This transcript and its speaker attributions were generated with AI assistance and may contain errors. Speaker names may be corrected in later releases. It is provided for search and accessibility; the official Council minutes remain authoritative.
Good evening, everybody, and welcome to Hawkesbury City Council's meeting for the 13th of December. Thank you, I'll get that date right, 2022. End of year craziness. Okay, Hawkesbury City Council acknowledges the Darug and Darkinjung people as the traditional custodians of the land of the Hawkesbury. We pay respect to all elders, past, present and emerging, and acknowledge all Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples as the First Peoples of the country. I will now hand over to the General Manager.
Thank you, Madam 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 would also like to advise that in accordance with clause 5.33 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 recordings are made to assist the 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 persons where such access is in accordance with the relevant regulations. The recordings are stored on Council's record management system. Meetings of the Council may be separately recorded with the prior authority of the Council. For the benefit of those persons who will be addressing the Council tonight, it is expected 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 if any person participating in or attending the meeting has a mobile phone, that they either turn it off or switch it to silent.
General Manager. I'll now proceed with apologies or leave of absence, but looking around the room, we have a full attendance. So thank you, councillors. Any declarations of interest in any of tonight's items? Councillor Djuric.
Thank you. Any other councillors? No. Thank you very much. Confirmation of the minutes of the previous meeting, please. Can I have a mover and seconder for that? Thank you, Councillor Reardon. Seconder? Councillor Sheather.
IS - Outcome of Public Exhibition - Draft Waste and Resource Recovery
Sarah McMahon
Okay, so let's get to it. The first items tonight are the agenda items subject to public address, and we have three items in that category. So we'll proceed with the first item, which is item 216, outcome of public exhibition draft waste and resource recovery strategy, and our speaker tonight is John Ross. Thank you, Mr. Ross.
This report might well have been written 10 years ago. It's not representative of the work done in the previous term of Council, and shows that after the first year of this term of Council, no progress has been made,
Which is most unfortunate, given that our neighbouring council, Penrith City, has a FOGO collection service which has been in operation for eight years,
One would have hoped that this council, in line with the overall situation of the nation, would consider that something more ought to be done in this regard, particularly as we are talking about the element number six in the dry waste disposal at the driftway.
FOGO has the opportunity to reduce the volume and amount of dry waste material, which would otherwise go to the driftway. So on that score alone, there is some merit in it. It further would potentially, and I'm not sure about this point, but may also obviate the payment of $142 or $150 a tonne to the EPA, as the FOGO material presumably would not go across the weighbridge, one would hope, at the driftway. I think there is considerable room for improvement in the report, and I am rather surprised that the council and the elected members here have not progressed matters to a much greater degree in that regard. I further draw council's attention, and I don't know whether it's been included at any point here, but the flaring of waste at the driftway. Which has had good outcomes and is a good outcome in part, warrants council staff
Being in contact with WSU in regard to potential use of that flared gaseous material as a heat source for potential agricultural pursuits undercover on WSU land. There would appear to be a great opportunity there, which would seem to be of greater merit than talking about FOGO with WSU, as council is already itself dealing with one company and paying to have solid waste removed from Ferrier Road treatment works. And there is also another composting and alike operation in the Ebenezer area, which, to my knowledge, last year had a very substantial development application in to increase the capacity of that plant. And council FOGO materials would probably be a great addition to their raw material supply and help obviate some other inputs, which would be beneficial both from council's point of view and from that company's point of view.
So I see that there are great opportunities in many areas, including cost reductions. That have not been followed up to any degree at all, and I would suggest that it is incumbent upon this Council to further pursue the matter with a greater degree of alacrity. Thank you.
Thank you, sorry, and I will just acknowledge that Mr Ross is a former councillor, having served five years on Hawkesbury Council, so thank you for your service. Any questions? No. Thank you, Mr Ross.
Sorry. There's a lot of very good information in this waste strategy, and I hear Mr. Ross's frustration that we are slow to move in this space. And I think that happens for a variety of reasons, in part due to cost and in part due to the size and scale of the LGA and the difficulties there. We tried on the previous Waste Management Committee to get a FOGO collection trial happening in the Hawkesbury, and for a variety of reasons, including money, that didn't kick off. It's been done successfully elsewhere, and we're probably now at the point where we don't need to reinvent the wheel. We can just move on from what's been done elsewhere. But I think we are moving forward fairly cautiously in waiting to see what the New South Wales State Government says about FOGO, so that whatever we do in that space meets the state government requirements, so that we don't have to chop and change once it's been put in place.
Because we know one of the big issues with waste is compliance and having people, telling people one thing and then having them find out that, in fact, they've now got to relearn how to do things. We also know that there's overlap between, we have people who come to the library here, for example, asking for the plastic bags so that they can put their kitchen waste in their green bin because they get them from their mother who lives at Penrith, and they've been putting their kitchen waste in the green bin. It's one of those things that has needed a statewide approach, I think, and hopefully we're moving towards that. I've added the additional points about the waste levy. We know, I think it was the year before last, that cost us in excess of three million dollars, and we got a hundred thousand dollars back.
If you read the submissions to this waste strategy, there is a lot of complaint about how much it costs to go to the tip, and that being blamed for a whole lot of things, including dumping in the bush, leaving mattresses, laying about wherever you like. And I don't believe that there are a reasonable reason for illegal dumping, but it is a concern that people have to pay so much over the weighbridge going into the tip, and that seems to be a disincentive for them to do the right thing. The New South Wales government is siphoning this money off councils. We pay this money to use our own staff to put our own waste in our own hole, and that's not good enough. I think we paid them 3.2 million a couple of years ago, and they gave us $100,000 back, which was extraordinarily generous of them.
I know we ask them repeatedly to do this, but we should ask them again because they still haven't got the message. It would allow local government, the level of government that wears the responsibility for waste, to actually do better things in this space, which, as you can see from the submissions, is what the community expects us to do. I think we also should ask for a polystyrene collection point. Other councils have them. We've got that excellent community recycling facility at the tip. People are crying out for a place to put polystyrene. It feels wrong to be putting it in the red bin. If we could have a collection facility there, I think it would be very well used because at the moment it's something that can and should be recycled and is just filling up our landfill.
It's light. It's not particularly expensive to take over the weighbridge, but it takes up a hell of a lot of room, and you can see from this report we've got four years left, and then we're going to be in a real bind. I think the submissions are really interesting. There's dumping costs, polystyrene, expanding the reuse shed, soft plastics, hard rubbish collection, and a real push to have more and more hard rubbish collections, which I find A little bit entitled, to be perfectly honest. The idea, and I think this is a society-wide attitude of someone else that applies to waste, where people who don't generate a lot of waste, for some reason, are expected to subsidise those who do. And this idea that someone else will pay.
The idea that Blacktown has—I don't know why you would need to have 16 cubic metres of hard rubbish collected for free off your front lawn every year. That's inconceivable to me. One, maybe two. You can always pay for extra, but I don't think that small households, or households who don't generate a lot of waste, should pay for the people who do. The other key plank, I think, for us with respect to waste is becoming the end user of this recycled content. It's no use us telling the state government, telling people to recycle, telling the state government to build an industry when we aren't using the end product. And I think with a massive roads program in front of us, with a variety of programs paid for by WestInvest, hopefully, there needs to be a significant recycled content in those so that we don't just become a producer and a collector; we become an end user as well.
So the community recycling centre located at the waste facility is fully EPA funded, and there's core problem waste that the EPA fund. Polystyrene is not included in the EPA list. We've actually in the past lobbied the EPA to include polystyrene, but for whatever reason they're not including it. Where polystyrene is collected at other community recycling centres across the state, council manages that and incurs the cost. But potentially we can do an investigation and explore that to see, you know, if the business case stacks up, that we could provide that service.
Thank you. So there is a cost associated with it. So in that respect, just requesting that we have one's probably a bit premature at this stage, and I'd probably prefer that point three is to get that data back about what we'll be up for. I mean, I think it's a great idea if we can do it and it's affordable. So, yeah , I would request that Councillor Will, through you, Madam Mayor, if Councillor Willer might add that.
Yeah, that's what I was after. Thank you. In point two, I'm a bit concerned that we've put that we write to the state government to get money back to do those three things that are listed there as A, B and C, because to my mind... We've really already started to do that. Now, I appreciate we haven't got much traction on the recycling industry component of that. But to have it
As a condition of getting funding from the state government is probably not the way I would go about that. I think we have to stick to those things, support local and regional council resource recovery programs, build recycling industries, and expand and educate the public. I mean, that's, they're fundamentally the things that we need to do. To start managing our waste in a much better way. So, and it's hard, but I would have thought that snippets of those things are throughout our waste strategy, so I'm sort of satisfied with that. So I just like to err on the side of caution that we're putting those three things as being on the condition that we get that funding, and I don't think that that's necessarily where we need to head. Thank you.
Thank you. I'm happy to support point one, the adoption as per the recommendation. I'm happy to receive a report on the cost of the establishment of the polystyrene collection point. Point two, first of all, I don't think it's a big deal either way, because obviously they're not going to give us the money back. We probably all know that before we even vote. But I guess from my perspective, my understanding was that the waste levy is introduced to account for externalities, to bring in the cost of the real cost of waste into the market cost of disposing of your waste. It's meant to capture that and be a disincentive for using landfill. So from that perspective, I think it's—when people are complaining about the cost of landfill, I think it's doing exactly what it was intended to do when it was introduced.
We could argue about which bureaucracy could better use the funds that it generates. For me, I don't really have an opinion on that, that if that funding was directed to local bureaucracies, that would be better than a state bureaucracy that have more expertise or better effectiveness, I'd have to be convinced of that. But I think we have to be careful and honest about what this is, because the waste levy was introduced because of environmental concerns and lots of lobbying that we needed to account for that externality, and that's why we have it. So it's not our money we need to get back. It's money that was charged as a disincentive for landfill. So I'd only be supporting— Bringing it back to Council, if there was some compelling argument that councils could better spend that money rather than the experts employed by the state government.
Thanks, Madam Mayor. Councillor Wheeler, in Part B of 2, where it's, 'build a recycling industry, ' are you talking about involving private enterprise in any schemes as well?
I don't think we need to be specific about who does this. I think we, and we already do have a player here who is doing that, and it would be great to use their end product. But that needs to be, there are some councils where they are playing an active role. Shoalhaven, for example, are playing an active role. I think Randwick, to an extent, through the University of New South Wales, are involved in a reuse project there. But I don't think it matters who does it. We just need to do it, and our biggest, I think our biggest role in this system is as the end user and the purchaser of those products.
Sheather. Yeah, thank you. Thank you, Councillor. Taking on board some of the comments by our speaker earlier, Mr Ross, the concerns that I have, and within the document, there are things that we can do with communities to recycle, which has been done fairly successfully over the years, and the bits of our waste that haven't been picked up on finish up in the same hole as everything else. Which is poor. The community has supported such programs, and as government and local government, we haven't turned out an end product. The comments that Councillor Wheeler made are spot on. We need to be looking at an end product. Some things are fairly easy to recycle; others aren't, and they're the things we need to be looking at.
We're not going to get private enterprise go out and start a business on the whim that some councils are going to do something. What's been presented by other councils and working with other councils, and that was part of my question in relation to using anybody and working with companies or councils to create something at the end of the day, that when someone is in a kitchen and puts something in a bin, there's a reason for it and an outcome for it. So, as good as the document is that's there, and it does mention about end products, but as Councillor Wheeler said, I think that that should be the outcome. People will support, you know, recycling much better than they've done in the past. Not if they think it's going in the landfill, they won't.
And to a degree, in the past, that's all we've done. So I would hope that any work that the council does, that they take the opportunity that Mr Rosson and Councillor Wheeler indicated, that if there's opportunities for local government, other local governments or private enterprise, that we take advantage of it.
Thank you, Councillor. Councillor Sheather and I had a lovely drive from Ebenezer to St Albans talking about this very thing on the weekend. Deputy Mayor.
Thank you, Madam Mayor. I want to thank Councillor Wheeler for putting this forward. I had a similar motion in mind. And currently the state government charges $147 a ton for our rubbish to go into our garbage tip. And unlike Councillor Conolly, I think the money was designed to have two purposes. First purpose was to raise the cost of bringing things into the tip and discourage people from having to use the tip without looking at alternatives. But the second reason was for the money to then be used by the state government in conjunction with councils to work on ways of reducing waste and finding other ways to have products that we could use from waste. And that money has not come back to that.
