Carol Altmann – The Terrier

I asked a simple question of the Warrnambool City Council last Friday: could I have the CV of our new CEO?

The answer was no.

Secrecy is so ingrained in the Warrnambool City Council that ratepayers are not allowed to see the CV of the person who we will potentially* pay around $340,000 – or $26,000 a month for the next 12 months – to run our city.

*(Edit: I have added the word potentially, as this was around the mark for the former CEO, Peter Schneider. Another former CEO, Bruce Anson, received a package of $320,000 in his final year. These salaries are in line with what is offered in “Band 2” councils which include W’bool. The WCC has not disclosed the package for the new CEO.)

As we know, the council’s head of Community Development, Vikki King, was thrust into the top spot by the Four Horsemen who decided to axe Peter Schneider and replace him with the person they wanted in the job.

Given this extraordinary turn of events, I thought it logical that we, as ratepayers, should see the credentials and work history of the person we just “hired” as our chief executive.

The request was denied by Ms King herself.

Here we go again.

It’s just a few weeks since the release of the community survey which showed the people of Warrnambool have had a gill full of being treated like shiitakes, but nothing has changed and, if the past week is any guide, it’s worse.

We were not told by our councillors that the former CEO was about to be sacked, or why, and in some sort of perverse charade the councillors spent the last monthly meeting congratulating themselves many times over for their brilliance.

We also don’t know the cost of this whole set up, and because the coup conveniently happened after 30 June, that cost won’t be included in this year’s annual report.

Amidst all this darkness, it’s the terriers who have to do the digging and delving and poke holes into the walls so that the light gets in.

As I say many times over, scrutiny of our council is not about personalities, but process: when decisions are made on behalf of the public, and involve public money, we have a right to know.

So what do we know?

Well, we know Ms King has been with the council for five years as head of Community Development and, according to some of those who worked with her over that time, is known as “a straight shooter”.

As it happens, Ms King’s contract was due to end in August and who knows what that meant for Ms King’s plans or her future with the WCC?

It doesn’t matter now, because Crs Neoh, Gaston, Cassidy and Owen had Ms King pegged for a whole new post and signed her up for a full 12 months, all without asking the Mayor or the other two councillors.

They didn’t even bother to put an ad on the tearoom noticeboard: “Vacancy. Long hours. Pays well.”

Ms King told the local newspaper last week that she had no idea what was coming.

Judging by the evidence put forward so far by Mayor Tony Herbert, neither did Mr Schneider, who had passed his performance reviews and received a pay rise before being booted out the door without so much as a farewell speech and a WCC tie-pin.

Ironically, Mr Schneider’s departure is the latest in a string of senior resignations from the council these past 12 months under his watch.

Among them was head of governance Anne-Marie Neal, who reported directly to the CEO – both Bruce Anson, and then Mr Schneider – before she departed suddenly late last year without any explanation or comment by the council.

A reader alerted me to a case listed in the Magistrate’s Court for September involving a worker’s compensation claim between Ms Neal and the WCC, so perhaps the circumstances surrounding that situation will soon become clearer.

Another three senior managers have also resigned in the past six months: Manager Economic Development Shaun Miller, Facilities and Projects Manager Ben Storey and, most recently, Director City Infrastructure Scott Cavanagh.

The council itself now has more holes than Swiss cheese and the councillors have never been more divided, with many now asking the same question: how did it get this bad?

And as the Warrnambool Ratepayers Association asked at the weekend, where to from here to turn it around?

As we head toward an election on October 24 and have a chance to determine who runs our city, both behind the scenes and up front, these questions have never been more important.

If you would like to support the Terrier, you can throw something in the tip jar below. 

The Tip Jar

Carol Altmann – The Terrier

Questions: Are we about to throw $1 million of ratepayers’ money down the drain because the four horsemen of the apocalypse decided to sack the WCC chief without warning?

This is the figure being floated about and because Crs Owen, Neoh, Gaston and Cassidy refuse to tell us the full cost of their night of the long knives last Monday, I am going to say it must be close to the truth.

The math makes sense: 2.5 years left on a $340,000 contract, plus paying the acting CEO another $340,000, plus legal fees, leave entitlements etc.

Carol Altmann – The Terrier

Hear that? Crickets. Not a word. Nada. Nothing. Zip.

A full 48 hours has passed since the much anticipated monthly board meeting of Lyndoch Living where it was decided which members of the community, if any, would be good enough to become members of Lyndoch, which is owned by the community.

Among those who applied, as we know, is Vicki Jellie AM, who was awarded a Member of the Order of Australia for her services to the community for her work with Peter’s Project to build a cancer centre in Warrnambool.

