Two large Norfolk pines in Nicholson St have been severely damaged by a gas leak, with a 30 per chance of recovery.
Carol Altmann – The Terrier
Tidbit: A few weeks ago a reader contacted The Terrier about two Norfolk pines in Nicholson St, near the corner of Harper St, saying they feared the trees may have been poisoned. This reader also contacted the W’bool City Council.
The WCC has since investigated and found there was a gas leak that was basically asphyxiating the trees.
The leak has now been fixed, but the trees, according to the WCC arborist, have only a 30 per cent chance of survival.
The council will keep an eye on the trees until the end of Spring to see if they recover.
I am really grateful to the reader for alerting the WCC.
As readers of this page know, I am a tree-hugging, greenie, leftie, plover-lover of our natural environment, heritage and history, so I am hoping the 30 per cent chance is enough.
Titbits: spending up, trees down and doin’ the Sharp shimmy
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.
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.
Paving paradise: an old New Zealand Christmas tree is chainsawed to make way for a new footpath in Kepler St. Image: supplied.
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.
Meanwhile, in Paddington, the trees and pavement and pedestrians get along just fine. Image: supplied.
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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People power at work: as has been reported in the paper, the two Moreton Bay figs planted around 1903 in the middle of Banyan St have been saved.
You did this.
Scarlett Patrick, who started a petition that attracted more than 2000 signatures in four days, did this.
Everyone who signed and wrote letters and buttonholed a councillor, did this.
These glorious trees, planted just fifty years after Warrnambool was founded, were due to be chopped down last year to make way for a better footpath.
They had already been mangled through “pruning” by people with chainsaws who didn’t care less about what they looked like in the finish.
This makes them easier to cut down, of course.
As one wise woman said to me this week, trees can be whatever shape they bloody like.
Yes, they bloody can.
Giant trees saved for now, but what happens next?
By Carol Altmann
Phew, that was close. Two of Warrnambool’s oldest street trees have been temporarily spared from being chopped down by the Warrnambool City Council this weekend, but the fight is far from over.
The two, 115-year-old Australian banyan trees on the corner of, yes, Banyan St and Raglan Parade are not yet saved, but thanks to people power, the pause button has been pressed.
Let’s look at what just happened and what happens next.
What happened was the council falsely and arrogantly believed that it could destroy these two magnificent trees that have been alive longer than any person on the planet and nobody would really care.
It also believed that consulting the public meant putting a media release on its website, sending this to the local paper, and contacting a few nearby property owners – all just 10 days before the chainsaws moved in.
Lastly, it hoped that we would blindly accept that these trees had to be chopped down because they were causing car accidents, that they were bubbling up the footpath and that the whole avenue of trees would actually look better if these two trees were gone.
To say the council was wrong on every single count is an understatement.
More than 2000 people signed an online petition within four days to stop this massacre. The petition, started by local Scarlett Patrick, is still going strong.
People were furious. They were furious because their heritage was about to be ripped out (again), that our precious old trees were being treated with contempt, that nobody had a chance to offer an opinion or an alternative, that not one single elected councillor was jumping up and down in outrage, and that the justifications being rolled out just didn’t make sense.
The trees, as we all know, are not causing car accidents at a big intersection that has traffic lights. They are not causing drivers to rear-end each other, or to turn too soon, or too late.
VicRoads knows this and I asked them, just to be sure, if they had expressed concerns to the council about the old trees.
They hadn’t.
What VicRoads did do, however, was offer to pay for a new footpath if the council decided to pull out the trees:
“VicRoads (Regional Roads Victoria) is responsible for the maintenance of the footpath in the Princes Highway median, and has, as a result of the Council’s plans to remove the trees, agreed to fix any damage to the footpath,” a spokeswoman said via email.
The footpath under the big trees is getting rough, just like those at the Warrnambool Botanic Gardens, but there are many ways to improve this and, just to be on the safe side, there is another, perfectly flat footpath just 2o metres away on the other side of the road.
Locals know this, they can see it for themselves.
(They can also see the broken stump of a traffic and pedestrian light that has been sitting there for weeks, wrapped in orange safety tape, waiting to be replaced.)
Picking up on the angry mood, the council has now switched tack.
You’ve got it all wrong folks! The priority was not about traffic accidents and footpaths, but actually improving the full avenue of Australian banyans/Moreton Bay figs along Raglan Parade.
The original media release has been taken down from the council website (see above), but this is the opening line of a statement sent to me this week:
“Council’s intention in proposing to remove these trees was to address issues associated with aesthetics of the boulevard which had been impacted by heavy pruning of the two trees as part of power line and signal clearance works, other considerations included pedestrian access and visibility at the intersection.”