Only a very small percentage of the money comes back into that area. Most of the money goes to general revenue and pays for bridges and roads and all kinds of things. In my mind, that's not what it was originally meant to do.
Now, therefore, I think, you know, what Councillor Willis put there is quite accurate. But I would also ask her if she could ask for this motion and the attachment to be sent to WESROC, please. WESROC has been working on this for quite some time. If we could send this to them and say this is the position we're currently at, and because WESROC has been working on it for some time, maybe we can get an update from WESROC as to where they're up to with some of the ideas that are now floating around. Some ideas are really quite innovative. There's schemes they use in Europe these days where... Nearly 95% of rubbish actually gets dealt with by boiling water. In Poland, they use this scheme, and it reduces everything to an inert mass, which then can be used in roads and playgrounds and anything else.
And these are the kind of schemes that are happening overseas. And Wesroc's been looking at those, and that's where this money, this $147 a tonne, should be going, because our tip's going to run out soon, and so are most of the other tips. And the only alternative I've heard from people around the place is out in the west, out in Lithgow, they've got a whole lot of coal mines that are no longer used. Let's all dump it down there. I mean, that's the kind of thing that people are saying, and they're saying that because there's been no alternatives really offered. So if we could get that added please, Councillor Wheeler, to send it to Wesroc and ask for an update and see if we can work more closely with them to get a solution to this problem, because this problem is going to hit us in the face.
Well, it already is, but it's really going to hit us in the face in about two years' time. So we need to address this. Thank you.
Are you happy with that, Councillor Wheeler? Happy to do that, yes. Thank you. We'll get the staff to add a point four in that regard. Any further speakers? Councillor Lyons-Buckett.
Thank you, Madam Mayor. I too think this is a very good motion, and I agree with what the Deputy Mayor just said and what we've been calling for for some time. When we're giving the state government $3 million in levy and getting $100,000 back only for some waste programs, that's just not—it's not fair, and we need to push to get this back. What I would just see, if Councillor Wheeler might add, would be in point A, as well as support local and regional council resource recovery programs and regional capital infrastructure. Investment .
Sure, sure, just keep building this thing. But that's just going on from what the Deputy Mayor was just saying about new technologies and new advancements. If we can't have it all back here, then at least with the growing city on our doorstep, let us have some sort of facilities that can be utilised with that money, rather than it going to non-waste things. So if we add that, that'd be good. But thank you to all those who've worked on this long-awaited strategy. It's been a long time coming, and as the Speaker alluded to, we did come to a standstill after progressing significantly at the start of the last Council term. The importance of moving to a circular economy, of course, can't be understated, as there's many opportunities within the waste sector, and we do have the advantage that we do have a waste management facility here, even though it's fast approaching the end of its life, so to speak.
It's encouraging to see that we're participating in working with various organisations like Western Sydney University and Sydney Water and with WesROC, of course, because we do have this massive growth on our doorstep, and it's more important than ever to ensure that resources are kept in the economy longer, that increased sharing and reuse are encouraged, and that we strive to reduce the enormous amounts of carbon emissions which are embedded in food and other products and need to be managed in a much, much better way. It was great to see the public feedback, and some common themes emerged there. It's obvious that people in the community are concerned about our waste management, that they do think about waste.
Some people think that people don't think about it, but it's often one of the major conversations that comes up when people are speaking to you about Council matters. There's obviously a keenness to see the FOGO system in place, which many of us have pushed for for a long time, and I'm a little bit concerned that we just have to sit around and wait until some guidelines come out, because I think that the sooner we get this system in place, the better. And I'm wondering if we can actually proceed with something, at least in our urban areas, that could be tailored to any future guidelines. This is probably morphing into a question, or. Because the concern of mine is that on a state level, there's no uniformity in FOGO.
So, like Penrith has one system, others have a different system. Is the aim of the guidelines to uniform? Can someone answer that? Is it to give a uniform FOGO system?
Through you, Madam Mayor, the intention is that all residents in New South Wales by 2030 have a food and garden organic service. That's about the extent of the consistency.
Okay. So, given that as the response, would it be possible for us to proceed in part with one, or do we have to continue to wait until we've determined the entire LGA system?
There would be risks in proceeding with a system that only, or a process that only deals with the urban and the peri-urban areas. It may be that within a short period of awarding a contract, for example, the guidance from the EPA comes through that it is indeed every residence within the city, which would pose considerable challenges for us. But it's something that we continue to press the EPA on, to have that guidance released early on.
Hopefully they'll, they'll release those shortly. And it is a shame that they didn't move to uniform it properly because it's quite confusing for people. Aside from that, I think that people raised, as Councillor Wheeler said about having a better tip shed system, and that, of course, has been raised often. But we're very lucky that in our community we've got initiatives such as what's undertaken by the Remakery and so on. I'd like to say hear, hear to the person who submitted about enforcing the bringing in the bin rules. I understand it's a challenge for those in isolated areas, but in terms of the bins being sitting out on the street, sometimes for the two weeks between collection, they're a hazard.
They're dangerous when you drive. They take up parking spaces, and I think that we should educate people to take their bins inside once they're emptied. You dodge them all over the place around where I live. Also, educating people around waste is always a beneficial project, and the War on Waste series has been a wonderful—it's always well attended—and it's a wonderful system of waste education. The Councillor Wheeler addressed the people wanting 12 kerbside collections. I share her dismay that people have that much stuff that they want to be putting out. But I am worried that for some people, simply don't have a capacity to get to a tip, and if that's why they're thinking that they need that many, then that's different from people who are just buying too much stuff to throw out.
If they don't have a trailer or a ute or even a vehicle they can put anything in, they're relying solely on a once a fortnight garbage collection. That may be different. But yeah, I'm also wondering in terms of the kerbside collection, and I think I've raised this before, is whether we have— analysed whether it would be better to do it on a suburb-by-suburb set date, or whether we will continue with individual booking for the kerbside collection.
Through you, Madam Mayor, my personal experience is that the booking collection is a better outcome for a few reasons. You tend to have—it's a more efficient service, and more targeted, and you tend also to not have the situation arise where you've got a lot of rubbish sitting around for a long period of time on a street. If everyone knows the date, you start to see rubbish two weeks beforehand starting to pile up. That's certainly been my experience in other councils, and the presence of rubbish on the footpath, legitimate for kerbside collection, does have an impact on encouraging further dumping. So we can certainly look at it, and that's one of the matters that we'll be bringing to Council later on with our tender in the new year. But for now, I think it would be—the best option would be to continue with the current system.
Okay, thanks. I did wonder, because on the flip side of that, I have seen places where they put it all out and most of it disappears again because of the reuse factor. But it'd be interesting to know about that. And also... One thing I'd like to say is that I think that we all—we're really lucky we've got some really good community champions amongst us who take it upon themselves to clean roadsides and public spaces, and huge thank you to those people who do that. As an organisation, I'd like to see every one of us, though, take that responsibility too, to actually report when we see dumped rubbish. And every council truck that drives past somewhere, or everybody who's in a car park booking somebody, if they see dumped rubbish, can we please have it reported, and councillors as well if we see it?
Because too often I'll be in a car park and there's overflowing bins and, you know, I ring up and it hasn't been reported. And I think that we all see it whenever we see rubbish, for the reasons that the director just said, when there's a pile of rubbish, there'll soon be a much bigger pile if it's left uncollected and if it's not picked up. So this is a big step for our council to now have a strategy in this regard, which is really encouraging to see. Hopefully it'll bring forward some more opportunities connected to it, and it'll serve a better purpose for better managing our waste reduction, but also opening up more opportunities for revenue-generating opportunities that are as the circular economy as it evolves.
And again, I thank the staff and Councillor Wheeler also for her motion. Thank you.
Relation to the monies returned from the collection of the tip, has the state got a policy on what they give back to councils, or is it tip-by-tip situation?
In terms of the waste levy, I guess the reallocation of it to what Councillor Calvert mentioned, you know, general revenue and then how much comes back to the waste sector, the EPA did release their waste strategy last year, and in that it includes all the funding programs and the waste levy, you know, that portion that is reallocated to the waste sector, it provides all those funding programs. But it is true that Council's funding, like the direct allocation to local government, is actually reduced under their new EPA waste strategy.
Can I just ask a question through you, please, Councillor? Yes, Councillor Feigl. It's probably back to the Director of Infrastructure Services. Have you got any data on what leakage you get through the normal bins that doesn't get recycled? Because a few times I've been down at the tip, there's a lot there, whether it be furniture, metal, mattresses or whatever. Have you got any data on that as a percentage at all?
In terms of the waste, or the component of the waste stream that ends up in the landfill that could be recycled, I think we have data on that. Yeah, we can take that on notice. You can take
It on notice. I was just interested if there's a high percentage or not. Can I just speak very briefly to it anyway? The business I’m in, we recycle a lot of cardboard paper. Most of it goes to China. At the moment it was getting about $180 a tonne, that’s export. That’s collapsed for some reason. But it is clean. The major doesn’t take much of our waste anymore because it’s dirty. It really comes down to, if you’re going to produce waste and recyclables, you need to have a demand for it as well. So I get it, all right. We haven't got industries in this country yet, although it is getting a lot better. Most of the FMCGs like Coca-Cola and the others are starting to recycle a lot of their stuff now.
In fact, it's probably 100%. So in time, I suspect it will get better. I'm interested about what they do with EPS, though. I suspect that's expanded polystyrene collections, isn't it? EPS, not just styrene. Just on the motion that Councillor Wheeler's got there at number three, establish a polystyrene collection. We're talking about expanded polystyrene. What do you do with that? I'd be interested, because I don't know what they do with it.
Is a point, though. It's a point there that there should be. If you can recycle the stuff, it should be at the tip face as well. So I agree with that point. But I would like to know, if you could, with notice about what they do with EPS, please.
Thanks, Madam Mayor, and thank you all for your contributions. As you know, it always gives me joy when we reach a shared consensus position. I think we've had some really interesting things raised. I just want to address the fact that, and I think it has been by the Deputy Mayor and Councillor Lyons-Buckett, that this isn't about funding the externalities. This is about, in fact, Council funding waste recovery, waste collection and disposal, and some recovery, and the state government siphoning off a significant amount of money from our ratepayers to do so. And they should be held to account for that. And it's not good enough that they say, well, we've funded a few waste recovery programs.
It's not good enough that the people of the Hawkesbury, and if you talk to people about this, people of the Hawkesbury are paying over the odds for waste disposal compared to other areas of Sydney, for example, Blacktown, where they don't have the same impost on their waste collection that we do here. That's not reasonable, and we shouldn't be propping up that. But I think Councillor Veigel also raises an interesting point. And what's really going on here with waste is that the disproportionate cost of waste is covered by ratepayers and councils, not by the manufacturers of all of this stuff who profit from the endless churn that we're all encouraged to participate in, and that's really what's causing a huge amount of the problem.
And so council, as the end receiver, we're not even the end—we don't use this stuff. We just collect it because it's been deemed by the state government that it's our problem, and we pay for that, and in fact our ratepayers pay for that, whilst someone else gets rich off the back of that constant turnover of stuff. We've seen recently too the collapse of RedCycle, and I'm sure we're about to see that increasing our volumes of collected waste. I know it's affecting me at home. I'm trying really hard not to buy anything that's in plastic. It's bloody hard, and it's particularly difficult on low-income and fixed-income households because buying things in bulk usually means going to a more expensive source than the supermarket where everything's wrapped in plastic.
So I think the time has come really for New South Wales to bite the bullet about waste and for the state government to carry its share of the load and start legislating about some of this stuff. I think too we're seeing, and that's why we're seeing councils in other areas of Sydney and overseas—the deputy mayor referred to what's going on in parts of Europe—they've got land constraints that are really determining. The idea that you could just stick it in this never-ending hole is going. We don't have the land, and we're a large, sparsely populated LGA, and we can see that the land is running out. I'm very happy to send this to WesROC. I'm hoping that we can have a regional solution for some of these.
I'd love to be in the position where we could have a facility like the community... Facilities that happen at Addison Road in Marrickville with the Bauer and the reuse shed there, or something like Kimbriki, where I think the figures that I pulled, the Kimbriki site recycles 80% of incoming wastes for the Northern Beaches, and they've diverted 4 million tonnes of waste from landfill. That's an extraordinary amount. Shoalhaven is set to divert 90% of its mixed waste from landfill using its facility. So there's plenty going. Moss Vale has got a fantastic huge tip shop. It's not run by council; it's run by a social enterprise called the Challenge Foundation. It doesn't cost council, but they provide the space for it.
