kick in until four years after that.

Thank you. Right of reply.

Thank you, Mr. Mayor, and thank you for that input. That's

Sorry, Councillor Sheather. Oh, sorry. You've your light on for discussion.

Yeah, just briefly, from my point of view, I'd say save the staff any work. As the ratepayer in our city, you can't be our representative, and if you have a problem with that, you need to think who you voted for. So, as Councillor Zamprogno said, you know, you pull your weight or you don't. Some people are in a position to do more than others. We spoke about that, I think it was on the councillors' notice of motion. I don't know that those positions would change if you had six or seven. But the other thing we spoke about was relationships with the community the other night in our briefing. You know, I don't believe the staff, as Councillor Zamprogno said, it's the role that we play in the community.

We can make a big difference to the attitude of people's perception of Council with the occasional people we see or the function we do go to. And there is heaps of things that we can be involved in. And I'm not talking about political sense. I'm just talking about people want to see that other people care. And the bottom line of it, that's what we get elected for. And in relation to numbers, you know, like, I've been around for a while, and I see no reason whatsoever to reduce this chamber by numbers. You know, something I spoke about before when we talk about how much councillors got paid, you drop down to six, say six or seven, what would be the chance of a pensioner, for instance, running for council and getting elected?

It'd be zilch.

You know, and I don't think that's fair. People, all these people sitting around the table worked hard to get to where they are. And it wasn't to be nicked off after four years. You know, if they want to stand again, good on them. And even though we don't all agree all the time, that's what democracy is about, you know, in relation to even numbers and stuff. I've sat in that chair a few times. The first time I had six casting votes at one meeting. Kidding, that wasn't fun. But, you know, if you're going to put your hand up once, why wouldn't you put up the same the second time around? You know, what are you having two bob each way? You know, so there's different ways people see things. But as far as representation of the community goes, you know, I think what we've got here has well served the community.

And as Councillor Zamprogno said, all of us travel different roads in different parts of the city, and not enough apparently, but we try, and I think that's extremely important. So from my point of view, I wouldn't be asking for any report or think about a referendum. Thanks. Councillor Djuric.

Thank you, Mr Mayor. I just want to briefly touch on that. I was contacted by a few members of the community today with their concerns of reducing their representation. The community members were saying that they want access to as broad a representation as possible. And last council election, there were new members elected to council because community members, a certain percent of community members, believe that their... Views weren't being supported or represented by the same old, same old, if you will. And now it looks like that we're now going to change things to reduce that and force these people back to voting the same old, same old. And that's the concerns that were brought to me. And whilst there might be a consideration that we are reducing some of our workload, I think anyone that's concerned for the communities out there amongst the community groups and doing a lot of work to represent their views.

And I'm also concerned that the terms for the report might be a little narrow if we're only comparing against other electorates with a similar amount of people, when we've got such, well, we're one of the largest electorates in— in the Sydney Basin, so it'd be very difficult to appropriately represent people at either end of the electorate, you know, in a single day if that's what was required. So I just wanted to raise those concerns. Thank you. Councillor Veigel. Yeah

Thanks, Mr Mayor. I'd like to thank Councillor Lyons-Buckett for bringing this motion to the table. Any good government governance, I believe, needs a review. All we're doing here is just asking for the review of the numbers. Now, okay, I take the point there may be a cost involved, there may be a referendum, but surely we've got a responsibility to have a look on our governance and see whether we can do it with less or the status quo remains. Nothing more, nothing less. It's basically pointed out here, and it was great—there's an amendment on this, and thank you for taking that, Councillor.

But if you don't ask the questions, how can you improve? Now, I don't know where this is going to come from. We've got to make a decision within a year.

Once the report comes back, the status quo may remain, or—and what was brought up by one of the speakers today about that's an even number here and, you know, the casting vote by the mayor. They've got a lot of history of council with a casting vote being made by the mayor, going back to 2006 or whatever. Technically, I think an odd number would work a lot better and will take the pressure off the mayor, dare I say. But that's—I'm not going to speak much more than that. I think it's a motion. I think, well, I'm going to be voting for it. I support it. I support the amendment too, looking at the numbers. So it's just a review, nothing to be afraid of. It's just a report. Sure, there's a little bit of work to be done, and let me take it on notice of whoever's going to do that, for our council employees, thank you, thank you.

Yeah, I'd like to see some facts behind it too, please. Thanks. All right. Councillor Dogramaci.

Thank you, Mr. Mayor. Being different again.

Last week, when we were at Karajong Heights, that meeting, you were there as well, and Councillor Calvert was there again. I stood up and I made some comment. Of course, like I always say that, you know, the window that I'm looking out is different than most of you, and a different angle. When I stood up and I said that some bureaucrats woke up in the middle of the night with power, some kind of power, and suddenly that pick your own thing was changed or somebody suggested. Again, the same thing, I'm relating that to this one. I'm not insinuating, I'm not insulting, but there's a saying in Australian language, we say, If something is working, don't touch it. Now, we'll bring it to nine, and that's going to cost a couple of hundred thousand dollars, while we are crying that we don't have enough funds to repair the roads or potholes or whatever it is.

