Carol Altmann – The Terrier

It’s 12 months since the Warrnambool City Council started a new chapter under a new CEO, but still it staggers under the weight of the old regime that is pulling the place apart.

As I write, I have just heard from solid sources that two high-level staff have taken leave amid allegations of bullying.

Other senior staff  have taken sick leave or unexplained leave, including the head of governance who has not been seen for months.

Over the past six months, staff have continued to resign, paying tribute to their workmates, but saying they can no longer deal with the workplace culture and a lack of leadership.

One senior staffer who left put it this way in a letter to colleagues: “I urge you to stick to your values, call out things that are not in line with the organisation’s values and most importantly, be kind to each other.”

The elected council, meanwhile, remains riven with deep rivalries that pit the Cr Gaston/Neoh faction against the Cr Hulin/Cassidy/sometimes Herbert faction, in a bitter struggle which is circular and exhausting.

To be frank, despite the polite smiles in the council chamber, most of the time they want to rip each other’s heads off.

Whistleblowers have been isolated and the CEO’s supposed “open-door” policy remains blocked by gatekeepers, so staff  are reluctant or unable to step through.

Even the CEO is kept in the dark, having allegedly not been briefed about the looming credit card scandal until June last year, which is when the scandal broke publicly.

In that environment, faith is broken and people learn to just shut up and get on with it.

Or they resign.

I say all this being fully aware – and grateful – that the council is full of decent, solid, hard-working, loyal people who give their absolute best to Warrnambool as true servants of the public and they make up the vast majority of council staff.

But the fact is the new CEO, Peter Schneider, inherited a shite sandwich which he has been unable to turn around.

Just three months before Mr Schneider started, the results of an independent staff survey leaked into the public domain and it was not a pretty picture.

It found that since 2014, the council had gone backward on every key measure, including leadership, people, customer focus, and strategy and planning.

Most telling was that while 71 per cent of all staff said they felt proud to work at the council, only 51 per cent said they looked forward to coming to work each day.

In one department, only 39 per cent enjoyed coming to work each day.

That is not a sign of a happy place, but a place where good people keep hanging in there, hoping things will get better.

They haven’t – I have seen resignation letters and spoken to some of those who have left – and they won’t until three things happen:

a full, open and independent assessment of the workplace culture with a commitment to act on the results;

an end to the bunker mentality by being open and honest with the public;

a changing of the guard at the next council elections in October.

Without these, I fear that the WCC will continue to lumber along like a bus on broken wheels, wondering why it’s losing all of its passengers.

Carol Altmann – The Terrier

This is a budgetary fairytale based on fact. The numbers are real, the names are not.

Once upon a time, in the town of WooBoo, there was a town leader, Snow White, who was paid more than $310,000 a year to work for the seven dwarfs who had been elected by the people of WooBoo to look after WooBoo and help it prosper.

Exciting things were happening in WooBoo under Snow White’s leadership.

There was a big, money-losing festival for children, there was a maritime museum with few boats but a new $3 million sound-and-light show that promised to lure carloads of tourists, there were parties at the racecourse, new public toilets, new parking meters, pretty roundabouts and still lots of money left over for the WooBoo Council to spend on consultants, credit cards, conferences and staff development.

Most of the seven dwarfs were ecstatic, except for Grumpy. Every council has a Grumpy, and Grumpy was seen as a troublemaker.

“Can we afford all this?” Grumpy would ask. “Does this all add up? Why don’t some of these figures make sense?”

“Of course we can,” said Doc and Happy in unison. Unlike some of the other dwarfs, they had represented the Town of WooBoo for many years and had grown fond of Snow White and her team of highly paid helpers.

Mayor Sneezy was equally as enthusiastic: “WooBoo is aspirational, sophisticated and cosmopolitan and I wish people would stop being so negative!”

The spending went on. Sometimes it was on necessary but boring things, like $5.5 million for a drainage system to avoid parts of WooBoo flooding.

And sometimes it was for sparkly things, and the biggest of all was the $15 million upgrade of the main street of WooBoo, with shiny new pavements, new trees, new lights, drinking fountains, more flowers and planter boxes and a much narrower road with so many pedestrian crossings that WooBoo drivers could no longer take their eyes off the road for a second.

The people of WooBoo were happy to see their tired main street being given the full Ritz treatment, even if they privately wondered what was going to happen to the other town streets with their peeling buildings and broken footpaths.

Don’t worry, they were told, celebrate the rise of wonderful Justice Von Liebig St!

Meanwhile, in the MelBoo office of the chief money watcher, the Victorian Auditor-General, a little red light was flashing.

It had been flashing quietly every year since 2014-15 and it warned a “high risk” situation was developing. This high risk was that the Town of WooBoo did not have enough money of its own to fund its operations, once it removed all the one-off gifts and grants from Grandma and Grandpa Government.