This is what we should be aiming for on the edge of Sydney. We've got the land. The rest of Western Sydney has the people, and I think a partnership with ResRock around that would be fantastic. I do want to make mention very quickly of the Windsor Guides, who I've spent a couple of evenings with now as they completed their Turn the Tide badge, which is an international badge. It began in India, and it's taken the girls a full 12 months to earn this badge, looking at a whole lot of different waste solutions, and they asked me to come in and talk about what they could do themselves and what council might be willing to do as well around the waste space. They're very keen to do some more education around that.
It was really interesting to hear them talk about what their schools are doing, to watch the primary schools who are really on top of this stuff and really working hard, and that drop-off as they got into high school, and the beginning of those feelings that they couldn't control what was happening because it was too big, and that there was a real need for manufacturers and government to step into that space and leave these kids with a better planet as we hand it over. So they really were lovely to chat to. So I'd just like to make mention of them. Thank you.
Thank you, Councillor. I'll put the motion to the vote. All those in favour, please raise your hand. In favour are Councillor Reardon, Councillor Veigel, Councillor Sheather, Councillor Kotlash, Councillor Calvert, Councillor Djuric, Councillor Lyons-Buckett, Councillor Wheeler, Councillors Improgno, Councillor McMahon. Those against? Councillor Conolly. And you're not voting, Councillor Dogramaci. I declare the motion carried.
RESOLVED on the motion of Councillor Wheeler, seconded by Councillor Lyons-Buckett.
That Council:
1. Adopt the Waste and Resource Recovery Strategy 2032 attached as Attachment 1 to this report.
2. Write to the NSW Government to return 100% of the monies collected by the NSW State Government as part of the waste levy to local governments to:
- a) Support local and regional Council resource recovery programs and regional capital infrastructure investment.
- b) Build a recycling industry that actually creates a market for recycled products and creates jobs from the transformation of our waste for reuse in other materials.
- c) Expand and urgently implement education programs for residents and local businesses to drive down waste to landfill.
3. Receive a report on the cost of the establishment of a polystyrene collection point at the Hawkesbury Waste Management Facility.
4. Provide its resolution and Attachment 1 to the report to the Western Sydney Regional Organisation of Councils.
Okay, moving on to the second item subject to public address, item 217, update on Rising Main C. Again, Mr. Ross, if you'd like to come and address the Council, please.
The first consideration I have is that there has been no clear statement given to the public as to what the costs are that have been incurred or are projected to be incurred in any finality
It is very unclear, as far as I'm concerned. It appears to be somewhere in the range of 50 to 55 million, particularly just associated with this one particular element of the project, or the project itself.
The public are entitled, I believe, to have that information provided. It is not sufficient for a business paper to indicate that there was a meeting in the way of a councillor briefing on the 8th of November, for which the public have no knowledge of or the content thereof. That's just totally untenable. You do have a CSP. You do have a community engagement policy. Please, when will you follow them? When did the public get any look in on what is going on here? This is just absolutely abhorrent and totally untenable, totally untenable . So, you've got those situations. So, I would suggest that you defer the matter to at least the end of January, at which time a full statement of costs incurred up to the end of December, both in terms of capital and operational expenditure, including the expenditure of reserves as has occurred, be made known to the public, and a further statement of projected costs known or anticipated at that time to complete the stabilisation of the main and return to, shall we say, normal serviceability, so that there's some appreciation of what the total outflow is going to be, and that be dissected between capital and operational costs
Now, the other aspect of this matter is that this is not just the sole province of concern in regard to the operation of the sewerage business — sorry, the wastewater treatment business, as Council describes it in the business paper . If one looks at the financial accounts in 2019, there was a revaluation of the assets by $56 million,
Which resulted in an appreciation, apparently, of fair value. But the accounting treatment of that was to reduce the accumulated depreciation by that amount, and there it stood. The effect of that was, and has been, that the projected life, apparently, the serviceability of the whole infrastructure of Council was extended by 65 years, which of course is a total nonsense when you've got the Windsor plant, which was constructed in 1938.
There was a missing element in the accounts for that year and subsequent years. The missing element in the accounts for that year was that consideration had to be given to the condition of the plant at that stage, the ageing of the plant, and that there needed to be an adjustment to the actual depreciation charges on a cumulative basis to offset the revaluation. Subsequent to that, Council has been depreciating those assets roughly at about 2 to 2.2 million per annum, even up to June '22. That is inconsistent with the exercise that should have been done at 1 July 2019, namely to reassess the service life of the assets that comprise that, and to re-evaluate the depreciation that is appropriate for Council to recover those funds that are involved in that exercise.
So , in other words, the rate notices that have gone out have been undercharged by anything between possibly three and five million per annum for those years. So there's a potential very much greater loss involved in this whole situation, and I think that needs to be brought to light. And it's just totally unsatisfactory. I suggest that action be taken immediately to redress that and to report to Council in that regard. Thank you.
Yeah, thanks, Mr Ross. We see the frustration, probably all of us. On page 58, under discussion, it clearly indicates there the cost. It says the forecast cost, the total cost of the works associated with 30 million. You mentioned 55 or something. That's adding a cumulative cost of two different projects, one for cleaning up, one for the project itself. I just need to clarify that. Have you read that section?
Now, there's been no statement at all, as I can see on the public record, of 10 May, 19 July, as to what the actual costs have been incurred at any stage. We don't know what has been taken out of reserves and paid to accommodate the transport costs or other remediation works or engineering or any of it. No, none of it.
Yeah, Madam Mayor, just if the staff can clarify just what I spoke of and what Mr Ross was asking, and I know some of the stuff we just discussed confidential in relation to the тенders and process that were offered. The other thing, the question that was asked was in relation to the
Remediation, I suppose, or the investigation, the works that was done, supposed to be done in 2019. I believe that in a briefing recently we were indicated that there wasn't an overhaul of the system, and can that be clarified?
Do you want to just have that question put succinctly? Do you want to just, what would, just put your question to the staff, just so, because that was a lot of information in that. So what was the first part you'd like answered
Through you, Madam Mayor, there hasn't been any significant or material variance from the figures presented on page 58 in terms of the projected costs of the project and the cartridge costs and street sweeping at this point in time
Thank you. And the other was, I guess the maintenance program and stuff that was done on the sewer treatment plant system and the like, that was, I believe it was done last year.
You, Madam Mayor. Yeah, so what Mr. Ross was referring to was that we have to do an assessment, a valuation of all our infrastructure assets, and it's an assessment done every year. There was a revaluation done, a full revaluation done in 2019. As part of that valuation exercise, they look at the remaining useful lives, so they get reviewed. That's all audited by the New South Wales Audit Office, and any adjustments going forward are based on those elements. Data is always improving on assets, and we now have a centralised asset team that will be looking closely at that, so there may be adjustments in the future, but it's all based on knowledge we have at the time, and it's audited by the New South Wales Audit Office.
Thank you very much. I give up. It was a hot subject for me. As you know, I followed the trucks on many occasions. If I could go back on the first of this month, 7 :30 in the morning, 8 :30 in the afternoon, PM Galleria, Slaney. I can give you the number plate, as a matter of fact, at 17: 43, YN54WG . That's Slaney . I give up. Nothing is going to change, and the cost will just go up and up. And when we had that confidential meeting, I said, and I told people, I told all of you that mark my word, the cost will go up and up. And I always refer things to what I have learned in the United States. One of the easiest things in the world is spending OPM. That's other people's money. Keep spending.
That's okay. And some people told me that we were going to get the money from state government. So what? That means that if federal government gave us 20 , 30 million dollars, it's okay because it's not our money. Keep spending.
I don't know what to say, but I give up. But I'm also declaring in here now, as I promised Councillor Zamprogno that I would keep it quiet, but from now on, I'm not. I will go public, and I will do whatever is necessary to get some peoples or to get some... If, if it goes to state government, which I did write to the Premier, I contacted ICAC, I contacted the Ombudsman. Something had to happen. It didn't happen. I suggested many things, as a small, tiny businessman, how things, you know, should be run. I was told that it was ductile iron, and some people in management didn't even know what it was. From 2.7 million dollars, it went to 4, 6, 8,
This council has no money or financial problems. It's like a business. It is a business. If it was a private enterprise, many people, you know, would be sacked a long time ago. But like I said, it's spending other people's money. Keep doing it. That's okay. You are immune. We have hungry people out there. We have kids. They go to bed without any food. We have single dads, single mums, struggling to put decent food on the table. And here we are spending 20, 30 million dollars. More to come. Carry on. Carry on doing what you are doing. It will not stop there. They will find the ductile iron suddenly turning to mehanite. I attempted to go there again to have a look again. Somebody by the name of Fahmy first asked my name.
When I mentioned, he said that I wasn't allowed to go in. I said, That's okay, that's no problem. It will just keep going up and up, and nothing will change. So I give up. I'm not going to fight in here anymore, but I will go public. Somebody has to answer, you know, what's happening, why did it happen, why some recommendations or suggestions weren't taken seriously. I don't know what to say, but
Page 61, it's the second paragraph down under insurance. It talks about claims and stuff. It doesn't indicate how much we're likely, if a claim was successful, and I'm talking about percentage, not about money, what sort of percentage on any expenditure there would we be likely to get back?
Through you, Madam Mayor, it would depend on which policy we were accessing for what event or for what component. So the view of staff is detailed in the report is that the cause of this failure was the March 2021 flood. Under Council's policy, the sub-limit has been exhausted for that claim. So we wouldn't anticipate, of course, that there's anything coming from that event. For the flood events in March 20— sorry, July 2022 and October 2022, the figures are... In round numbers, less than two million total, and they really are for direct cleanup costs and rectification works that arose as a direct result of the flood. But having said that, as I said, there hasn't been any claim and there hasn't been any assessment of any claim either.
Thank you. Anything further? I might just add a couple of very quick points as well. Suffice to say that looking at this report, and this report is public, so this is now out in the public domain for our ratepayers to see. Absolutely, the cost of this whole situation is less than ideal. However, we must keep remembering what our LGA has been through. This isn't an excuse for what's happened, but we have had so many floods over the last couple of years, and when you look at this report, which does go into the detail about the cost, and that number is mind-blowing when you look at it. It's absolutely mind-blowing. However, what it does show in here on page 60 is that, in a way to address this funding, this situation to fund the repair of this rising main , we have to establish what caused it.
And we are struggling to be able to establish exactly what caused it because we can't get the video through the sewer main. If I've got any technical terms incorrect, please correct me. This is not my forte. So we cannot get a camera in there to ascertain what's been going on. What we can— Allege at this point in time is that it failed because of the floods, and that is something that I think that we as a council will have to put to the state government. There is precedent that they have looked at a similar situation in Lismore, up in the Northern Rivers, and they have funded that particular circumstance. So, in terms of trying to get the money back from the state government, we will be able to hopefully make a case that can establish the cause of that failure.
Now, I get your point, Councillor Dogramaci. Whether you're calling it ratepayers' money or taxpayers' money, it's still other people's money, or your money, my money, that we're paying. I completely appreciate that. But we are here representing this organisation, and our pool of funds is much smaller than the state government's pool of funds, which is much larger. Now, I'm really hoping that moving forward, if we adopt this motion tonight, if it gets adopted, we will have the borrowings available to be able to cover that shortfall . But then, as mayor, it will be my job, in conjunction with the staff, hopefully able to put forward a case to show what caused the failure, to be able to establish that to the state government and get that reimbursement of funds from whether it be the Disaster, Natural Disaster Funding Arrangements or through government assistance.
But that's something we'll have to work on. As I said, I go back to my main point. This is less than ideal . I get Councillor— sorry, I go to Councillor Ross. I'm so used to saying that. Sorry, Mr Ross. Mr Ross's point about what are the projected costs and when does the timeline end for this, I completely get that. I do hope now, though, that the public can see that we've put this information into a public report. Briefings that happen are confidential for a reason. I think you do know that, Mr Ross, from your time here on Council. Briefings go to the heart of sometimes matters that concern our contractors or commercial agreements, and I think that's why you'll note that two additional items for this item 217 are actually in our— In our confidential session, because it goes to the heart of the contract and the heart of the technical drawings.