And 2024 to that election, nine councillors, okay, and a few elections later bring it down to seven, and then to five. Then what?

So if we had the power, which now I understand we don't, if we had the power to vote for it, I don't know who came before me or who came after me. How about if we have the power, how about we vote now and get rid of the last three or four or five? How about we do that? Let's see who is going to get upset or not. I mean, this is not a game. It's been going for... That's it, get rid of the last four. I'm happy. I don't know who came after me. You know, like I always say that I came by accident. But it's been working with 12 of us. We have hardly met the people that voted for us. I don't know how many of you , I personally went 35 kilometers from Colo all the way to see two farmers. They haven't seen any one of the councillors in the last 20 years.

So, like I said, 12, we're hardly managing. And I suggest that, you know, we stick with the 12. And if somebody wants to leave or have no intention of contesting, which I'm not going to anyway, not contesting in the next election, if somebody is happy, I'm very happy as well not to see their faces. So let's stay as we are. And if it's going to be a motion or something like that, I'm going to oppose it. Let's make it 15 or 21. Thank you.

Right of reply, Councillor.

Thank you, Mr Mayor. I think Councillor Veigel hit the nail on the head. This is a review. I mean, very often, and it's something I've brought forward because I don't like the rushed decision-making around these things when we're directed to do them. And I thank Councillor McMarn for expanding it like that. I had just picked a number to— I was rushing to get the notice of motion in, and I had chosen specifically an uneven number. But I'm happy to look at 7, 9, 11. Maybe we should have more. This isn't a measure of what people do as a councillor. It's a criticism we draw often from the public, is that we just leave everything as it is. We don't review things. We don't look at things. There's no harm in looking.

I wasn't a fan of the last referendum we had, which was to introduce wards, and yet that was a very rapid decision-making process, and then it was foisted upon us, and we had to go with it even though it lost. It is expensive. I don't want to put the ratepayers to a lot of expense if it's not a feasible thing that's not supported. And I think these sort of conversations are healthy to have, that we should be— we should be looking at these. Things have changed. Local government is an evolving space. Our methods of communication are changing. There's different ways of doing things. I just want us to be able to have discussions like that. It's not— it's not having a go at anybody or anything. And as Councillor Wheeler said, we could have, you know, two effective councillors and ten that do nothing.

It's not about measuring people's worth or anything. It's about good— a good approach to a conversation that needs to be had. And the community needs to see that we are looking at these things to see if we can do things better. We always should be looking at that, and we should be reviewing the things, just as we would review a policy. And because these are requirements that it comes to a point a year before an election. We'll have to say the number of councillors, whether or not we want a popularly elected mayor, whether or not we want to have wards, and these are things that we have to affirm or change. And so this is a way to draw it out, to understand what that process is. And if people are ringing, you know, I mean, most of us are out and about in the community.

I'm not suggesting that nobody isn't out there, but it's a long process as well, and it also goes to the heart of, you know, what direction local government is going in. And so it certainly wasn't meant to offend anybody or to allude to anything. It really is just to address the changing scope around local government, to hopefully maybe move to an uneven number. I do think that would be healthier as well. And I think, although of course if someone's not there, you're still back to an even number, so still in the same boat. But I just think that this isn't the only thing I think we should be having a conversation around as well. I think there's a lot of other things that we need to not be seen by our community that we just leave the same old, same old, everything going, going, going as it goes, and that we need to be looking at these things.

And it's not going to cost $200,000 to write a report of what the process is. So I think that when we get the report back, which we've given plenty of time now for that to be done in, then we can have another conversation around it and see where we head from there. Thank you.

Put the motion. All those in favour, please raise your hand. Favour, Councillor Conolly, Councillor Reardon, Councillor McMahon, Councillor Veigel, Councillor Kotlash, Councillor Calvert, Councillor Lones-Buckett, Councillor Wheeler, Councillor Zampogno, against. Councillor Sheather, Councillor Dogramaci, Councillor Djuric, declare it carried. Are there any...

Questions on the questions taken on notice? Councillor

Wheeler. Thanks, Mr Mayor. I note in the response that the minutes from the third party organisations apparently were last uploaded to November last year, and that further minutes will be uploaded. Can I just ask what the process is for that? It seems cumbersome if we have to chase back to these third party organisations, ask them, get the minutes from them, and then we upload them, you know, our staff upload them to the hub. Is that what's going on? Is there a way of streamlining this process so that those minutes are publicly available quite quickly? This is public money that we're talking about being spent by these agencies.

I refer that to the Manager, Corporate Services and Governance .

Thank you. Through you, Mr Mayor, that process that you described, Councillor, is the process that's currently followed. So there was discussion earlier about the minutes from the Sports Council. They were obtained by Council in a lot some time ago and literally scanned and then placed onto the Councillor Hub. That's up to date as up to November of last year, as is set out in the business paper, and the other minutes since that time from those meetings can be obtained and the same process would be followed. And the same applies to other organisations. What's probably lacked attention is a robust mechanism for ensuring that the minutes are provided. Because at the moment, although sometimes there are staff representatives at those meetings, there's not a systematic process of the organisation itself providing the minutes to council.