In particular, the Auditor General found WooBoo might have trouble paying to repair and replace things once they wore out, like footpaths and playgrounds and bridges.

The red light blinked, but in the town chambers of WooBoo the party went on until, one day in late 2018, it stopped.

By then, Grandma Government had put her foot down and capped rates so councils could not just keep asking ratepayers for more. Instead, annual rate rises would be capped at between 2% and 2.5%.

By then, the money-losing WooBoo children’s festival had been axed abruptly. By then, it was becoming clear that the carloads of tourists were not going to the maritime museum.

The seven dwarfs had to absorb some hard truths.

One of these was that the WooBoo capital works budget for 2017-18 had blown out by a whopping $6 million from $17.6 million to $24.6 million.

A big part of this was dressing up Justice Von Liebig St, the cost of which had grown from $15 million to around $19 million, including $8 million that would need to come from the citizens of WooBoo.

The big drainage project had also been in trouble, with the first contractor going broke and the final cost still not known until it is all finished.

On top of this, recycling fees had skyrocketed, the cost of keeping a pet had shot up, parking in WooBoo was more expensive, rates would still rise, and there was still not enough money for all the old roads, pavements and playgrounds to be repaired.

Things were suddenly not so good.

Grumpy thumped the table and yelled “I told you so!” and this time Mayor Sneezy agreed with him.

Happy and Doc, being astute in the art of public relations, told the people of WooBoo that they were committed to tackling a crisis that they had “inherited” and the only way to do this was to ask the people what they thought, ignore that, and then seek to bust the rate cap anyway.

The three other dwarfs, who were still trying to get their heads around it all, nodded in agreement.

And so, dear reader, hi-ho, hi-ho, off to the Essential Services Commission we go.

And what of Snow White?

Ah, she sensibly retired early to her castle by the seaside, from where she watches the hard-working people of WooBoo rise up and prepare to march past the empty grounds of the maritime museum, and down the glittering, gridlocked avenue of Justice Von Liebig St, named, as it so happens, for the German industrial chemist who invented fertiliser to replace cow dung.

The End.

[For those who want to go deeper, you can find the Auditor-General’s red light here on the WCC’s adjusted underlying result, page 79. The WCC 2018-19 budget is here. You can find the capital works details at item 4.5.1 on page 45.]

Carol Altmann – The Terrier

How to save $700,000 in seven days, instalment #5:

On the same night Warrnambool City councillors decided to explore breaking the rate cap – on December 3 last year – they also agreed to spend $450,000 to spruce up a single city roundabout.

That’s almost half a million dollars to beautify just one roundabout – at the corner of Kepler and Koroit streets – and they did it without a hint of irony.

Not one of the five councillors who supported potentially raising rates above 2.5% (Cr Peter Hulin voted against and Cr David Owen was absent) seemed concerned that they expect ratepayers to choose between paying more for services, or having services cut, while they plunge money into non-essential projects.

Like dressing up a roundabout.

The council will draw $450,000 from the city parking fund – putting that fund into deficit – to upgrade the roundabout by the end of this year.

This is the busy roundabout outside the Warrnambool Hotel and Ishka etc, which is no doubt unfriendly to pedestrians in its current state.

But improving pedestrian safety (more about that in a moment) and a $450,000 makeover are two separate issues here.

Mayor Tony Herbert was particularly enthusiastic about the improvements because, he says, Kepler St is “the next most important” CBD street after Liebig St.

“It doesn’t matter who occupies businesses there, but I believe that is the next street to get the work done,” he told the meeting.

As it happens, Mr Herbert does occupy a business there, with his office smack bang in the middle of Kepler St, in the Wyton’s cafe precinct.

Until last year, this intersection wasn’t even part of the city renewal plan, but it is now.

Now it will have bluestone paving wrapped around each corner foothpath and central lighting poles that allow for banners and decorations. (See the plan here).

The council calls this “high end aesthetic treatment” and there is no doubt it will be swish compared to boring old bitumen and basic lighting, but is it really necessary in a cost-cutting environment?

It’s a bit like fixing the electrical wiring in your house – for safety – and digging into your savings to replace all the light shades at the same time.

Because what started the momentum for this makeover was money from the Transport Accident Commission (TAC) to make the CBD safer for pedestrians.

The TAC will fund almost half of a $1.67 million upgrade to three CBD intersections, including the Kepler St/Koroit St roundabout.

The council will use that money to replicate those painful zebra crossings that are now in Liebig St and which make drivers give way to pedestrians as they enter and exit a roundabout.

(VicRoads, by the way, say this style of zebra crossing can work, but they also create a greater potential for rear-end accidents. But I digress…)

Having secured money to build the crossings, the council decided to go one step further.

It rummaged around behind the couch and found a neat $450,000 to throw into beautifying the Kepler St/Koroit St roundabout.

Importantly, such a makeover would also create a distraction from the fact the council has run out of money for Stage 3 of the CBD renewal along Koroit St, which is not surprising given the other two stages blew out by more than $3 million.

