Carol Altmann – The Terrier

There are so many wasteful decisions being made in our city at the moment that I’m going to throw it all into one big bowl for you and call it a dog’s breakfast.

First, the Warrnambool City Council has just advertised three new senior management positions at around $100,000 a year that will add, roughly, at least another $300,000 a year to its wage bill.

This comes, of course, as the council awaits to hear whether it is allowed to raise rates above the 2.5% cap to 4.5% for the next three years because it needs to save $700,000 a year.

Hiring more senior staff…while trying to save money. I can’t work that one out.

The three new positions include not one, but two management positions to work on developing Reid Oval so that it can host AFL practice matches, even though council-operated childcare and home care services may have to be cut and the art gallery (still) gets just $15,000 a year to spend on buying new art.

Welcome to the spending priorities in the city of WooBoo.

The third position is a project officer who will help develop the new joint library with TAFE.

All three positions run until 2022, which means a total salary bill of at least $300,000 x three years = $900,000.

 

This comes on top of the current contingent of senior council staff already earning over $100,000 and any consultants that, no doubt, will also be brought into the mix.

In 2016, the council had 21 staff earning a total salary package of more than $120,000 and, last year, it spent $900,000 on consultants. Let’s not forget the CEO position also attracts a salary of more than $310,000.

My eyeballs are watering.

Any day now the Essential Services Commission will rule whether the council has done enough to cut its discretionary spending, which brings us to the Sharp shimmy…

As we know, Sharp Airlines is shimmying off stage and ending its passenger service from Warrnambool to Essendon.

This is not a shock. In fact, it was entirely predictable, given the airline planned to close the route in January, but was offered $300,000 of public funds to try and turn things around by May: an almost impossible task.

Should Sharp have taken the money? Should it have just said “no thanks, we’re closing and that’s it”?

That is up for debate, but the bigger question is why did our council – our financially strapped council – provide $78,000 of that money? Why?

Sharp didn’t ask for it, but the council – apparently via former CEO Bruce Anson – handed it over anyway.

It is this sort of waste that makes ratepayers’ hair stand on end. Which brings us to chopping down trees for more bitumen.

As we know, the council recently and reluctantly saved two 115-year-old Moreton Bay fig trees from being axed to make way for a new footpath, only to last Friday cut down an 80-plus-year-old New Zealand Christmas tree in Kepler St…to make way for a new footpath.

It did so without consultation or notification, which means its tree policy is not worth the paper it is written on.

A council spokesman told the newspaper (I didn’t get any answers to my questions on this topic) that the tree had to go because the public was baying for a high-quality roundabout at the corner of Timor and Kepler streets.

Did you hear any baying? I didn’t.

Did you see any petition with hundreds of signatures saying please build us a high-quality roundabout on Kepler St? I haven’t.

What I have heard is person after person saying please stop wasting our hard-earned ratepayer and taxpayer dollars.

 

What I have also heard is people saying please stop turning our CBD into an urban wasteland of cement and concrete and pavers, where trees are seen as a problem, not part of the solution.

Other cities, truly cosmopolitan cities like Hobart and Sydney, value their trees.

In Hobart, they put rubber matting over the roots to protect the pavement and the tree.

In Paddington, Sydney, they let the trees grow right up through the pavement and people go around them or use the path across the street. Radical, hey?

 

The revitalisation of the CBD started out as a reason for celebration, but after a $3 million cost blowout and an ongoing obsession with building enormous pedestrian crossings and new roundabouts, it has turned into a financial nightmare.

We can only hope that we all wake up soon.

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Carol Altmann – The Terrier

Here’s a twist on the $75,000 given to Sharp Airlines by the cash-strapped Warrnambool City Council  – Sharp Airlines didn’t ask for the money.

No, it was offered to Sharp as part of a $300,000 package to try and keep the passenger service to Essendon flying beyond last January when it was due to close because of insufficient numbers.

So this money wasn’t a “bail out” for Sharp Airlines, but an unexpected bonus.

The package was put together by the State Government, which in turn asked for contributions from Warrnambool, Glenelg and Moyne councils – only Warrnambool and Glenelg said yes.

Warrnambool ratepayers didn’t know a thing about any of this until the local newspaper broke the story in early January, right smack bang in the middle of the council announcing it wanted to break the rate cap and lift rates by 4.5% because it was slowly going broke. No wonder they wanted to keep it quiet.

The WCC wouldn’t say at the time how much it had given Sharp, but ironically the $75,000 figure was revealed privately to a focus group of ratepayers who were invited by the council to discuss the need for a rate rise.

As one of those ratepayers told me later, they were shocked to learn that the council could have said no.

 

Sharp Airlines, as a business, doesn’t need rescuing.  It operates other routes from other airports quite successfully, but the Warrnambool to Melbourne passenger route was not proving  profitable since its relaunch in 2015.

Like any business, the airline made a decision that after four years of making a loss, it was time to pull the pin, but if the State Government was offering a package to help turn things around, Sharp would happily try.

Sharp Airlines CEO Malcolm Sharp is refreshingly up front about all of this.

“We have never asked for and have never before received any government assistance, but we certainly appreciate the support,” he says.

Mr Sharp says passenger numbers have improved slightly since January, but a final decision will be made in the next six to eight weeks. The key is whether more business passengers get on board.

What the Sharp Airlines deal has done, however, is expose a much bigger problem with the airport which, unbelievably, runs at a loss that is picked up by – you guessed it – Warrnambool ratepayers.

 

So we have an airline receiving council money that it didn’t ask for, while that same council runs the airport at a loss. No wonder the budget is stuffed.

This loss is despite a $4.3 million upgrade of the airport just three years ago that included $750,000 of WCC money and was supposed to see the airport zoom into the future with more hangars being built, more flights, more businesses setting up….

Three years on, WCC ratepayers are still having to meet the average shortfall in income of around $200,000 a year.

Does this sound familiar to you? If you have been following the Flagstaff Hill $3 million sound-and-light-show debacle, it should.

A big upgrade, all bells and whistles, media photos, high-vis vests and handshakes….and then ratepayers keep footing the bill.

Despite running at a loss, the WCC still has virtually no user-pays fees for the airport.

 

While we are being whacked for parking, pet registrations and green waste, Midfield Meats International, for example, pays about $50 a week or $2600 a year to rent space for an airport hangar (the hangars themselves are privately built and owned).

There are also no aeroplane parking fees or landing fees, despite around 15,000 takeoffs and landings at the airport each year.

If the WCC charged, say, $50 a pop per landing and takeoff, there is a neat $750,000 a year … which just happens to be how much it hopes to raise through breaking the rate cap.

Head. Wall. Bang.

As it is, WCC is one of only two of the 79 councils right across Victoria to apply for permission to bust the rate cap. We can only hope the Essential Services Commission sees right through this and says no.

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