Carol Altmann – The Terrier

The time has come to use our voices, stand up for Lyndoch and show that Warrnambool will not tolerate bullies, no matter who they are, where they come from, or what they promise.

I have now had contact with 33 people, including past and present Lyndoch workers, about the toxic culture and the warped priorities that have allegedly taken root within its walls. By the end of this weekend, I will have spoken to 36.

We can’t turn away and expect the victims of this culture to fix it; they can’t.

Instead we, as a community of terriers, need to get involved, to step up and hold the Lyndoch board to account for what is unfolding on its watch.

We did this with the Warrnambool City Council credit card scandal and we can do it again.

Some of Lyndoch’s most senior and experienced staff are among the 70 to 80 people who have left in the past two years and the resignations just keep coming, yet the board remains silent.

If this was happening in a primary school, or our hospital, or inside TAFE, it would be front page news.

So would some of the decisions around the use of public funds.

As it stands, Lyndoch Living – as a registered charity – has spent more than $100,000 on gambling via sponsoring a steeplechase and hosting a corporate marquee at the May races, and somehow this passes as core business.

We also know that Lyndoch plans to spend millions of dollars to build and run a new medical centre that nobody has asked for, while at the same time it doesn’t have enough experienced nurses to fill shifts, and basic furniture needs replacing.

Enough.

I am unable to look on while personal power trips are pursued at the expense of Lyndoch staff wellbeing and, ultimately, the care of our elderly.

So this is what we can do:

– contact the board: chair Kerry Nelson (knelson@mpower.org.au) or any of the other board members: Andrew Paton, Cr Sue Cassidy, Ron Page, Percy Eccles, Kane Grant, Peter Downs, Suzanne Coulson and Lorraine Mielnik via a letter to Lyndoch Living, 10 Hopkins Rd, Warrnambool.

– ask the board about staff morale, staff resignations and Lyndoch’s core priorities;

– contact our local MP Roma Britnell (roma.britnell@parliament.vic.gov.au) and ask her to investigate, just as her Liberal colleague Cindy McLeish did in response to the troubles at Seymour Health;

– write a letter to the editor of the local newspaper which, unfortunately, no longer does investigative journalism;

– most importantly, become a member of Lyndoch: it’s free to apply, can be done by filling out a simple form, and means you can have a say on where Lyndoch is heading and who is in charge.

 

At the moment, Lyndoch has very few members, including the nine people on the board, two life members (Ron Patterson, David Atkinson), the CEO Doreen Power, and four senior staff.

It’s a tight little shop.

Under the new rules of Lyndoch (last year it changed from an association to a company limited by guarantee), these members have significant powers, including standing for the board, voting for the board, and being involved in the AGM.

In fact, unless you are a member, Lyndoch has no obligation to even tell you when the AGM will be held.

This is what happened last October when, for the first time, the Lyndoch AGM was not advertised, nor were the board vacancies.

But here’s the rub: the board gets to decide who can become a member of Lyndoch, so even if you apply, you may not be accepted.

It’s open to all sorts of manipulation and perhaps explains why the current board is such a curious mix.

There are no GPs on the board. There is no lawyer.

But there is the former CEO of the Warrnambool Racing Club, Mr Downs, who now lives in Melbourne and works for Moonee Valley: if that’s not a massive conflict of interest between the board and Lyndoch’s support for racing, Barry the Bullshite Detector and I will run three times around the racecourse.

(Actually, Barry, we will need to do four laps, because Ms Power and Mr Downs also have shares in a racehorse.)

The Lyndoch company secretary – a former PA to Ms Power – also has no accounting or legal qualifications, despite now monitoring a multi-million-dollar organisation.

From all the evidence, none of these people in charge are asking the hard questions about Lyndoch’s operations, or none are asking them publicly.

Cr Cassidy, for example, has gone from being a power house to a mouse. The bold woman who stood up and exposed the games behind the council mayoral race has nothing to say about Lyndoch. She won’t return my calls.

Chair Kerry Nelson? Not a word.

They are supposed to be our eyes and ears, yet all we have is silence.

To me, the entire Lyndoch board and senior executive are accountable for the distress of every single Lyndoch person who is suffering or has suffered.

So I am going to keep exposing what I know, and I am going to also apply to become a member of Lyndoch, although I doubt I will be accepted, even though my mother was in Lyndoch for 10 years, and my late Dad, as a bricklayer, helped build some of it.

Warrnambool people started Lyndoch, we still own it, and we all have a stake in caring for its residents, its staff and its future.