So from not being part of the CBD renewal, the Kepler/Koroit intersection now has star billing.

In fact it will probably be all that happens along Koroit St between Kepler and Liebig St for some time.

Even so, can new pavers and lamps really be a priority when the council says it must save $700,000 a year from its budget?

It’s too late to ask that question because the beautification is going ahead.

Your input, via the council’s online consultation that opened last Friday, is to decide what else you might like to see added to the works and when you would prefer the 12-week project to start.

There is no option to say, um, we don’t want that style of fender-bender zebra crossing and, by the way, can we also save the $450,000 for something more important?

There is actually no mention of the $450,000 cost of the “high end aesthetic treatment”.

This figure remained buried inside the council agenda and minutes: until now.

More tomorrow.

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ANALYSIS – Carol Altmann

[dropcap style=”font-size: 60px; color: #A02F2F;”]T [/dropcap]here was a headline just begging to be written a fortnight ago and it would have read something like this: “Cr Ermacora votes with rogue councillors!”

Or maybe it should have been this: “Shock move: Cr Sycopoulis abandons faction!”

Because despite a sense that the Warrnambool City Council is hopelessly divided 4-3 between two opposing factions who can never see eye-to-eye, they do.

And they sometimes agree on the most surprising and controversial of issues, such as in the case of Cr Jacinta Ermacora voting with the supposed “rogue” councillors Peter Sycopoulis, Brian Kelson and Peter Hulin to refuse a permit for a 2km sewerage pipeline to be built by Midfield Meats from its rendering plant to an existing sewer pit.

This was a significant decision in terms of Midfield Meats – one of the most successful and powerful companies in Warrnambool – being able to press ahead with its plans to upgrade the rendering plant which sits in the heart of a sensitive environmental zone because, when it was first approved 40 years ago, nobody cared about such things. They do now.

[dropcap style=”font-size: 60px; color: #A02F2F;”]A [/dropcap]n hour later, in the same meeting, Cr Sycopoulis stepped away from his supposed rock-solid faction and voted with Crs Ermacora, Askew, Neoh and Gaston to preserve the controversial Rolf Harris mural at the Lighthouse Theatre.

He didn’t have to, they had the numbers, but he did it because that is what he believed should happen.

In other words, both Crs Ermacora and Sycopoulis voted on principles rather than politics and this is exactly as it should be, and it happens more often than you think, but the dramatics that are also part of the current Warrnambool City Council gain much more attention than these occasions.

And nobody is denying that there is conflict and drama, borne from frustration, ideological differences, wrong-doings (perceived or proven) and lapses in leadership, but this is what happens when seven, very different individuals are elected to represent the many different people that make up our city.

[dropcap style=”font-size: 60px; color: #A02F2F;”]W [/dropcap]orking in the media in the past 26 years, I have sat through literally dozens of council meetings in various parts of Australia and watched them transform from stuffy, ultra-formal and dull gatherings made up of mostly businessmen keen to push private interests, into dynamic, diverse forums where not only the councillors are engaged, but the people.

To see the Warrnambool City Council chamber packed for council meetings is a victory for democracy.

And to see our elected officials made up of men and women from different cultural backgrounds, ages, political leanings and occupations is also not only a victory for democracy, but a big beautiful breath of fresh air.

Even if we don’t agree with everything they do or say – should we? – every councillor has to be admired for, as US writer Bréne Brown calls it, stepping into the arena, because that arena is very public, very demanding and, at times, bruising, and that is why most people remain on the sidelines.

[dropcap style=”font-size: 60px; color: #A02F2F;”]W [/dropcap]hat I don’t understand is why our robust, vibrant and, yes, occasionally dramatic council is considered dysfunctional?

It is in good financial shape and surely it is far less important that councillors sit down and have a convivial meal at the end of each meeting, than it is for important issues to be dissected, debated and thrashed out in public.

Judging by his recent statements, newly elected MP and former Moyne mayor James Purcell is among those who claim our “dysfunctional” council could stop jobs growth in Warrnambool because it has had the temerity to question the building of an enormous milk processing plant and cold storage facility by Midfield Meats in Merrivale.

Midfield’s plans are passing through due process and the elected councillors are doing exactly as they should: watching that process unfold while also listening to the hundreds of people in and around Merrivale who have concerns about the single greatest change to their neighbourhood in decades.

Leaving aside for one moment the handful of jobs that will actually be created by this expansion, surely a council is not elected to be a mere rubber stamp for developments and developers?

If so, they should be more rightly described as corporations, not councils.

The day our councillors start to fall silent on the significant issues within our city is when we really need to begin to worry, not when they are making too much noise.

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 You can find more analysis here…

Sovereign Hill strikes gold as “Flaggy” struggles

Harris mural a lost opportunity to take a stand

Behind the spin, W’bool business is losing heart

The changing landscape under Midfield Meats