Carol Altmann – The Terrier

I have been thinking about consequences and wondering if there will be any for what unfolded in the last 12 months of the last Warrnambool City Council.

Because while we wait to see if sacked CEO Peter Schneider wins his court case, there are some other potentially illegal dealings that also require attention.

The first is alleged fraud or alleged theft (take your pick) of public money as part of the corporate credit card scandal.

The council confirmed that the credit card misuse involving former tourism manager David McMahon was referred to the police, as recommended by the Ombudsman in her report tabled six months ago.

The police, I can only assume, are now investigating Mr McMahon’s repayment of more than $6000, the doctoring of receipts, and writing fake invoices that saw staff parties at the Lady Bay put down as “room hire” so they would be picked up by the public purse.

Despite leaving messages, I have been unable to get an official update from the detectives involved.

I wonder if charges will be laid, or if there are two sets of rules for so-called white collar and so-called blue collar crime?

Under that form of justice, if you pinch a mixed grill from Woolies, you are charged, but if you misuse thousands of dollars in public funds, you get to pay it back and that’s the end of it.

We shall see.

Second, we have confirmation that four former councillors sought detailed legal advice from the council lawyers, Maddocks, in Melbourne, to work out how to sack Mr Schneider.

This legal advice, as the Supreme Court heard last month, was not approved by the full council.

This is against the law.

Such legal advice normally costs money and is paid for from public funds.

Maddocks sent the council an invoice, but it was withdrawn and never paid.

These are the simple facts, so the question is: does an illegal act by four councillors become legal if the bill is torn up?

Can the former councillors involved – knowing the public was expected to pay the bill – just get away with it?

And, if so, who decided that the invoice would be withdrawn and why?

All of this was referred to the Local Government Inspectorate last year as part of a request for a broader investigation into the sacking of Mr Schneider.

Another spurious decision was also referred to the Inspectorate, which was the re-appointment of acting CEO Vikki King for another five years to her position as manager of Community Services.

Ms King’s contract was due to expire in August last year.

Ms King was appointed acting CEO the night Mr Schneider was sacked on 13 July.

As Acting CEO, Ms King delegated off the authority to re-appoint herself for another five years.

We still don’t know exactly who signed off on Ms King’s reappointment, but I understand it was a casual staff member.

These are the simple facts, so the question is: can a casual worker sign off on a $240,000 a year position and why didn’t a senior manager put their name to it?

The Local Government Inspectorate confirmed last August it has launched an investigation into Mr Schneider’s dismissal, and that investigation is ongoing.

Any details on the scope of the investigation, however, and how it is coming along, are strictly under wraps.

I recently contacted the LGI and the latest update is this:

“The Local Government Inspectorate is investigating a complaint in relation to Warrnambool City Council. This investigation is ongoing.

“The Inspectorate deals with complaints or requests for investigation in strict confidence and does not provide comment on investigations that are yet to be finalised.”

The passing of time does not diminish the importance of these ongoing investigations and the need for either closure or consequences.

Only then will this sorry chapter in our civic history be fully laid to rest.

Carol Altmann – The Terrier

I want you to meet Foxy. I will tell you more about her at the end of this piece, but we need Foxy, because speaking up is now a crime.

If you raise your voice and shout at a Warrnambool City Council meeting, you face an $825 fine, or, to put it into council currency, one Pickled Pig dinner, six bottles of shiraz and two creme brûlées.

This is a local law that was designed to protect councillors and staff from aggression or violence toward each other, or from the public. It is now being used to shut people up.

Not all people, mind you, just the Neanderthals, as Cr Michael Neoh likes to call them.

These “Neanderthals” include the everyday people of Warrnambool who don’t wear suits and who have callouses on their hands from physical work, or tired faces from holding down two jobs while raising three kids.

According to Cr Neoh and Cr Kylie Gaston and our CEO Peter Schneider, these people now need to be shut down for shouting, like they did at last Monday night’s fiery meeting.

If police need to be called, Cr Gaston is happy to use speed dial.

