Carol Altmann – The Terrier

Lyndoch Living bulldozed – illegally – a dirty great track through the back of Scoborio Reserve.

The road was cut through several weeks ago so trucks could drive in and out of the construction site for the $22m medical clinic.

No permit.

No authority.

No shame.

I recently asked the Warrnambool City Council if this road sliced through a public reserve had been approved by council officers.

No, it was not:

“The short roadway cut into Scoborio Reserve was done without Council consent. Council expects the affected area to be reinstated,” a WCC spokesman said.

There you have it.

The illegal roadway has now been shut off.

For those keeping count, this is the fourth time Lyndoch Living has failed to meet planning and permit laws in the past eight months.

That’s all for now, but rest assured the terriers are still digging.

Carol Altmann – The Terrier

Tonight, two photographs.

The first was taken around 1pm last Thursday 24 June and posted to Instagram by building company Nicholson Construction.

It shows members of the Lyndoch Living executive and board whooping for joy at the turning of the first sod for the $22 million medical clinic to be built on site as of this week.

Nicholson Construction is building the clinic, which as we know, despite being a $22 million project, was not put to tender.

Instead, Nicholson was appointed automatically, having previously built the $13 million Swinton Wing extension.

The second photo captures a message sent from within Lyndoch less than three hours later.

This photo shows Lyndoch’s nursing staff pleading for help to fill shifts.

They needed help to cover not one, but 12 shifts across Swinton Wing and elsewhere. Twelve.

I don’t think Lyndoch’s nursing staff were whooping for joy.

Like them, I find it hard to celebrate the turning of the first sod on a $22 million clinic that has no discernible benefit to the  vulnerable and frail residents.

A $22 million clinic also won’t fill the empty or understaffed shifts.

This is the reality of life for so many staff at Lyndoch who are either run off their feet, or stressed out, and it’s a reality that I have been reporting on for two years.

In that time, I have watched the slow wearing down and silencing of the voices who dare to question or challenge this reality.

But there is only so much you can silence.

The consequences of these staffing issues were made brutally clear by the aged care watchdog in its report which Lyndoch perhaps hoped we would never see.

As was first reported here, the Aged Care Quality and Safety Commission spoke of residents in pain, a resident chemically constrained without consent, of falls, of wounds, and of the staff mix being “inadequate” to care for residents.

The commission was not whooping for joy.

And yet the horrors within this report have been all but buried under the first sod of the medical clinic.

This clinic will soak up millions and millions of dollars from Lyndoch and make not one squat of difference to the daily lives of residents living just 200m away.

I can’t stop thinking about the residents in that report, just as I can’t stop thinking about the scabies, or the suffering of other residents whose stories are yet to surface publicly.

This is why we must keep pressing on, in the face of mounting pressure to shut up, to stop being a spoil sport and, instead, whoop for joy.

I will whoop for joy one day: when we have all the answers to all the questions and Lyndoch is once again fully accountable to the community it serves.

Carol Altmann – The Terrier

Lyndoch Living today held a ceremony to celebrate the turning of the first sod on its $22 million medical clinic on Hopkins Rd.

Red rope and gold pillars, like those you see outside nightclubs, marked the VIP area on the razed Tomlinson site that remains littered with a pile of unanswered questions, like how will this benefit the residents?

There didn’t appear to be any VIPs other than the board who turned up today, and there was no sign of any residents.

Neither was there any care staff who, 100m away from the sod, are still battling with an unreliable nurse call system.

These staff must wonder, surely, how Lyndoch can afford to spend $22 million on a medical clinic while such basics as the call system remain dodgy.

This is the mobile system that connects care workers as they move from wing to wing and floor to floor.

It’s the spinal cord of the communications system and yet is not 100 per cent reliable and plagued by black spots.

This means calls between care staff can drop out, which, in an emergency, is a bit like us dialing 000 and nobody answers.

Lyndoch has known about these system failings for more than a year and yet, for whatever reason, it still hasn’t been fixed.

In that time, there has been at least one serious incident involving an emergency with a resident and the call system breaking down.

How such lop-sided priorities within Lyndoch remain acceptable is beyond me and I can only ponder, as the board lines up for photo opportunities with a shiny spade, if they are aware.

They are now.

[Once again, I am sorry, but I have comments turned off on this post until a current legal action involving Lyndoch is sorted.]

Carol Altmann – The Terrier

Look closely, this is the slow ruination of a public reserve by Lyndoch Living through ongoing, illegal parking with impunity.

They are photos of Scoborio Reserve, a public reserve on the north side of Lyndoch and the original site of the Warrnambool botanic gardens.

It is named in honour of a head gardener, Charles Scoborio.

It’s a place where a few remnant scraps of native vegetation cling to what used to be a rich habitat along the banks of the Hopkins River as part of the Peek Whurrong lands.

Yellow-crested black cockatoos, pink-chested galahs and nesting magpies still like to hang out there.

And now, bit by bit, it’s being lost to the expansion of Lyndoch.

Lyndoch is turning the eastern end into an unofficial staff car park because it has failed to ever provide enough staff and visitor parking on its own land.

The reserve is becoming a mud bath.

What was once a handful of cars has grown to 30 or more a day.