And I think people accept that as a reality. There are some things that we can't put out in the public domain because it jeopardises contracts or commercial agreements with other people who are doing the job. So I hope that moving forward, I'm urging the staff to please establish the case for us so that we can put it to the state government and receive, hopefully receive, reimbursement. That will be my job to make that case— or our job, the 12 of us, to make that case and put that pressure on. And I hope that we can do that in a timely way. But I take all of your points on board. We would love to not be in this situation, but we are . But by and large, it looks like it happened from a result of continuous floods and the pressure on the system.
So that's my two cents there. Thank you. If there's no one else wishing— you've spoken, Councillor Dogramaci. You only have the opportunity to ask a question.
Through you, Madam Mayor, the commissioning of the reconstructed sewer main is, as of late last week, still on track for the 23rd of January, and then the clean-up works, backfilling and so forth will proceed after that. Now, we're not too concerned with the duration of the time for the backfilling, so I don't have that number in my head, or that date in my head, I apologise. The date for the commissioning, though, is of high importance because that's the date that we can cease the truck movements carting. So it's January now . The commissioning? That's correct. Yes, as of late last week. In writing? That's the forecasted update from the contractor in writing, yes
In writing, January will be the... Do we know the date? Since this company is so experienced and took 10, 20, 30 million dollars from ratepayers, what is the exact date? Thank you, councillor. You can ask the date, but that's the extent of the question, Director.
As I just said, the date for the commissioning is the 23rd of January forecast. It's forecast to be the 23rd of January on the current program, which was the date in their last update to us Thursday or Wednesday last week.
I think that goes to the commercial terms of the contract, councillor. Yeah, thank you, Director. So that one will be something we'd have to discuss in confidential, councillor.
Okay, well, and I'll guarantee you that, you know, it's not going to be finished on the 20th. They'll find something else anyway. Thank you. Thank you,
Wheeler. Thanks, Madam Mayor. Very quickly. This is a staggering cost. It's not... but I think we really need to be cognisant of the fact that we can't do nothing about this. We can't just sit here and go, Well, that's a lot of money. We won't spend it, because the result of that, of course, is a whole lot of sewer in the river, a whole lot of houses that don't have a proper functioning sewerage system, and staggering fines from the EPA. So while this is really expensive, it's just one of those unfortunate, unforeseen things that happens in natural disasters. What we're seeing are the impacts of climate change and the increase in intensity and frequency of natural disasters. We're going to have to live with that. And so, frankly, as the state government ...
There is no cover-up here. The costs are on page 58 of this report. It's $30 million. What isn't here is the breakdown of costings because it's commercial in confidence. There should be no surprise that those costings are not sitting in the public section of the business paper. The external borrowings are clear. That's a lot of money, $32.5 million over 20 years we're currently signing up for. And with that comes a $134 increase in the annual fee for those people who are covered by council's sewerage system. The thing that concerns me here, if the state government or the federal government don't help us out with this, and this isn't something that we're doing as an ad. This is one of those really essential pieces of infrastructure that most councils in metropolitan—well, no other council in metropolitan Sydney—is required to deliver that we have to wear here, and has a real weak point.
It's a sewer. It's a sewage treatment plant on a floodplain. This is not a grand idea, but it's a mess that we've inherited from the way this city has evolved . We are now moving to a tale of two cities with respect to sewer provision in this LGA. We've got those of us who are covered by Sydney Water who pay less than $600 a year for our sewage collection and treatment, and those who aren't, who pay lots more, either for our sewerage system or for pump-out and collection, or people who provide their own systems. This is a message that the state government needs to be receiving loud and clear from this council, that if you want us to be a metropolitan council, if you want to take away our planning powers, if you want to give us all the imposts of a metropolitan council, if you want to deny us regional funding and regional roads funding, then start paying for metropolitan level of services, which includes a fundamental service like sewerage.
collection and treatment, because this isn't just an environmental issue. It's not a matter of convenience. It's not one of those nice things you go home and say, ‘Oof, we did a good thing tonight.’ This is a fundamental public health issue and a reasonable expectation of a civilised city in the 21st century, that the state government is blithely ignoring, and our ratepayers are carrying the can for. And that's the message that we need to be taking to the state and federal government, that in an era of increasing natural disasters, in an era of increasing pressure on land use pressure, and a pile of water flooding down that South Creek catchment from all of that development that's going on, all of which is on Sydney Water's sewerage, I might add, this is something that we are having to bear the brunt of, and we shouldn't have to.
And that's the message that we need to be getting across. In the meantime, we're being responsible by funding this fix-up ourselves. It's a bitter pill for our ratepayers, I think, who don't have any of the benefits of Sydney Water's infrastructure—not the drinking water; ours comes out of the river—not the sewerage system, none of it. All the costs, none of the benefits.
Thank you, councillor. I think that's a nice way to—not nice, but a very important way to end with those remarks. And if there's no other councillors wishing to speak, I'll go right of reply, Councillor Sheather.
Thank you very much, councillor. I'll therefore put the motion, which is a recommendation in the business paper. All those in favour, please raise your hand. Councillor Reardon, Veigel, Councillor Sheather , Councillor Conolly, Councillor Kotlash, Councillor Calvert, Councillor... Djuric , Councillor Lyons-Buckett, Councillor Wheeler, Councillor McMahon. Those against, please raise your hand. Councillor Dogramaci, Councillor Zamprogno, you're not voting? No, abstain.
RESOLVED on the motion of Councillor Sheather, seconded by Councillor Veigel.
That Council:
1. Receive and note the update on the progress of Rising Main C, the projected total costs to be incurred and measures being undertaken to seek funding from other levels of government and insurance.
2. Approve external borrowings of $32.5 million to fund the rectification and ancillary works associated with Rising Main C, with the acceptance of the preferred loan offer to be delegated to the General Manager, in accordance with Council's Borrowing Policy.
Okay. Okay , the next item is still one more item subject to public address. That is item 218, which is quite coincidental to be carrying on from the previous item that we just discussed, the sewerage scheme review. And I ask Mr Ross to please come up to the microphone again. Thank you, Mr Ross.
Thank you, Councillor. Mayor Budden and councillors, again, I call on you not to accept the staff recommendation. The first comment I'd like to make is that I served between September 2016 and December 2022.
I was heavily involved in the financial matters of Council, attended pre-operational plan meetings and so on and so forth over a number of years, and the particular
The accounting or consulting firm that is mentioned here was never, and I mean that literally, never raised, or did their name come to light through any of the time that I served on Council or I was deeply involved in. All matters pertaining to the finances and the waste treatment business
So this comes as a complete surprise. And again, I think it is not a good reflection on the administration of this council that there are apparently activities going on which are not within the purview of the elected councillors. And that is totally unsatisfactory, from my point of view as a personal citizen and as a former councillor. Now, we can't see the sewerage business review. KPMG have got this, or have apparently done this at council's behest, and I would wonder if there is any allocation within the operational plan for that, per se, and identified for that, per se. Good question. Now,
I'm boxing at shadows. I have got no idea as to the content of this business review, whether it's got any engineering component at all or not, or whether it's purely a financial analysis and operating on particular—what are the assumptions?
It appears to me that whilst this has come to light only as a result of presumably the sudden interest in disposing of the— Wastewater business, which is a business, you know, we're out to at least recover costs, if not make a profit. It's not a community service. This is a business, so you want to cover your costs at least. So we don't know exactly what they were engaged to do, but I would suggest that it has probably been done base over apex, as usual. The first thing that ought to have been done is hire somebody like GHD, who are reputable engineers and specialists in that field, who designed, as I understand it, the Ferry Road plant. They should have been called in to do a complete assessment of both plants and their current state of operations and such information as the condition in which those plants are and what are the remaining service lives of those plants, and all relevant details there before you start looking at financial matters.
Because I would suggest also that there are probably different alternatives that may have been able to be suggested that I don't know whether they have been suggested. Usually there is more than one road into Rome. I believe that's the case. There is always more than one solution to every problem. It's a matter of just finding it and working it through. But the public, again, don't get a look in. This is great, isn't it? Now , I appreciate that there are difficulties involved because we're talking about the lives of employees of this council, and I respect that. But they also have to respect that it is the ratepayers and the business operators who are copping all the costs of running this outfit.
You can't do an operation like this without the public being aware of what is going on. It's not a secret society. It's not a private business. This is public money, public business, and there are considerations that, unfortunately, involve employees and staff , and that, I appreciate, does have to be managed and is an integral part of the costs. But the council has an obligation to the community under the CSP and the engagement policies to engage the public about it. And the business of council is supplying the public as one of the multiple suppliers of these wastewater treatment services in the area. I mean, we've got Richmond being serviced by Sydney Water, and some other areas are as well.
The council is supplying some of these services to other areas. We've got pump-out services. We've got all sorts of things going on. But there has to be a proper, open and sensible line of approach on this, and this looks just as if we've all run for the exit because it looks like it's going to be a real mess-up here, and there's going to be big dollars involved in the costs. We're all of a sudden going to find out that we're 50 or 100 million down the gurgler.
Great. But if we're looking at it from the wrong perspective, or we don't have the correct information or the necessary information on which to even assess those levels of potential loss or potential gain, I don't understand how this thing can be looked at without the public being given better information, and I would suggest the councillors themselves, even in their little secretive enclave and the smoke rising from the building.
Can I move the recommendation, but could I start with a question, which is why it was deemed inappropriate to release the initial business case to the public ?
I'm happy to commence, and perhaps the Director of Infrastructure Services can chime in. As the speaker, Mr Ross, indicated, this is effectively—it's a service, but it is also a business, and the confidential attachment of the initial review provided to you by our consulting firm is effectively, we would consider it to be commercial in confidence, and if it was released to the public, would confer a competitive advantage on somebody who potentially, at some point in the process, could be effectively procuring the service.
Thank you. Based on the information we've been provided with, I think this is— Looks like the way forward. So I'm happy to move this motion and continue this process. The only comment I would make, which perhaps can be fleshed out as we keep moving on, is that it does seem like we're setting ourselves up for a very, very detailed and long process. And I'd really like to ensure that we're not being overly bureaucratic and safe in that process, and that we're spending a lot of ratepayers' money to come to the same outcome potentially. That's not something we have to decide tonight, but just something I want to flag.
Through you, Madam Mayor, I think that it is entirely appropriate for the council to resolve a preferred position rather than get down an 18-month long path, and then for council to consider what the end business model may be for the sewerage business. The next stage is a detailed feasibility study. It will be costly and lengthened if we don't refine it down to a one or perhaps second preferred option. And it is an appropriate juncture, I think, and it's my staff's recommendation that at this point we put to council for your determination which is the preferred option moving forward for that detailed feasibility study.
Thanks, because the concern that I have with this is that if we, and we do have a detailed report that has come to us confidentially, and we did have a briefing from the consultants . I guess I'm not completely satisfied that if we go down, if we go down the sale path , that we aren't, that it isn't going to be something that we regret down the track. So I know that we have some serious regret at the moment, given our friend Rising Main C, and I don't want us to act in haste because of that, frankly, exorbitant cost. I don't understand the biodiversity offset stuff sufficiently at the moment. I'm concerned about the loss of water reuse opportunities if we do divest this asset, and I would like us to, I would like whatever we do going down that feasibility analysis, that we look at the capacity to reuse the water that comes out of the treatment plant, because I think we have this quite unique, as much as we are sick of it, we have this unique capacity to reuse the wastewater that comes from that facility.
And we saw during the drought that actually was incredibly beneficial, both for farmers outside the Hawkesbury and for our own farmers in the provision of fodder during the drought. This isn't all a bad facility. What we get out of this isn't all a pain, and I'd like us not to lose those. And I'm not satisfied that what's come back to us flags those benefits. What worries me the most is the loss of Both the outputs and the cost. If we divest to an organisation which doesn't have Sydney Water's charter, so we're, I think, getting Sydney Water to take this on with that charter, where everybody who's serviced by Sydney Water pays the same, and there's that cost subsidisation across the Sydney basin.
I'm comfortable with that for the people who are on this sewerage treatment system. But if we end up with a commercial operator who doesn't have that charter, and they are making—they're not just treating that sewerage, but they're making a profit on treating that sewerage in a way that Council can't, then it's our ratepayers who are—it's those communities who are paying, it's the end users who are paying that extra money. And that concerns me greatly, and that's why I can't support point two of this motion at this point, because I don't feel comfortable with divesting that cost impost onto the people of the LGA who are stuck with this system through no fault of their own. So I can't support the motion as it stands.