And yet no police have been called by the WCC for the almost $4000 in ratepayers’ funds that were mis-spent by a former senior manager.

This man was an actual Neanderthal, but he wore a suit and was regarded as a “good bloke” by our Mayor and others while he ripped off ratepayers and bullied a string of council staff mercilessly.

Not a word was raised last Monday night about that Neanderthal’s bullying behaviour.

Instead, within hours, the finger was pointed back on the people who have had a gut full of years of waste and not being heard.

The main agitator, ratepayer Ben Blain, who was facing a fine, was loud, no doubt about it, but he was not abusive, or threatening. In fact he was pleading.

Here’s a theatrical but accurate transcript of the full exchange. Warning: contains foul language like “sack ’em” and “cheat” and “you have not got your house in order”.

——-

Lights up. Agenda Item 5.4: Council decides to increase its carbon footprint by flying 31,000km to and from Mariestad, Sweden, to learn how to reduce its carbon footprint.

Ratepayer Ben leaves his seat, walks to the front of the public gallery, his pants trembling with nerves:

(Cue loud voice….aaaaaaand action!):

“Peter Schneider was the council aware of anyone’s involvement? We have sat here and listened to the council try and hide every single cover up that has happened in this place and we are not going to take it anymore.

We are the ratepayers, we are the ones that have voted you in, and you think it is alright to sit here and lie, cheat and steal. Listen to the ratepayers.

What we want is transparency. That is what we want.

How do you think we are going to put up with this?

(Mayor Herbert: Ben, Ben, I have asked you to leave.)

How do you think we are going to put up with this?

(Mayor Herbert: Ben, I have asked you to leave.)

Have you? I am not leaving.

(Ratepayer chorus: No! No!)

Sack ’em! Sack em’!

(Ratepayer chrous: Sack ’em! Sack ’em! Sack’ em! Sack ’em!)

It is absolutely disgusting. We can’t afford to run the city with the rates we’ve got and then you want more to go to Sweden.

You have not got your house in order. How do you think the ratepayers….

(Mayor Herbert: I have asked you to leave.)

(Ratepayer chorus: Nooooo! Nooooo! Noooooo!)

(Mayor Herbert: Right, councillors, we will adjourn the meeting please.)

(Ratepayer chorus: Ohhhhhhhhhhhhhh.)

Meeting adjourned for 10 minutes while CEO Schneider spoke quietly with ratepayer who had returned to his seat.

Councillors re-emerge.

Meeting resumes and picks up again at item 5.4.

Meeting rolls on for almost another hour with a few jeers and moans and groans.

Subdued crowd reignited fully by Cr Gaston’s speech about The Terrier (aka Fox Terrier News), during which Cr Gaston reveals her preference for media that behaves like a toothless tiger, rather than a blog that bites.

Lights down. We all go home.

This is democracy in action and I am determined to keep fighting for it.

As part of that, and because Cr Gaston said she would like my fact checking to be public, I have hired Foxy the Fact Checker. She works 7.6 hours a week alongside Barry the Bullshite detector and she will have her first outing shortly.

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Carol Altmann – The Terrier

Today is the final episode of Season One of House of Cards meets Warrnambool City Council meets Game of Thrones, where all the lines in the ever-thickening and outrageous plot come together and I lay it all out on the table.

The opening scene in this special, double episode is yet another corporate credit card – we are now up to number four – which has the same pattern of spending on the backs of ratepayers that has become so depressingly familiar: the dinners, the drinks, the endless coffees, the lunches, on and on and on.

I have been sitting on all of this information for a very, very long time, hoping the council would eventually throw open the windows, but it hasn’t and it won’t, so I am doing it for them.

I will start with credit card #4 and a snapshot:

Exhibit A is $98 worth of drinks at the Hairy Goat on a Friday night on 21 September last year, which is around the time when, supposedly, the council was cracking down on its credit card use after “discovering” the inappropriate and over-the-top spending of former tourism chief David McMahon.