Notwithstanding that, the organisations were informed about council's resolution going back a couple of years now to provide minutes to council following meetings. So those steps that are referred to in the business paper are the steps that it's proposed to take now to engage with those organisations to make sure that the minutes are provided. But the process is that council would request that they be provided, and that there would be some steps that staff could take to ensure that that's done following the organisation meetings.

So would that require a motion from council to begin that process, or is that something that can be done without that step?

Well, there is the council resolution from the second part of 2020, which required council to request that third-party organisations provide their minutes to council following meetings, and that's the action that was taken. There just perhaps hasn't been the robust follow-up that there ought to have been all the way through that period since, and perhaps with the exception of that work that was done in relation to the Sports Council, which was actually fairly time-consuming because of the way that those minutes were provided, and they needed to literally have hard copy minute books scanned into our system. So we could take steps now to again remind the organisations about council's resolution without council needing to take further steps to pass a further resolution now.

Okay, so I think that's a no to motion not being needed. If I can just reinforce the need for those minutes to be on the hub in a timely fashion, you might need to — this might be an additional question. Are the Sports Council minutes still handwritten in that hard copy notebook, or are they now in a method that can be quickly uploaded?

Through you, Mr Mayor, the minute books that were provided contain typewritten minutes on pages inside a book which are able to be scanned.

So they're not in that readily uploadable file format at this point?

At that stage they weren't, but I need to make inquiries as to whether anything had changed since the last lot that we obtained. Thanks. Thank you.

Any other questions on questions? If not, we move.

Noting a motion to go into confidential, moved by Councillor McMahon, seconded by Councillor Kotlash. All those in favour? Declare that carried.

Councillors, the live stream is recommenced. We're back in open session and I'll hand over to the General Manager to advise the resolutions of closed session.

Thank you, Mr Mayor. In respect of item 116, community representation on the Hawkesbury Heritage Committee, whilst in closed session the Council resolved on the motion of Councillor McMahon, seconded Councillor Kotlash, that Councillor Point, Ms Cindy Laws, to the Heritage Committee until September 2024 as an additional member.

In regards to item 117, lease from Crate Myrtle 442 and part of — sorry, in respect of the first— in respect of item 116, for the motion were Councillors Conolly, Calvert, Djuric, Dogramaci, Lyons-Buckett, Reardon, Sheather, Veigel and Wheeler. There were no councillors against the motion. In respect of item 117, lease from Crate Myrtle 442 and part of 441 Cornwallis Road, Cornwallis. Whilst in closed session the Council resolved on the motion of Councillor McMahon, seconded Councillor Kotlash, that

The outcome of negotiations between Hawkesbury City Council and Crate Myrtle Pty Limited regarding land that is leased at 442 and part of 441 Cornwallis Road, Cornwallis, as detailed in the report, be received and noted. Two, Council enter into a new lease between Hawkesbury City Council and Crate Myrtle Pty Limited for 442 and part of 441 Cornwallis Road, Cornwallis, as outlined in this report. Three, authority be given for any documentation in association with this matter to be executed under the seal of Council. And four, details of Council's resolution be conveyed to the proposed lessee, together with the advice that Council is not and will not be bound by the terms of its resolution until such time as appropriate legal documentation to put such a resolution into effect has been agreed to and executed by all parties.

In regard to item 118, licence agreement for signage at Industry Reserve Vineyard, whilst in closed session, the Council resolved on the motion of Councillor Sheather, seconded Councillor Wheeler, Council delegates authority to the General Manager to negotiate a licence agreement with Price and Speed Clearances Pty Limited trading as El Media in regard to part of the land known as Industry Road Reserve located at 9 Industry Road, Vineyard, for up to two signs. Point 2, authority be given for any documentation regarding this matter to be executed under the seal of Council. Now, for the motion were Councillors Zamprogno, Djuric, Calvert, Kotlash, Veigel, Reardon, McMahon and Conolly. Against the motion were Councillors Wheeler, Lyons-Buckett, Dogramaci and Sheather, and the motion was carried 8-4.

In respect of item 119, licence agreements, Hawkesbury Professional Business Chambers, 1 Dight Street, Windsor, whilst in closed session, the Council resolved on the motion of Councillor McMahon, seconded Councillor Kotlash, that 1. Council agree to enter into new licence agreement with existing tenants of property known as the Hawkesbury Professional Business Chambers located at 1 Dight Street, Windsor, as outlined in this report, as well as any new tenants that are secured. 2. The General Manager be authorised to approve minor amendments to the licence agreements if necessary. 3. Authority be given for the licence agreements and any other relevant documentation in association with this matter to be executed under the seal of Council.

4. Details of Council's resolution be conveyed to the proposed tenants together with the advice that Council is not and will not be bound by the terms of its resolution until such time as appropriate legal documentation to put such resolution into effect has been agreed to and executed by all parties.

For the motion were Councillors Conolly, Calvert, Djuric, Dogramaci, Lyons-Buckett, Reardon, Sheather, Veigel and Wheeler. Thank you, Mr Mayor.

Thank you. So that concludes our meeting at 10.57 p.m. Thank you.