I would be comfortable supporting points one and two if we could— I'll move an amendment to strike out point two, so just have points one and three. We'll see how that goes, and then I'll hope—I'll foreshadow, if that fails, that I'll move to take the motion in seriatim.
Thank you, Madam Mayor. I just had a question around that. What percentage of ongoing costs, and I take on board what Councillor Conolly said about the extent of the process and so on, what percentage would it be to move forward with looking into two potential options rather than one? Director of Infrastructure.
I don't have a— To succinctly answer to that, it's—we haven't gone out and sought fee proposals or anything of that nature yet. So the figure that's referred to in here is based on our past experience of a similar consulting-type project. I would anticipate that if you were to take two options to the detailed feasibility study, it would be at least 50% more, and perhaps higher than that. Okay,
Thank you. I'll support the amendment because I share the same concerns Councillor Wheeler does. Of course, when we're looking at these decisions, we're looking from the point of view of representing our community and ensuring that our residents end up with a fair and equitable system that they're faced with. I understand logistically it's very difficult, and we had the presentation around all those things, and of course I agree that this is something that we have to come up with a solution to, that we have to work towards. But I'll support the amendment and see what comes of that, and I may speak again after that. Thank you.
Thank you. I'll speak against the amendment, just to point out that we've already had an initial review, so this isn't the first time we're going to be looking at it. We've had a review by a commercial operator looking at a consultancy, I should say, looking at a few different options, bringing it back to two and then making a recommendation on the way forward. That report's already been reviewed by our council staff and by us, and we're now suggesting that we're not making a decision tonight, clearly, to go and divest the sewer business. We're making a decision that that of the options presented to us was the most feasible and is the first one we should investigate. I think it would be silly to go and do detailed feasibility analysis on multiple different options when I, for one, and I think some others are already concerned about the cost of doing this for one option.
If we were going to do multiple options, we've wasted our money on the first review. We shouldn't have done that if we were going to go and do detailed analysis on all of it. I wouldn't be in favour of that.
Council's got a responsibility for the services it provides. I've been around a little while. I've seen Prospect County Council go. That was owned by local government, then sold off, and all the problems we have with PowerSense. We used to have a service; you could make a phone call and have someone outside your house within an hour. Now it stays, and sometimes a lot longer than that. One service that local government provided and walked away from, with no compensation, I might add. More recently, the council handover of the ferries, all but one, that we discussed regularly about getting rid of that too. Another service that we're going to provide to the community. Well, try using it occasionally.
It's constantly off , problems with it and the likes. And when council serviced it and served the community , those stoppages were extremely rare. So diversing our responsibility is not always in the community's best interest. It might be in council's best interest financially, but certainly not in the community's. It's our job to service the things that we represent, and the history of this council is Sirrich has been part of that. The only complaints I've ever heard about Sirrich is pump out and the prices are dear. On page 72, it indicates that figures, that the price is likely to go up for the service by $462. And with the previous item, it indicates in that that there's going to be a likely cost of $134 on top of what they were paying, which was $370.06.
Now, those figures don't quite add up, so either we've got our figures wrong or Sydney Water's putting their fees up considerably, one or the other. So, Madam Mayor, when we spoke about this and had the briefing and stuff, I wasn't comfortable with it. The breakage we've had in the previous item we just spoke about puts us in a situation where we've got a problem. To chuck the baby out with the bathwater, I don't know whether that's a good idea or not. There's been the survey that was done and the likelihood of ongoing costs and stuff into the future had been budgeted for and the likes. This issue we have with the rising main, on top of that. And as you said, anyone that sees it sees that it was a fault of floods, and I believe that the government will come forward, as they did up north, and serve the council with appropriate funding for that.
This... Item though, I'm not yet convinced that it's the best way to go. I went along to see what the reports were, and they're fairly detailed in what outcomes and possible outcomes could be for the council.
I don't know that our residents would feel that way, even though the cost is quite substantial compared to Sydney Water. But, you know, like, where do we stop and start with the services that we're supposed to provide? We keep giving them away. We can give our seats away. There was comments earlier about the responsibilities in light that we have. Well, I don't think we've got enough, and the ones we've got, I don't think we do well enough. And I've got to be convinced that to dispose of what we're proposing here is in the best interest of the community.
Thanks, Madam Mayor. This is just a review. It's a feasibility study. Bring the facts back to the chamber, then we can decide what we need to do. The capital outlay for new infrastructure for sewage must be ginormous. And I can't see it getting any cheaper in the near future. And I guess the
Somebody said it was, I think the first commissioning was '38, if I heard Mr Ross right, if it is, and they've probably done the updates. I think it's got a lifespan. I don't know if a community of 70,000 people paying rates, if that's what the base is, can afford the infrastructure. Well,
Not, as somebody's mentioned, we're not making a decision tonight on it. We're just coming back to a motion to do a feasibility study on a report, which the option is to maybe fully divest and our infrastructure services.
So I'll voting for the motion on how it is, dare I say. I think we need to look at some cost savings for the community anyway, and I think if it did divest, and that can be proven, we can divest it and it can save the community any ongoing costs, and the service is there and it's safe and it's robust and it's maintained. We haven't got broken pipes for whatever reason, whether it be subsidence, flood or otherwise, and we're not polluting our river systems or whatever, then so be it. So I look forward to seeing the full report when it comes. I'm inclined to just go with the adopt to how the recommendation is at the present time. Madam Mayor, thank you.
Thank you, Councillor. I might just make some remarks as well. I won't be supporting the amendment. I'll be supporting, if the amendment fails, I'll be supporting the recommendation in the business paper. There's some points that need to be made here. I don't think that this report in the business paper is about just looking at how it helps Council. I think the very last paragraph on page 72 is actually all about how it helps ratepayers. It's as simple as that. It's black and white. If we divest the sewerage scheme to a business that is bigger than us and can spread the load across more people, then people's access to sewer is going to be cheaper. It is written there in black and white in the last paragraph of the report.
So it is not just about how it benefits Council, it's how it benefits the ratepayers. And I think when we're talking about keeping things that we, or that Council should be doing, in my opinion, and I'm sure in a lot of professional opinions, this is not what we should be doing. We shouldn't be doing this. It's not Council's core business. And if you look at, again, the last paragraph on page 68, and I'll quote, Council is unique in that it is the only Council within metropolitan Sydney that owns and operates a sewerage scheme. We're the only one. So if we're the only one that does that, how is it Council's core business if no other Council is doing it? It's just not. Sewerage services across metropolitan Sydney are largely delivered by Sydney Water, with a small number of commercial operators predominantly serving new developments.
So when we look at the last item we just discussed about the consequences of impacts on our scheme and our infrastructure, this is actually just, ironically, the exact conversation we should be having next about what we do with a system that's actually not our core business. And it's actually not any other Council's core business in the whole of metropolitan Sydney. So I think this is actually a very, very sensible approach. Now, when I've just heard commentary about what we put forward to be studied in the feasibility analysis, well, if just adding one extra element to be studied in that document increases the cost by 50%, and we're all here debating about how it affects ratepayers, I'm not going to sit here and put extra money onto ratepayers when every single thing we're asking them to investigate is increasing the cost by another 50%.
I think that — Keeping point two in the recommendation is actually what's economically sensible. I think that that's being transparent and open to the community, that this is what Council is thinking about the sewer scheme, and this is the way we're going to go. And that goes back to the heart of what Councillor Conolly said a moment ago about not continuing to talk about this years down the track, probably into another term of Council. We just get on with the job of making a decision, which is what we're elected to do. If you look back at the history of this on page 69, this began in 2015. So it's not a new thing that we're introducing into the Council in terms of something that we want to discuss.
This is actually what you call proper governance. This is what you call due diligence. We've gone then in 2022 and we've expanded on that. And we've gone back to KPMG, who we've engaged to continue that work, so that we actually have all of the proper foundations in place to be able to make this kind of a decision. I think that we have seen that with the amount of floods that we have had over the last few years, our sewer scheme isn't going to just keep being business as usual, as it has been over the last few decades. We're going to have those huge impacts to our system, and based on what we've just had to decide in the last item, I don't think that we can continue to keep making those kinds of decisions and spending that kind of money.
Why wouldn't we give it out to a service provider who can bear that cost greater because it's got such a larger base of people that they're covering?
Talking about other things as well, touched on ferries. Well, ferries is in Council's core business as well. No one wants to touch the Lower Portland Ferry. We're not going down there, but the point is the State Government should be paying for that. I know that we'll keep paying for it with the Hills because it's a service our community expects and it relies upon. But the State Government should be paying for that. It comes down to sewer. It’s not our core business. It’s not something that we should, in my opinion, be focusing on. We should be focusing on the things that we do well and ensuring that the things that the people out there who stop me on the street want to talk about, which is one word, and that’s roads, that we actually get on with doing the things that we can focus on.
And that increases that service delivery to those elements that we’re good at and that are our core business in delivering. So I’ll be voting against the amendment for those reasons, and I’d support the recommendation because it is absolutely sensible that we tell the community where we’re heading. Thank you. Councillor Lyons-Buckett.
A question, Madam Mayor, if I may. It’s around the wording of the amendment. Point two in the original motion was a commitment to supporting the full divestment of the sewerage business. Point three is around a detailed feasibility analysis of the divestment of the sewerage business. Do you think, question for staff, do you think that within that feasibility analysis, would the partial divestment be looked at because of the components of the parts that had to be divested? Would the analysis include an outcome for partial divestment? Thank you, Councillor Lyons-Buckett. Director of Infrastructure.
Anything other than full divestment, because point two specifies full divestment, and I know when we were looking at the options there was outsourcing as one of the options. Would that be included in the analysis along the way, or would it be simply all or nothing?
Thank you, Madam Mayor. Can I just ask a few questions? Firstly, the staff who are employed at the moment, I assume they are council staff. They're not employed by the business. And I know we discussed in the confidential session that somehow they would be looked after in the process, but that is not sort of outlined here in the report. And I know some staff are getting rather worried about their future. So is there a way to somehow mention the staff in this report and take away some of the concerns that are currently going on?
Through you, Madam Mayor, the feasibility study would look at a number of things, including the industrial relations matters and the value proposition for employees. What that means in plain language is what options might be feasible in terms of staff protections if we went down the path of divestment. So that is, and it's a requirement in other business areas such as waste collection, where anyone or the entity who receives, or for want of a better term, purchases the business would maintain employment conditions for a set period after the, effectively the date of contract, the date of sale. That is one of the things that we need to explore and ventilate through a detailed feasibility study, along with other aspects.
Thank you, Madam Mayor. The table on page 71, which outlines what the feasibility study would look at, doesn't specifically mention the staff or industrial relations that I can see. It talks about business
If I may, Madam Mayor. Sorry, yes, I hadn't— I didn't know the question was finished . On page 71, so the initial feasibility and assessment of key steps clearly starts to look outside of the financial scope of the analysis and includes strategic, environmental, customer, employee and regulatory considerations. So that is set out there, and that's certainly something that we would give an undertaking to our employees to do. Yes,
Thank you. I can see that, but it says employee considerations. I was hoping for a little bit more of a supportive phrase about our existing staff. This doesn't make any guarantees or promises. It just says, we'll think about it. Is it possible to put something more in there?
Through you, Madam Mayor, my instinct as councillor is that that would be something that would be drawn out of the next phase that we would look at those options for our staff as part of that feasibility analysis. So I'd be loath to add it at this particular point in time, simply because I think we need to do the analysis on it. But it's wholeheartedly our intent to look after the staff, I can assure you, councillor.
Thank you, and that's the kind of thing I wanted to put in the report, that statement you just made. It's our intent to look after the welfare of the staff. But I'll take your answer on board. Now, the other thing I wanted to ask about is the, when we're looking, if we are looking to divest the business, would Sydney Water be one of the possible players who might put their hand up to take the business over, or are we just assuming they're not going to?
Through you, Madam Mayor, Sydney Water would be the intuitive party to take over, for the reasons outlined in terms of all the other options that are available through the introduction of the Water Industry Competition Act 11 years ago. They're all of a similar size to us, and again, that is one of the things that we want to explore to a greater level of detail, is what might it look like as we begin to understand that Sydney Water operate in a different regulatory environment to us. They're governed by IPART, so we need to understand how their funding model works a little more. But Sydney Water is the party that we would be, I suppose, looking toward for an option of divestment.
Through you, Madam Mayor, I wouldn't be able to dictate that Sydney Water would come to the table to be a part of the process, but at the appropriate juncture we would commence talks with them.