Exhibit B is a $163 dinner for two people at the Warrnambool Hotel on a Saturday night, 26 May last year, which included a dozen oysters au naturale and, wait for it, a plate of eye fillet. (Whoever gets to play the eye fillet in the eventual movie of this saga is going to become a star).

And then there is Exhibit C, a receipt from 10 December last year – after the council re-wrote its floppy credit card policy – where two people spent $105.30 on dinner at the Japanese cafe Gyoza Gyoza in Melbourne, of which $44.90 was soaked up by a bottle of pinot gris (with two glasses).

This outing was enjoyed just a week after the council decided to apply to break the rate cap and bump our rates up by 4.5% this year and the next.

What a ****** cheek.

Like you, I have had a gut full of the excuses and the ducking and weaving and hiding behind Utopia inspired spin that does nothing to comfort ratepayers that this long age of entitlement, slack governance and lack of accountability is well and truly over.

It needs to be rooted out and that’s why it’s time to name names.

Credit card #4 is held by the Manager of Economic Development and Investment Shaun Miller, he of the two jobs and who, after being named in relation to those two jobs, prompted an email from CEO Peter Schneider asking me not to name staff.

I tried that tack, but the council has done nothing since to convince me that it intends to get to the bottom of the rot which runs so deep. (#notAllstaff)

In fact all the signs point to yet another cover-up, so the gloves are coming off, because my only motivation through all of this is to expose the truth. So here are some truths.

Mr Miller travels around a lot. I can now reveal he is the mystery man who, you may recall and according to an invoice paid for by his former colleague, Mr McMahon, arrived two days early, on a Saturday, for a conference in 2017 that was held at the Flemington Racecourse which, on that Saturday, was hosting a major racing event.

A coincidence? Maybe, because our council thrives on coincidence.

Certain people don’t like me naming Mr Miller. When I wrote about his two jobs, there was a barrage of abuse and behind-the-scenes threats, perhaps because these people suspected that I knew more than I was writing about publicly. They were right, I did. More about that shortly.

I have not had any direct response from Mr Miller about his credit card use, however I did get another polite email on his behalf from Mr Schneider last Friday night, but it said nothing new and provided no explanation for the receipts above.

Mr Miller’s spending is signed off by his superior, Director City Growth Andrew Paton.

Mr Paton is the owner of credit card #3.

This is the card that was used, among many other things, to pay for the $1476 dinner at Pippies, and the $700 dinner at the Myrtle Kitchen which included five bottles of wine at $79 a bottle.

Mr Paton was very polite in his response to my emailed questions last week, but he is gagged from answering me directly, such is the council’s tight grip around the throats of those who might wish to talk to journalists.

If he could have spoken to me, Mr Paton might have explained the purpose of the boozy Myrtle Dinner which was attended by four people, including himself and Cr Sue Cassidy.

Cr Cassidy is another name that is significant to this story because Cr Cassidy is one of two councillors on the council’s Audit and Risk Committee. This committee is important because, well, it is designed to keep an eye on audit and risk, ie. the use of public money.

This is the committee that has just been put in charge of the external audit into the use of council credit cards.

You guessed it, Barry the Bullshite Detector has been having a meltdown.

So let’s paint the picture: Mr Paton is the boss of Mr Miller and was the boss of Mr McMahon and was the manager responsible for signing off on all the questionable spending on their credit cards, while at the same time using his own credit card to pay for a long, boozy dinner attended by Cr Cassidy who is a member of the council Audit and Risk Committee that will now oversee the investigation into those cards.

The House of Cards ain’t got nothing on this.

And rolling along behind the scene of this car wreck are three specific side stories that I also want you to know about.

(Intermission. Lights up. Toilet break. Grab a choc top. Right, away we go…)

Side story one: Freedom of Information. As you know, none of this – none of it – would have seen the light of day had it not been for a Freedom of Information application that I lodged almost a year ago, asking for Mr McMahon’s credit card receipts.

The council did everything it could to stop me getting that information fully and efficiently and the whole process took nine months and a lot of money (#thankyouTerrierTipJar).