What started as an important story for me is now a campaign – unashamedly – to restore a bold community voice inside Lyndoch and to stand up for those who need us to be strong.

On we go.

You can find the Lyndoch membership form here and its new constitution here.

Next: digging into the multi-million-dollar medical clinic.

If you would like to support the work of The Terrier, you can throw something in the tip jar.

Terrier Tip Jar

Carol Altmann – The Terrier

Tonight I am digging into the second chapter of where Lyndoch Living CEO Doreen Power worked before being chosen in late 2014 to lead our much-loved aged care home.

To me, Ms Power’s back story is important in the context of what is happening at Lyndoch now:

an extraordinary number of staff that have left since 2015, including a string of senior managers and managers,

allegations of a toxic work environment and;

evidence of staff shortages and equipment shortages for our aged and frail.

As I wrote on Monday, Ms Power was in charge of Seymour hospital for five years from 2007 to 2012, before resigning in the face of a virtual uprising within the town over allegations of a toxic workplace, high staff turnover and extremely low staff morale.

Seymour is almost a mirror image of the concerns now leaking out of Lyndoch.

The back story, however, doesn’t end there.

After Seymour, Ms Power became CEO of Plenty Valley Community Health, in Melbourne’s northern suburbs, but resigned and was replaced by an interim CEO after only 18 months.

Why?

After Plenty Valley, Ms Power was appointed Director of Nursing and Manager of the Clinical Team at the Tweddle Child and Family Health Service – her last position before coming to Warrnambool – but, again, she resigned after a few months.

Why?

I have dug deep into these questions and spoken to many people about this period in Ms Power’s career, and a troubling pattern has emerged.

That pattern centres around a particular management style which results in the same allegations: a toxic workplace, low staff morale, high staff turnover and, in the aftermath, the need for a major overhaul and refocus on the organisation’s people and core purpose.

For various reasons I am, unfortunately, unable to quote any sources directly for this piece, but I can tell you that up to 60 staff left Plenty Valley Community Health during 2012-2013.

I can also tell you that the issues left behind for the health centre to deal with were complex and draining.

Former Plenty Valley health board director Marcia O’Neill sums it up in her opening line from the 2013-14 annual report, written six months after Ms Power’s resignation:

“The past year was one of the most challenging in the history of Plenty Valley Community Health.

“Thanks to the efforts of the Board, our stakeholders and key executive staff during this critical time, the prospects for the future are now very promising,” she writes.

Ms O’Neill goes on to say that the appointment of a new CEO (Phillip Bain) saw a sound foundation of executive management and loyal staff and a move back to “business as usual”.

Phillip Bain also gave a blunt assessment in the 2014-15 annual report of what Plenty Valley health looked like when he took charge:

“The Plenty Valley that I joined in early August was a much less confident organisation than the one we see today.

“We had a backlog of productivity, infrastructure and policy issues to address.

“We also had very low levels of staff morale arising from changes in senior management, and had missed out on many opportunities for growth or building partnerships in the years prior.”

One source told me that when Mr Bain took over, it was like Plenty was “being liberated”.

Mr Bain goes on to list 25 main areas of change under his watch, including a new strategic plan, a review of financial reporting, and a “dramatic improvement” in staff morale, absenteeism and staff retention.

Did the Lyndoch board, as it was in 2014 when Ms Power was appointed, know about any of this?

If it did, what impact, if any, did it have on the board’s choice of Ms Power as the best person to guide Lyndoch into the future?

Apparently Ms Power was chosen from 20 applicants, but I am not sure who was on the selection panel. (I emailed chair Kerry Nelson about all this today, but she is on leave until 19 December.)

Lyndoch Living is a very different place under Ms Power’s reign and there is no doubt some changes to Lyndoch were necessary, but what has also happened is a growing culture of silence, with staff too scared to speak up and the public not encouraged to ask questions.

On the ground, the Lyndoch staff have been threatened with disciplinary action if they make any comments on social media that are considered unacceptable by management, and especially if they comment on The Terrier.

I have heard a list of names has been taken, which explains the lack of comments from Lyndoch staff on anything I write (don’t worry, I see you).

The lack of information at the last Lyndoch AGM also showed the disregard for wider community input into Lyndoch’s direction.

I am starting to wonder if Lyndoch, which was started by the community, supported by the community and is still accountable to the community, is turning into Leningrad.

How this has happened, and what we can do about it, is where this story goes next.

More soon.

 Thankyou to everyone who supports The Terrier. If you would like to be a part of it, please consider a contribution to the tip jar.

Terrier Tip Jar