That’s because the opening of a mini medical clinic at Lyndoch and demolition work for the $22 million medical clinic has pushed scarce parking on site to breaking point.

Lyndoch has even had the gall to direct staff – in writing – to park on land that it doesn’t own because it couldn’t be bothered to find its own solution.

And what have the WCC officers done about it?

They haven’t, as you might expect, told Lyndoch to stop.

In fact they haven’t moved one inch to protect the reserve from this illegal activity.

No, what they have done is actually far worse than doing nothing: they are looking at ways to let it go on.

The council officers – NOT the elected councillors* – are busily working to solve a problem that is not their problem and are offering up a piece of public land in the process.

In other words, if Lyndoch breaks the law, the council doesn’t fine them, but bends to them.

What a disgrace.

I wish I could say this was a one off.

You may recall the large corporate sign that was installed on the side of Lyndoch last November without a council permit.

Seven months on, the permit application (lodged after The Terrier story) is still being processed.

The illegal sign is still there.

Lyndoch is also, as we speak, committing an offence under the State Planning and Environment Act by ignoring the permit conditions for its mini medical clinic.

Part of the permit issued by council staff (NOT councillors*) included a clear traffic and parking plan.

This plan has been completely ignored by Lyndoch ever since the clinic opened on 4 April.

Has anything happened as a consequence? Was the clinic forced to close immediately?

No, of course not.

And here comes the pub test.

All of these breaches are happening while the WCC chief of planning, Andrew Paton, sits on the Lyndoch board.

He is also a director of the Warrnambool Medical Clinic, a commercial, private company owned by Lyndoch that is driving the $22m project.

Former WCC Acting CEO and community services manager Vikki King is also deputy chair of a board chaired by the Lyndoch CEO and managed by Lyndoch.

How is it okay for senior council managers  – a chief planner and a former Acting CEO no less – to be anywhere near an organisation that requires multiple council approvals* as part of its expansion?

(You might also recall the secret talks between Lyndoch and the WCC about 18 months ago to sell off part of Scoborio for a childcare centre before exposure by The Terrier cut that off at the pass.)

The WCC says Mr Paton has declared a conflict of interest in all planning and applications from Lyndoch* and has not been involved in any decisions.

And Mr Paton, for his part, told me both positions he holds with Lyndoch are, “to date”, voluntary.

I have no doubt Mr Paton has acted with integrity, but that is not the point.

The question is, why would he put himself in that position in the first place and why would the WCC allow it?

If Mr Paton was a board member of a building company that was rolling out $100m worth of housing on Hopkins Rd hill, eyebrows would be up.

Why is it not the case here as Lyndoch rolls out a $100m masterplan*?

This is precisely the “wheels within wheels”, “who-you-know” rubbish that the people of Warrnambool are sick of.

We are all tired of doing the right thing – applying for permits, parking within the lines, paying our fines – while others sail past in the express lane of exemption and ruin public property in the process.

Insiders and outsiders.

As I wrote after the Schneider court victory, those days are done and it’s time for the WCC to end it, regardless of who is in charge.

* Not one part of Lyndoch’s $100m masterplan so far has gone to full council for approval by the elected councillors. Each part has been signed off by delegation.

Carol Altmann – The Terrier

Lyndoch Living has taken to Facebook today to urgently flog off the fencing around the site of its proposed $22 million medical clinic, strongly suggesting work will start within a week.

The big hint? It needs the whole lot packed up and gone by Monday.

And why wouldn’t they be putting the pedal to the metal?

There is nothing like getting a cement slab down to try and shut down growing community concern around the viability of this project.

More than 600 people have now signed a petition started by the “Keep Lyndoch living” action group asking for the State Government to intervene and pause the project until these concerns are addressed.

This petition asks for nothing more than an independent review, just to make sure that this massive investment by Lyndoch – the largest in its history – is sustainable.

But 600 people is obviously not enough to stop the Lyndoch Living juggernaut.

No, it presses on regardless, rolling right over the top of the community concerns and flattening them like it did the Tomlinson dementia wing with its established gardens, vegetable beds and green lawns.

The residents, you will recall, were shuffled off to the spanking new Swinton Wing, where they could peer through the windows at the destruction of their former home.

Grass and gardens are so yesterday, with that “old” Lyndoch slowly being replaced by cement, rooftop gardens, and a medical clinic that could possibly send Lyndoch broke.

And despite being owned by the community, Lyndoch feels under no obligation to explain anything to the community about its decisions.

Simple questions like where is the money for this medical clinic coming from?

What is the benefit to the elderly residents?

Is there a business plan?

What are the expected returns?

Such concerns are dismissed as a beat-up by “troublemakers” or “disgruntled ex-workers” who must be pushed aside quickly if Lyndoch is to move on with its masterplan.

It doesn’t matter a jot that one of those raising the alarm about this clinic is former Acting Chief Financial Officer Allan Conway who has the rare distinction of actually standing up and speaking out publicly for Lyndoch.

That shows a spine, yet Mr Conway’s concerns have so far fallen on deaf ears.

And because those with the power to intervene are choosing not to act, Lyndoch is acting – fast.

But as the petition shows, hundreds of people are prepared to publicly support Mr Conway and, most importantly, the elderly of Lyndoch, and that gives me heart and hope that this fight is far from over, fence or no fence.

You can find the petition here.