Okay. So thank you for that. Looking at the amendments, see, I was concerned when it says full divestment in the recommendation, but I think you've answered that successfully in that we're not looking to privatise necessarily, from what I can see. I personally do not favour privatisation, and, I mean, you only have to look at the electricity business at the moment. Consumers pay more and get less for it. And privatising is not the way I would like this to go either. But if there is a possibility that Sydney Water might be one of the groups who might be involved in the feasibility study in one way or another, then I'd be happy to support the original recommendation rather than the amendment.
I wish we had another seat in here for Mr. Ross, who had been thinking, you know, same way that, you know, I have. There's a word saying that give credit where it is due, which is to Councillor Buckett. In the early days, they told me that running a private business is different than running a bureaucracy. I never thought it would be like this. Very interesting. You mentioned the name that we have responsibility to the people. Of course we do. And I don't know why the confidential meetings, the one that, you know, we had and the coming couple of in here, why do we not have to be transparent? I mean, what are we hiding from ratepayers? That's something else that we could discuss. And you mentioned the name KPMG.
Well, plenty of them. PricewaterhouseCoopers, and I can give dozens of these names. They prey on situations like that, and I know it because I have been there. Now, did we have to pay that huge amount of money to that consultancy firm to tell us retain the business, partially outsource, or sale of the business? I could have done that, you know, free of charge. Why did we have none of those people, you know, lived in Hawkesbury. They have no idea, you know, what people are going through. Like I said, people find it very difficult to put a decent meal. And council recently, I'm sure that, Madam Mayor, you know it. You know, I live in Pitt Town, and those volunteer people, you know, to cutting that small piece of grassy area.
Council couldn't even afford to give them $ 80, which they had to obtain through the different channels. Now , the other thing is that it amazes me who prepares all these reports, and especially like that on page 72, Reliable Council, Build Strong Financial Sustainability for Now and Future Generation. No kidding. How about we put there, We are Australians. We challenge. We stand together. Go ahead, Southern Cross, and that kind of things. What are we talking about? And here, one doesn't have to be a genius to say that the gap of $370 and is forecast to grow by year 2030 in seven years' time. I won't be here in seven years' time. Of course, you know, I don't want to die, but I won't be sitting in this chair.
One doesn't have to be a genius to say that it will go up, and financially will go down and down. Now , why do we have to spend, you know, days and times now? How about we form a committee now to think about what we are going to do, and a subcommittee, and then, you know, get another consultancy firm, so we could spend another 150, 200 thousand dollars. Why can't we just invite, you know, those people to come in here and answer us face to face, instead of, you know, just sitting and going through all these rules , regulations, red tapes and that kind of things? To me, it's all, I don't know. Like I said before, and I reiterate again, if it was my company, most people, you know, wouldn't be sitting downstairs or maybe, you know, sometimes upstairs.
And I have absolute no doubt in the dignity of our Madam General Manager in my first couple of meetings. I'm sure that she will remember. Councillor Milacci,
No, all I say that, you know, at that time, you know, I suggested, with my little knowledge in council, which it's still little, I suggested to sell that business altogether to Sydney Water. So I really have no idea, you know, what's happening, who is running what. But obviously it's not working, so it doesn't matter whether I support this or not, nothing is going to change, and we'll spend more money, and people will be spending more and more, and consultancy firms will be making more money. Thank you.
Thank you, Madam Mayor. I won't be supporting the amendment because I'm of the view that enough information has been presented to us for us to resolve a position that our preferred option is to divest our sewerage treatment plant from our books. I'm concerned that the
Unexpected events of a flood or the failure of a rising main or a natural disaster can impose a cost on Council that is so huge that it effectively amounts to a third of our operating budget in any given year. I mean, it's a huge amount of money. It poses a nearly existential threat to us if we get events like this that we just can't handle. And I'm no fan of privatisation either. So I've worked on the assumption that if we divest this business, that Sydney Water would probably be the one that would take it on, and that would be my preferred option, but that's further down the track. But I think we do need to give some clarity to what our position is. We've certainly been engaged in this process for a very long time, and as the Mayor says, it's entirely appropriate for us as a Council to look at what our core business is.
Other tiers of government have done this. Years ago, other tiers of government decided that they weren't in the business of running a bank or of running a telecommunications company or of running an airline, and it was given over to the private sector. In the same way, the anachronisms that we're encumbered with in running a landfill that, as we have heard earlier this evening, does us no favours, in running a ferry that is so poisonously expensive that it effectively has to be run by the state through a complicated system of subsidy, or that, in this case, that we're running the only sewerage treatment system in the Sydney metropolitan area means that we have to, in the business of governing this city well.
Look at those things that are simply too expensive for us to do. Certainly the evidence in front of me makes it clear that the economies of scale that another operator like Sydney Water can bring to the table will not only insulate Council against these black swan events, but it means that they will have the resources and the economies of scale to deliver better service to the customer base. So when people come to us and say, Council, you need to be concentrating on your core business, this is a classic example of where our eyes are taken off the ball by massive expenditure incurred in an area that really we should have divested ourselves from years ago. So I'm happy for us to proceed, and therefore I'll be endorsing the original motion.
Thank you, Councillor. Anyone else wishing to speak? No? Therefore, I will put the amendment as is on the board. Those in favour, please raise your hand. Those in favour are Councillor Sheather, Councillor Durick, Councillor Lyons-Buckett and Councillor Wheeler. Those against, please raise your hand.
Oops, sorry, my ticks look like crosses. Councillor Dogramaci, you're not voting. The amendment is lost. The original motion therefore becomes the motion. Now, Councillor Wheeler has foreshadowed you would like to go in seriatim. Yes, please. Can I have a seconder for that? Thank you, Councillor Lyons-Buckett. And I did just check on that. It doesn't need a vote. It's a procedural motion. Just checking. So I'm happy to put the original motion as per the business paper in syriatum. Anyone else wishing to speak on the motion? Councillor Lyons-Buckett.
Haven't spoken. Thank you, Madam Mayor. I'm happy it'll be heard in syriatum because I continue my concerns about using the words full divestment before we've done these studies, but... It's not that I necessarily think we should continue operating a sewer business. I'm really, I don't know, I'm not committed to it, but I'm concerned that Sydney Water won't want it. I mean, they haven't wanted it before, and they may not want it again. So my concern is that we may be going to spend a lot of ratepayer money only to find it's not feasible in the end, and then where are we at? And also, we're spending a lot of ratepayer money, and I would also like us to be spending money about other solutions around sewer because we've got other issues with pump out and other things like that.
So those were where my concerns were from. I understand that there has to be processes followed, and I'm certainly grateful that it has finally got to a stage where we're at least looking at it. And I do share Councillor Calvert's concerns around the staff issues around that, particularly of the perception within the community of what we're doing, and I am a little bit concerned around that aspect of it. I guess it's just one of those difficult things. I wouldn't be so hard and fast to say that we, you know, we shouldn't operate this or we should operate it. We are also the only council that owns our waste management facility in metropolitan Sydney as well, as far as I know. So sometimes, because of our nature of where we are and where we sit in the Sydney basin and how we've grown over the years, we've inherited quite a hodgepodge sort of system.
We don't really fit any categories. We're not really like many other councils, and we also, we don't have growth levels that for some councils have brought them other solutions. So, I mean, I'm happy for this to proceed in terms of we have to deal with it. So I'll just be voting for one and three as per the amendment. Thank you.
I share Councillor Calvert's concerns, and I thank him for articulating them, that we're not just interested in what , in the employees, like is written in this piece. Sorry, I'm just hunting for the word. Employee and regulatory considerations. We're not just talking about considering the employees. I think what we've heard from Councillor Calvert, and I agree with, we're talking about protecting these employees. People work in local government often at salary rates that are lower than they would in private industry because it provides them with additional things: a chance to work for their community, a chance to work close to home, a chance to work for an organisation whose values they share, or a level of employee protection that you don't find in a private company, a private profit-driven company.
And that's the key trade-off for someone who takes on a lower rate of pay in local government. They also earn considerable employee incentives for sticking around: long service leave, sick leave, holiday pay. If we were to transition those employees across to a privatised entity, they would lose some of those, and we would, of course, foot the cost for some of those payouts. But things like long service leave, you don't carry your long service leave across to a private company. If you've only been there for nine years, for example, that's gone. You've lost the lot. That's a significant thing for an employee to lose, through no fault of their own, frankly. If you make that as a choice, that's on you.
If you make that because the organisation you work for dumps you, then that's a different thing. So I would like us to not just talk about employee considerations. I would like us to be talking about employee entitlements and protections. I would also like us to be considering the end use of water in this space, because I think that is very likely to be something that, in a warming climate, I know we don't want any extra water at the moment, but down the track, and we have had periods not so long ago where additional water would have been a very, very nice thing, including the capacity to put it on our parks to keep things green. So I think we have to be cognisant of what we lose when we opt for divestment.
I'm really concerned that we're putting a lot of hope in Sydney Water taking this on when we say that we will fully divest, because I would not like us to see that, and this is why I can't support a full divestment as a fixed policy of Council. If we decide that we will fully divest and the only option we've got on the table is a private company, for example Veolia, who is not going to keep the same, that don't have the arrangement that Sydney Water has to have a lower pricing structure because they've got such a large customer base, we are really selling our ratepayers up the river, and that really concerns me.
Councillor? I don't think it's a good idea for us to be identifying and naming potential buyers and telling the public what we think of them before we make that point in the process. I think that's poor practice.
Look, I picked them as an example. I'm not saying that that's the company that we would be going for. I'm using them as an example, but I won't do it again. Not that I feel it made any difference. The problem is that this is a monopoly business. Regardless of who gets it, it's a monopoly, and they can charge what they like at the end. And that's my concern when we say that we will fully divest as a position of this Council. That's what we are passing on to both our employees, the loss of protection for our employees, and the loss of protection for our ratepayers. And as elected representatives of those ratepayers and the employers of those staff, that's what we should be concerned about, not just whether this facility is expensive and a pain.
Thanks. Just very briefly to clarify a couple of things. We're not adopting a beneficial position of Council. This is, and only looking at one option, we're adopting as a preferred option. So we're acknowledging there's multiple options, and we're acknowledging our preferred option as to which we should investigate first. Whenever you do a feasibility study, the risk is you could spend a lot of money determining the feasibility and not get a result, but that is the express purpose of a feasibility study. We have done enough preliminary work that I think we're in a position to go and proceed with that. And I think lots of other people have said this makes sense now.
Thank you, Councillor. I'll put the motion to the vote as per 1, 2 and 3 in the business paper on page 68. Those who support point 1, please raise your hand. Councillor Reardon, Councillor Veigel, Councillor Sheather, Councillor Conolly, Councillor Kotlash, Councillor Calvert, Councillor Djuric, Councillor Lyons-Buckett, Councillor Wheeler, Councillor Lamprogno, Councillor McMahon. Those against? Councillor Dogramaci. Declare that one carried. Point 2, if you are in favour of point 2, please raise your hand. In favour is Councillor Reardon , Councillor Veigel, Councillor Conolly, Councillor Kotlash, Councillor Calvert, Councillor Zamprogno and Councillor McMahon. Those against, please raise your hand.
Councillor Sheather, Councillor Dogramaci, Councillor Djuric, Councillor Lyons-Buckett and Councillor Wheeler. I declare point 2 carried. Point 3, if you are in favour, please raise your hand. Councillor Reardon, Councillor Veigel, Councillor Conolly, Councillor Kotlash, Councillor Calvert, Councillor Dogramaci, Councillor Djuric, Councillor Lyons-Buckett, Councillor Wheeler, Councillor Zamprogno, Councillor McMahon. Those against? Councillor Sheather. I declare point 3 carried also. Thank you, councillors. That is the last of our agenda items subject to public address.
We have no condolences, no mayoral minutes, items on block. Items are 2.12 and 2.13. We have no declarations of interest in those items, so they can be put on block. Can I have a mover, please? Councillor Conolly, seconded Councillor Reardon.
All those in favour, please raise your hand. In favour, Councillor Reardon, Councillor Veigel, Councillor Sheather, Councillor Conolly, Councillor Kotlash. Councillor , if you have an objection, objection, Councillor Dogramaci, and I'm looking at staff to clarify. We can't carry that on block, can we? No, we can? Yeah, just checking. Okay, thank you. I did some training and they said you can't. Anyway, we'll have to check that. Councillor Durick, Councillor Lyons-Buckett, Councillor Wheeler, Councillors Improgno, Councillor McMahon. Those against? Councillor Dogramaci. I declare the items on block carried.