Even after the nine-month wait and all that money, we would not have known about the secret repayments and behind-the-scenes deal between Mr McMahon and the then CEO Bruce Anson last November, had it not been for sources.

That whole, disgraceful cover-up was only exposed, here, in July.

And who in the council was in charge of responding to my Freedom of Information applications about the credit cards?

The CEO’s executive assistant, Wendy Clark.

So, to try and find out information that ultimately involved the actions and decisions of the former CEO, I had to go through the former CEO’s executive assistant.

And if I wanted to dive deeper and detail the tens of thousands of dollars of credit card spending on behalf of Mr Anson – he didn’t use his own corporate card to buy, for example, the cases of wine enjoyed after council meetings  – I would need to go through the same executive assistant.

Does that pass the pub test?

And just to tangle that web a little more, Ms Clark, the CEO executive assistant, is the senior staff member who has lived in a council-owned CBD apartment for more than 30 years and for most of that time has leased it on nothing more than a handshake deal.

That suspect arrangement existed until I started asking questions and learned, wait for it, a written lease had been miraculously signed just a few weeks before my probing.

This is the rotten culture I am talking about.

It stinks and it has to end.

Side story two: former tourism chief Mr McMahon was a bully and made life hell for a lot of people, especially women. He came to the council with a reputation as a bully that somehow escaped the attention of those who hired him, but which I have since substantiated.

This is how this whole story started, not from people contacting me to talk about his credit card abuse – although that was raised too – but because of Mr McMahon’s foul-mouthed bullying and a desperation to be heard, because nobody in council was listening.

I told  Cr Tony Herbert about this bullying when we met last August in the meeting that he now fails to remember much about at all. Cr Herbert did nothing. The council did nothing. #goodbloke #heLikesAdrink

Nothing happened to Mr McMahon – he stayed in his top job while so many around him fell away, distressed and exhausted, and he stayed there right up until his dishonesty around his credit card expenditure finally caught up with him last July.

How was Mr McMahon hired in the first place? Why was he allowed to get away with all that he did? And why on earth – why on earth – did current CEO Mr Schneider praise him upon his departure?

This is how the council boys’ club works and it is part of the rotten culture that I am talking about.

It stinks and it has to end.

Side story three: Mr Miller has two jobs. One is full-time with the council and the other, as I reported recently, is with a start-up called Acusensus, which Mr Miller joined in March this year as International Business Development Manager and for whom he works 7.6 hours a week.

The chairman of Acusensus is a smart, charismatic guy called Ravin Mirchandani.

Before Mr Miller joined the WCC in 2016, he and Mr Mirchandani were in upper level management at a company called Mack Valves, which makes valves for things like hydrogen pumps.

Mr Mirchandani is still the director/chairman of Mack Valves and is now also the Australian representative of a group called Nilsson Energy, based near the regional city of Mariestad, Sweden.

Mr Mirchandani became the Australian rep of Nilsson Energy after going to see its work in Mariestad in June last year and, it seems, came away very impressed.

Ten months later, in April 2019, Mr Mirchandani was part of a delegation from the city of Mariestad and Nilsson Energy that was invited to visit Warrnambool and talk about using hydrogen electricity, which is the next big thing and has companies jostling for a slice of the action.

Mr Miller was a key driver and organiser of this Warrnambool visit, which saw Mr Mirchandani share the stage at Deakin Uni with government reps.

As a result of that April trip, Warrnambool CC and the city of Mariestad signed an MOU to share ideas and information and keep the momentum moving.

Tomorrow night’s council meeting (2/9) will decide whether to send our Mayor, CEO and a council staff member – I wonder who that might be? – to Sweden to visit Mariestad before the end of the year. The public will help pay for the cost of that trip.

And this is the nub: nowhere, at no time, has there been a public declaration by the council of Mr Miller’s active business links to Mr Mirchandani and any potential conflict of interest that may arise from the Mack Valves/Nilsson Energy Australia/Acusensus connection.

In fact Mr Mirchandani’s name is missing from the list of names in tomorrow night’s council agenda of those who visited Warrnambool with the Mariestad delegation in April.

Zero transparency.

This is the rotten culture that I am talking about.

It stinks and, despite hundreds of hours of investigation into all of the issues above, I am still only just touching the surface.

Curtain falls. Lights up. Credits roll.

Credits: all of the brave people who have trusted me to tell the truth, I see you and I want to thank you. And Dad, as I write this on this Father’s Day, I see you too, even though you are long dead. My Dad was a bricklayer who got up at 5am every morning to make the money to pay his rates. I have done the best I can to get the fresh start in Warrnambool that we all deserve; it is now up to our elected officials, and our leaders, to press the reset button. On we go.

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Carol Altmann – The Terrier

The Warrnambool City Council may be wishing the whole credit card mess would just dissolve into the background, but that is not going to happen.

Ratepayers Victoria has today sent a powerful letter to the Local Government Minister, urging him to intervene.

The letter, a copy of which has been sent to local media, pulls no punches as it describes the need for an “urgent investigation” into the serious allegations around misconduct and inappropriate use of public money.

Ratepayers Victoria is the peak body representing ratepayers across the state.

The WCC may be clinging to the days of keeping its messy secrets tucked behind closed doors, but outsiders are determined to fling up the windows.

Local MP Roma Britnell has already flagged her intention to raise the issue in Parliament after it resumes on August 14 – a move which saw WCC chief Peter Schneider and Mayor Tony Herbert race to cut her off at the pass by trying to get to the Minister first. This letter reveals that they met with his chief of staff.

Importantly, the letter also raises concerns about the long-term financial viability of the council, saying it is unsustainable to have 86% of rate revenue spent on staffing costs.

I will let this letter speak for itself and run it in full below:

A letter from Ratepayers Victoria to Local Government Minister The Hon Adem Somyurek:

 

We write in reference to some serious allegations circulating in the media in relation to WCC and alleged misconduct.

Several local councillors have made media commentary that we would consider to be contrary of the Local Government Act and the Code of Conduct of Councillors.

There is already evidence of at least one staff member misusing their senior position and corporate credit card resulting in the repayment of thousands of dollars of public money.

It is now being reported that there are current staff holding other external senior positions whilst remaining the incumbent in senior WCC roles.

Media coverage indicates a potential dysfunctional relationship between councillors and conflicting statements by several parties to the events.

I am also aware that the Local Member, Roma Britnell, has been looking into this matter.

I have personally spoken to the Mayor and whilst I found him open to discussion, I was alarmed at the indifference he displayed to my questioning over the sheer number of credit cards held by staff for a regional council.

As you may be aware the Mayor went on local radio (3YB FM) on Friday 2/8/19 and conducted an interview making statements such as “I’m putting my neck out and it gets cut off all the time”, “What in the hell am I putting myself and my family through” and “The CEO has seen the local government minister”.

We do not believe these statements are consistent with the best interests of the community. We believe that the CEO has not met with you personally, rather with your chief of staff and it is misleading of the mayor to say such things on local radio.

This council has recently sought and been successful at gaining an increase in rates above the 2.5% cap.

Approximately 86% of rates are allocated to employee costs in WCC’s 2019/2020 budget. This is commercially unsustainable and must be benchmarked and reviewed immediately. (See attached for your reference)

We believe that WCC is in peril and that failing intervention, an administrator may need to be appointed which is a disastrous outcome for the city and ratepayers.

Ratepayers Victoria formally asks you as the governing Minister to urgently intervene and investigate these serious allegations including councillor and executive conduct and the inappropriate use of public funds.

We urge you to formally ask the Auditor General to review all council staff credit card expenditure to ensure confidence can be maintained in Council and its spending of public monies.

Lastly, we ask you to consider investigating whether the “alleged reporting by the CEO” of credit card misuse met the legal requirements of same.

We look forward to your response.

Yours sincerely,

Dean Hurlston

President- Ratepayers Victoria

“I am responding to your question about the exact date of notification.

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