Thank you. Don't need to speak much other than say that I think the submission, as drafted, succinctly and clearly lays out the position of the Council. We have debated this at length earlier, so I don't think we need to rehash what our position is, but tonight we're just considering whether the submission reflects that, and I think it clearly does. Sorry,
Thank you, Councillor. Sorry, I just have to check, the Deputy Mayor was out of the vote on the items on block. Sorry, can that please be recorded? Yeah, thank you very much. Sorry, Councillor Conolly , thank you very much. Anyone else wishing to speak on the item? Councillor Sheather. Yeah
Just briefly, I'd like to congratulate the staff on the documents provided. It's something I've been passionate about half my life, and to have the Council support it is a big thing. And I guess when you look at the studies that have been done over the years, and there's been a lot of them, and to put a submission in, we've got just over two pages, and it covers a lot of stuff. And for the people who read it, I'm guessing that they've read a thousand submissions like this a thousand times and understand it, but when you, like, there's a line here that we've got 130... 4,000 people and 25,000 residents, and we've got two million square metres of commercial area. I wonder how many people realise we're talking about people's lives, their livelihood, where they live, what they do.
We're talking about this building. We're talking about the hospital, you know, and it's hard to put that in perspective. And so the way that this has been chosen and put together, I think, is very good, and I thank the staff and the councillors who would support it.
Wishing to speak? Councillor Lyons-Buckett. Thank you, Madam Mayor. As I've said each time this issue comes up, the decision on this project is not ours. I expect it'll be a state election issue, and as such the people will decide whether they support it or not. I think it's a shame that it has sort of been hijacked in a political sense, so to speak, because my concern has always been around the various information that's available, and in this case we were asked to address the new material that had come out after the feedback from the EIS. And I don't think our submission does that at all. I think that it states what our position is, which is a publicly acknowledged thing anyway, and I acknowledge that is the position here.
But our role is to examine the documents that are put out in the context and impacts on our area, including and in particular the impacts on the community-owned assets that we're responsible for. So a number of questions have not been answered in this material that were raised as feedback and were in our previous submission, and I think that it's a shame that we're not following up. To say that the various concerns that were raised in the submissions that went in, particularly around things like water quality and the impacts of post-flood water release on our community infrastructure, the impacts on our growers with the lengthened amount of time of inundation. I think it's a real shame that that's not in it, because whether you're supported or not, I feel that we have an obligation to raise those questions because they have not been answered.
So I think that it's a real shame that we've not taken an opportunity to include the outstanding information that we have as a council asked for over and over again. Now, whether we've got an overall commitment to a project, nevertheless, we have asked, and in our previous submission, we took on board the questions that everybody had to include, and yet we're sending in a submission which, I mean, I don't really know why we're sending it. It's like a segment from Wikipedia or something. It's just saying how many people live in the floodplain, what our council's decided. It doesn't address the criteria that came out from those documents. I think we're still waiting on regional land use studies, which are long promised, never delivered, and yet they're a crucial element of the overall planning of floodplain management in the valley.
We are responsible for that. We need to know when that regional land use study will come to us because we've got the responsibility around land use. It's a key component. You know, around the proposed doubling, in our submission says we're going to double the population in the floodplain. Where are this other 134,000 people going to live? And why can't we see the plans that either confirm or eliminate any possibilities of further development in the floodplain? Why would we not ask for that? It's not saying we don't support it, but it's information the government is refusing to give. We want the government to give us information on all sorts of other things around waste or flooding or whatever, but we're not prepared to ask for a document that was part of the 2017 strategy and it's never been delivered.
The 2D modelling, long ago promised, never delivered. Nothing about the cumulative Overland flood studies, also promised and an integral part of the overall picture. I notice in recent grant funding from the government, many councils have been allocated funding to carry out studies to deliver greater understanding of flood behaviour in areas where hard surfaces have replaced soaking pasture land. When we see the figures quoted in these documents, it's not clear whether they relate strictly to riverine flooding or if they include impacts on, for example, roads from heavy rain inundation or localised impacts. We know in the Hawkesbury we've had people suffering impacts on localised level, many road closures prior to the river's rising, many impacts from the sheer volume of rain which fell, for example, in South Windsor.
So when we've got figures being put in about $400 million for damage from the floods, how much of that is actually from the river flooding, and how much is from the other flooding that comes overland or that comes simply from the volume of rain falling? I think that the government's own modelling shows that greater than 50% of floodwaters can come from the Upper Nepean and catchments that are effectively downstream from the proposed wall. And we're not seeing anything that's being done. My concern is that there's always a veil over the facts with this project. I have been calling for years for various studies, and I can't see why people object to us pushing to still get those studies, because I would not want to support something for which you did not have all the information.
It's an excuse used in here why we don't proceed with other things, and yet some people are prepared to overlook the fact that the government will not give us that information. They will not give us a regional land use study, and they will not let us have the studies about overland flooding. When we've got that massive development sitting right on our doorstep, I want to know where that water is going to go and that our people downstream aren't being impacted by it. So I'm not prepared to support this submission. I accept and acknowledge it contains our official position. I know that's the case, and we can't change that. But what I would have liked to see, and of course because of the time constraints and another pre-Christmas rush to get something in with big documents, no time to read, because of that we won't be changing it, I guess.
But I would have liked to see us work together to To at least put in a balanced portrayal of the concerns we have, particularly around community infrastructure and the impacts post-flooding. Sorry, trying to speak so fast because the time goes so fast
Thanks. I can't support this submission either. We put in a really detailed submission last time, and I think that was valuable. What we've got now is something that just reiterates Council's political position, and that's exactly what it is. It's a political position. Nothing has actually changed with this project. All the faults identified in Council's submission in 2021 still remain. There's still too much reliance on raising the wall. We're still waiting on strategic land use planning frameworks. I mean, seriously, why? Why are we waiting for these things while we've got that development galloping down Windsor and Richmond roads at us on the SOKA way for the Hawkesbury-Nepean catchment?
Why are we still waiting and the land is still being sucked up? We need better modelling, including the impacts of South Creek, and we desperately need the cumulative overland flow because anybody with a flood-affected property in Windsor or South Windsor will tell you that the impacts on South Creek have impacted directly on their properties. We've got footage showing the demarcation line between South Creek and the Hawkesbury River, and that water was in people's kitchens. The fact that they're still pushing on and they can't release that key piece of information is staggering. We still don't have adequate evacuation routes. We still have key infrastructure problems. We've still got flood islands.
The only thing that's changed there is that the residents that live on them now know they're there. We've still got hundreds of houses being built in the South Creek catchment and on our evacuation routes, and that should make us very scared. We still likely have increased flood times and bank erosion from the raising of the wall downstream . We still have significant environmental, economic and cultural consequences from this project. The only thing that's changed here is the political makeup of Hawkesbury City Council. None of our original concerns have been answered. They're just not politically convenient. The state Liberal government has got all its eggs in one basket. We have a position from this council that is not mentioned here, calling for other mitigation strategies to lower the level, to create a flood mitigation zone.
No mention of it. To increase desalination, because it's going to be required anyway, which can be powered with renewable energy, to allow that flood mitigation zone to function properly. To increase water recycling, because as several of us who went to Sydney Water's presentation a couple of weeks ago heard, 80% of the water used in Sydney still goes out to the ocean. So it's not like we don't have enough water to lower the dam by the 12 metres that we've asked for, or 14 metres that we've asked for. It's because we're not using the water that we've got properly. We desperately need routes in and out of the Hawkesbury improved, not just for floods but for every day. And we need to buy back land that is no longer viable.
We need to revegetate absorption areas, which they're doing in the northern rivers, and we need to stop covering the Hawkesbury-Nepean and South Creek basins in roads and houses where water would have been absorbed. We haven't dealt properly in this with impacts on the Cumberland Plain woodland, although I notice that they've used Long Neck Lagoon as a potential study site. We haven't addressed the additional economic uses to agriculture and business, including fisheries and aquaculture, businesses that are in the Hawkesbury. We also haven't addressed the increased complacency and increased numbers of people putting themselves at risk because they think this project will fix things that it isn't capable of.
And we haven't addressed the reduced access to services, including health facilities, that will result from the impact of a prolonged inundation. We certainly haven't even discussed what will happen to communities downstream like the Macdonald Valley if we hold that water and then let it out over a two-week period, prolonging their flooding. This is irresponsible.
Any of the staff aware of the 200,000 modelling that was done at Manly Research Water Institute in relation to the comments that were made about South Creek and the like?
That's okay. Thank you, Madam Mayor. Again, I don't know whether people are under trance or sleeping or we have been hearing all these lullabies and stories . It's not going to happen. Even if it does happen, 14 meters, then what? What's going to happen in 5, 10, 15, 20 years' time? Put another 20 meters, put another 30 meters. It's like someone asking me, Where's my right ear? and I'm showing it like that. We're looking at the solution. It's like we have a bathtub with a drinking straw, and nobody is talking about when we had, sometimes in March, when I had some kind of a meeting, I suggested to very abruptly maybe blow up the Sackville Gorge. We know what's happening, and currently we have, what, 14, 15 meters of silt sitting under there.
We cannot do anything about it. It's a simple physics. Fill it up to here with the sand and you will have this much water, and take out, you know, this much and sell it. But for some reason, I don't know, we are going to the option. This is something, to me, I think it's a diversion to take people's mind from the actual problems that, you know, we have and divert our attention to this. It's not going to happen. State government doesn't have the money. Thirteen billion dollars in debt. They cannot borrow money. Overseas companies, overseas financiers are not giving any more money. It's only political purposes . Liberal government is that deploy. I know it inside. I don't want to go into the details.
I've been told about it. We cannot change our attitude, you know, better than I do. Just like two-lane mentality, that the wall is not going to be raised. Even if it does, it's not going to solve the problem. Not one end, but we have to look at the other end. But again , good luck to the people. Nothing is going to change. I don't know whether I should vote for anything or not, but I'm looking from my point of view, it's not going to solve the flood problem. I don't know when the next flood is going to come , but good luck to the people. I hope I won't be in here three
Madam Mayor. I'm distressed at the binary way in which this is often portrayed. Many of the criticisms that Councillor Wheeler or Councillor Lyons Buckett raise about development, the pressure of development, the change to our landform caused by hard surfaces and all the rest of it, I agree with all of those. But I'm also trenchantly in support of raising Warragamba Dam and have been for very many years. And when we have this debate, I return to the figures that are now presented to us about the saving of life and property that would follow from raising the dam. We have to start and end our discussion with that. The report that the state government developed, and which we have cited in our submission, reminds everybody that if the dam had been raised, 80% of the houses, 80% of the properties that were affected in the most recent flood, which was a moderate flood, would have been spared.
Talk to those people. Talk to those people before pontificating about issues that may be important but have to be taken in the broader context, such as the environmental impact and so forth. And of course, we know that the project to raise Warragamba Dam isn't really aimed solely at these kind of moderate to medium floods that we've been having recently, but the really bad floods that we know statistically are going to be inevitable over time. The 1867-type floods, the one in 100 or worse than one in 100-type floods, where we know that if we act now, we could lower the height of that flood not just by three metres, but by five or seven or more metres, saving thousands of properties. And incalculable cost to livelihood, public safety and economic productivity.
So I'm not as fatalistic as Councillor Dogramaci, who thinks that this opportunity will be lost to the never-never for another two generations, as it was when this last came to government in the 1990s. I think the time for us to act is now, and I think that it's entirely appropriate for we, as the council that represent the community most at risk, get on with the job of reminding the state and federal governments that they should extract the digit and get on with it.
Thank you, Madam Mayor. My understanding is that this item is not about raising the dam wall. It's about whether we send this submission in. And this submission, to me, even though our council's stated position is that we favour the raising of the dam wall, this submission is not very positive. It asks many questions. For example, on page 20, it asks about the impact—
I thought we'd made that decision. Well, I withdraw that then, sorry. I'll get back to what I was saying. It's whether to send in the submission or not, and I don't really think that we need to send in the submission. Council has made its position clear, and the submission itself— Has no effect, no impact. So I was planning to say that the bits that I thought were in there were quite negative anyway, but I would say that I'm going to vote against this because we don't need to send in a submission.
Thank you. Just very briefly, I think from my perspective this is very simple in that no one in the Hawkesbury expects us to be advocating on their behalf to the state government to slow down this project, which is what's being suggested by asking for more information, raising more questions, and suggesting more studies are required. That would be Hawkesbury City Council advocating for the state government to slow down on this project. Blue Mountains City Council will put a submission in, no doubt, and they will raise their environmental concerns and their heritage concerns in the Blue Mountains. You can be quite sure they're not going to raise the concerns for the environment and heritage in the Hawkesbury.
They don't going to care. They're going to look after their own patch, as they're elected to do, and that's what we need to do. We shouldn't be sitting here putting a submission in that raises environmental and heritage concerns in the Blue Mountains as a reason why we might not protect the Hawkesbury. Point of
Thank you, Councillor Wheeler. I'll ask you to continue apart from that, although I can see your point that we're elected for the people of the Hawkesbury, not the Blue Mountains. But let's continue on another— Sorry,
There was actually a number of references to previous submission, and the previous submission contains all those questions. And I took it from what was being said by other councillors that they were advocating for those sorts of questions to be included in this submission, and I was answering that concern. But I'll leave it there. Thank you.
Thank you, Councillor Conolly. I will therefore put the motion as per the business paper. All those in favour, please raise your hand. In favour are Councillor Reardon, Councillor Veigel, Councillor Sheather, Councillor Conolly, Councillors Amprogno and Councillor McMahon. Those against, please raise your hand. Councillor Kotlash, Councillor Calvert, Councillor Dogramaci, Councillor Djuric, Councillor Lyons-Buckett and Councillor Wheeler. I declare that carried on the casting vote of the Mayor.
Thanks, Madam Mayor. Following discussions we've had at a briefing session, I think this, and the very lengthy report we've got, I think this needs further discussion. So I'd like to move that we defer for a Councillor workshop and bring this back to either the January or February meeting of Council.
Thank you. Second that, Councillor Wheeler. Any discussion needed? No. Thank you. No right of reply. Thank you, Councillor Conolly. I'll put the motion to defer. All those in favour, please raise your hand. Councillor Reardon, Councillor Veigel, Councillor Sheather, Councillor Conolly, Councillor Kotlash, Councillor Calvert, Councillor Dogramaci, Councillor Djuric, Councillor Lyons-Buckett, Councillor Wheeler, Councillor Zamprogno, Councillor McMahon. I declare that carried .
ROC - Innovation and Partnerships Committee - 8 November 2022 -
Sarah McMahon
Okay, we're on to committees now, minutes of committees. Did anyone want a five, ten-minute break? We're happy to keep going. I just wanted to float that idea. Keep going?
Okay, excellent. Okay, item 2.19, Innovation and Partnerships Committee. Could I have a mover ? Councillor Connolly's on fire tonight. Seconder for that, please. Councillor Veigel. Do we wish to speak, Councillor Conolly? No. Anyone else wish to speak?
On page 77.2, it's got, Council secret update from our local member regarding mobile coverage in Bilpin and remote areas. Is there any reason, does anyone know why Bilpin was, and it says other remote areas, but I haven't heard any complaints from Bilpin, but certainly north of Sackville I have every day. Yeah,
Thank you, Councillor. There was a lot of focus on Bilpin in the previous term of Council, yeah, when this committee was in operation, and that it originated from that community putting forward that they had concerns, and it sort of stemmed from there. Thank you, Councillor.
Councillor Lyons-Buckett. Thank you, Madam Mayor. I think you've just touched on a point, which was the point I was going to raise. The point that Councillor Sheather raised was from a notice of motion, which was actually about how to keep the towers charged during disasters, and it was lobbying for $10,000 for a backup battery. But then it went to this committee and it became something else, which was the point I was going to raise, which is a concern of mine with when things are passed on to the committees like this, is that the original sentiment of what something's about can actually get quite lost, and I think that that's a concern. So with regard to the heavy vehicles, the original sentiment, and admittedly it was from a mayoral minute in 2018, so it's a long time ago, and it was actually about, it was really brought up, and I brought it up, it was about establishing the impact of heavy vehicles that are using our road networks in lieu of using the State road network because of a number of reasons.
So we saw the massive damage to Kurmond Road, for example, when all the trucks had to use it because they couldn't go the other way, or it was around trying to get through that, and it sort of turned into a thing about truck breaks and things like that. So I was just a little bit concerned about that, but I just wanted to raise that when we have a report, a motion, and then a report, and then that report goes to a committee, and then that committee decides it's about something else, it can really lose its original intent, and we never really get to the bottom of it. So I just wanted to say that, but anyway, we'll wait and see what the committee system ends up doing in the future. Thank you.
Thank you, Councillor. Anyone else wishing to speak? No. Right of reply, Councillor Conolly. Okay, voting on the recommendation. All those in favour, please raise your hand. Councillor Reardon, Councillor Veigel, Councillor Sheather, Councillor Conolly, Councillor Cutlash, Councillor Calvert, Councillor Dogramaci, Councillor Durick, Councillor Lyons-Buckett, Councillor Wheeler. Councillors Improgno and Councillor McMahon. Thank you very much. Item 2.2.
RESOLVED on the motion of Councillor Conolly, seconded by Councillor Veigel.
That in relation to the Minutes of the Innovation and Partnerships Committee Meeting held on the 8 November 2022:
1. Council receive and note the Innovation and Partnership Committee in respect to Item 1.
2. Council endorse the Committee Recommendation in respect to Confirmations of Minutes:
3. "2. Council seek an update from the Member for Macquarie, Susan Templeman MP, regarding mobile coverage in Bilpin and remote areas of the Hawkesbury given the changes that have occurred since the previous meeting of the Innovation and Partnerships Committee in August 2021."
3. Council endorse the Committee Recommendations in respect of Item 2 (Economic, Investment and Tourism), namely:
5. "2. Receive a verbal or written report to the next Innovation and Partnerships Committee Meeting outlining the status of actions identified in the Business Recovery Plan.
3. Following receipt of a verbal or written report outlining the status of actions identified in the Business Recovery Plan, the Committee to determine if further engagement with the business community is needed to implement the Business Recovery Plan."
4. Council endorse the Committee Recommendations in respect of Item 3 (Heavy Vehicle Movement Investigation in the Hawkesbury Local Government Areas), namely:
8. "2. Note the demand of heavy vehicles be considered as a key driver in the development of the next Transport Asset Management Plan.
3. Note the outcome of this be reported back to an Ordinary Meeting of Council as part of the normal reporting process for Asset Management Plans.
4. Recommend that Council use this report to continue advocacy through State agencies and the National Heavy Vehicle Regulator to address amenity impacts of heavy vehicles."
Over to you, Councillor Lyons-Buckett. Thank you, Madam Mayor. I just wanted to raise just one point. The Audit Committee, which is a very extensive and very thorough committee, I just wanted to draw attention to the fact of a question that I had asked within the Audit Committee, which was about how reliant Council currently is on grant funding, and the answer was that about 50 percent of the grants were in relation to natural disasters, so we were getting a lot of money in around that. And the Chief Financial Officer had advised that we would have been fairly close to breaking even, even without those grants. I think it's unlikely that we'll ever see the magnitude of grant money given out again, and so I think it's unsustainable for government.
So I had just wanted to raise that question and draw attention to that, that in the future, I think that when we're making decisions, we have to be very mindful of the inbuilt costs of ongoing maintenance when we've got money up front and we're doing projects. If we're not looking at what that's going to cost down the track, we're going to have these amounts of money that we can't necessarily find and to look after things for our ratepayers. So I just wanted to draw attention to that, and the other issue in there we've dealt with tonight, which was rising main C.
Thank you. Thank you, Councillor. Anyone else wishing to speak? No. Right of reply not needed, Councillor Lyons-Buckett? No. I'll ask people to vote for the recommendation. All those in favour, please raise your hand. Councillor Reardon, Councillor Veigel, Councillor Sheather, Councillor Conolly, Councillor La Cotlais, Councillor Calvert, Councillor Dogramaci, Councillor Djuric, Councillor Lyons-Buckett, Councillor Wheeler, Councillors Zamprogno, Councillor McMahon. I declare that one carried.
RESOLVED on the motion of Councillor Lyons-Buckett, seconded by Councillor Conolly.
That the Council adopt the recommendations contained in the minutes of the Hawkesbury City Council Local Traffic Committee meeting held on 14 November 2022.
Can I have a mover for that? Do we need— do we need to? I'm just double checking, and we don't have discussion on it either. So I'm just checking with— sorry, we don't need to move or second that. Excellent.
Okay, councillors, we'll be needing to move into confidential. Before we do, I will need the councillors to read out their declarations of interest, or after, and then again after. Okay, motion to move into confidential. Thank you, Councillor Reardon, Councillor Kotlash. All in favour? Yes. Okay, carried. Move into confidential. Thank you.
The copy ? I'll just repeat that again. I will be asking the General Manager to read out the decisions for each confidential item, but I will just ask the councillors who declared an interest to read their interest into the microphone. For item 223, Councillor Djuric, could you please read your interest?
I have a significant non-pecuniary interest in the lease agreement, Pioneer Village. I do volunteer work at the community garden, which is within the Pioneer Village, and I have a close association with the people that run the garden, and they will potentially be affected by the decision.
I have a pecuniary interest in item 223, the lease for the Australiana Pioneer Village. My son is employed as a contractor by the Friends of the Australiana Pioneer Village.
I have a significant non-pecuniary interest in item 225, the lease of 160 to 164 Golden Valley Drive, Glossodia. I'm currently a patient at this practice.
Thank you, Madam Mayor. In regards to item 223 regarding the assignment of the lease of the Australiana Pioneer Village Limited to the Friends of the Australiana Pioneer Village Society Inc, Australiana Pioneer Village, 496 Wilberforce Road, Wilberforce, whilst in closed session the Council resolved on the motion of Councillor Alliance Buckett, seconded Councillor Kotlash, one, that Council agree to the assignment of the lease for the property known as the Australiana Pioneer Village, 496 Wilberforce Road, Wilberforce, from Australiana Pioneer Village Limited to the Friends of the Australiana Pioneer Village Society as outlined in this report. Two, authority be given for the assignment of the lease and any other relevant documentation in association with this matter to be executed under the seal of Council.
Three, details of the Council's resolution to be conveyed to the proposed assignor and the proposed assignee, together with the advice that Council is not and will not be bound by the terms of its resolution until such time as the appropriate legal documentation to put such a resolution into effect has been agreed to and executed by all parties. For the motion were Councillors Conolly, Calvert, Dogramaci, Kotlash, Lyons-Buckett, Thurgood, Reardon, McMahon, Sheather and Zamprogno. Absent for the vote were Councillors Wheeler and Djuric.
In respect of item 224, appointment of the investment advisor, whilst in closed session Council resolved on the motion of Councillor Lyons-Buckett, seconded Councillor Reardon, that the Prudential Investment Services Corp be appointed as Council's investment advisor for a period of three years, with the option to extend for a further two years at Council's sole discretion, commencing on 1 January 2023 and ending 31 December 2026. For the motion were Councillors Conolly, Calvert, Djuric, Kotlash, Lyons-Buckett, Thurgood, Reardon, McMahon, Sheather, Wheeler and Zamprogno. Absent for the vote was Councillor Dogramaci.
In respect of item 225, Hawkesbury Allied Health Pty Ltd, shops 10 and 11, Glossodia Shopping Village, 160 to 164 Golden Valley Drive, Glossodia, whilst in closed session the Council resolved on the motion of Councillor Lyons-Buckett, seconded Councillor Conolly, that Council agree to enter into a new lease with Hawkesbury Allied Health Pty Ltd in regard to shops 10 and 11, Glossodia Shopping Village in accordance with the proposal outlined in the report. Two, authority be given to the lease and any documentation with this matter to be executed under the seal of Council. Three, details of Council's resolution to 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.
For the motion were Councillors Conolly, Calvert, Djuric, Dogramaci, Kotlash, Lyons-Buckett, Vargoul, Reardon, McMahon, Sheather and Zamprogno. Absent for the vote was Councillor Wheeler. I think that's it, Madam Mayor.
Thank you, General Manager, and that concludes all of our business not just for tonight but for 2022. I would like to thank all of my councillors and all of the staff for their contributions to Council this year. It's been a significantly difficult year with many challenges for our community and also for doing a lot more than just business as usual. So I want to thank everyone for their contribution, and for anyone listening at home, I hope you all have a lovely Christmas, have a very safe holiday and a very happy 2023. Thank you, everybody. Good night.