So you prune the trees so harshly that they look ugly, then you get rid of them because, hey, they look ugly.
Oh boy, we are back in George Orwell territory again.
Self-confessed tree hugger with the 115-year-old banyan tree.
The good news is that the council says it will now consult more broadly. When and how, we still don’t know, but it has decided to bundle the issue into its response to another petition, received in April this year.
That petition, signed by 19 residents, asked to have some native trees planted on the median strip in the southern end of Banyan St, between Timor and Merri streets.
Thanks to Scarlett Patrick, you, and more than 2000 other people, these 19 residents now have a whole lot more clout and the two Australian Banyan trees have a second chance.
More broadly, the council has been given a wake up notice that people are watching, that they do care, and that we need a better policy on how we manage our precious urban forest.
[author] [author_image timthumb=’on’]http://the-terrier.com.au/wp-content/uploads/2015/11/vault3.jpg[/author_image]Welcome to The Vault – this is where Bluestone will place all sorts of subscriber-access-only material. If you have something you would like to submit, please email us at editor@bluestonemagazine.com.au[author_info][/author_info] [/author]
By Carol Altmann
[box]Bluestone would like to acknowledge subscriber PT for funding the Freedom of Information application used for this piece.[/box]
[dropcap style=”font-size: 60px; color: #A02F2F;”] B[/dropcap]luestone subscribers will know that we cop quite a lot of flak for continuing to ask questions about the sacred cows of Warrnambool including Flagstaff Hill, Fun4Kids and the increasing secrecy and lack of transparency around how the Warrnambool City Council runs its affairs – but as long as there are huge gaps in the information, we will keep asking.
Bluestone has just uncovered this fact and it is staggering, irrespective of your views on Fun4Kids or whether it has picked up tourism gongs.
Anyone who has ever dealt with public funds will know that full disclosure on how that public money was spent and the results of that spending is standard procedure.
It’s called accountability.
Indeed I remember when working for the might of News Ltd that we were expected to account for every dollar we claimed when working on a story, right down to producing a receipt for a $10.50 pizza – after all, Rupert might be a very wealthy man, but he was still the boss.
Yet the Warrnambool City Council has spent almost half a million dollars of public money on an event that, until now, has always produced a full report on its budget and the festival results.
When we asked the council media manager for a copy of the 2015 Fun4Kids report, he said the key results of the festival had already been released to the media.
So, what was told to the media via the council’s media unit should be enough.
Well some journalists in Warrnambool might be happy to swallow the pre-chewed lines delivered by the council, but Bluestone is compelled to dive deeper.
So when the council told us that “about 15,000” people attended the 2015 festival and that 24% of these were from Melbourne and that they surveyed 1000 of these patrons for their views, we wanted to know more.
Can we have the full report? We asked.
Nothing was forthcoming, so we lodged a Freedom of Information asking for two things:
i) the report and/or documents prepared for the council relating to the financial results of the 2015 Fun4Kids festival
ii) the report and/or documents prepared for the council relating to the patronage, including any breakdowns or analysis on these figures.
[dropcap style=”font-size: 60px; color: #A02F2F;”] A[/dropcap]fter the obligatory 45-day wait, the council’s Freedom of Information officer Wendy Clark, who is also chief executive officer Bruce Anson’s personal assistant, came back with this jaw-dropping response:
“I have found no documents that meet the terms of your request…”
This means, we must assume, that there were no reports prepared for the council.
Ms Clark then attached two documents that, we must also assume, amount to the full documentation available on the results of Fun4Kids 2015.
One was a single budget line reference and the other was five paragraphs that included not one single figure, but plenty of motherhood statements like:
“The Fun4Kids Festival achieved a positive percentage increase in the metropolitan market, while maintaining regional attendances. This outcome is a key growth strategy for the festival moving forward.”
I don’t know about you, but whenever I read those last two words – “moving forward” – I know we are deep in the river of public relations spin and far from the shores of plain speaking.
People were outraged after a row of old tea tree was pulled out from Pertobe Rd – one reader asked for more information on why it had to be done and is still waiting.
[dropcap style=”font-size: 60px; color: #A02F2F;”] I[/dropcap]n a similar vein, you may remember the uproar that followed the sudden removal of a row of old tea tree along Pertobe Rd just before Christmas.
The trees were removed, we were told, after an arborist inspected them and found them to be unsafe due to infestation by a certain worm and cracking.
A Bluestone reader dared to ask more. In early January, she asked for a copy of the arborist’s report (or at least more detail) and whether the trees would be replaced.
She is still waiting for a reply, let alone any more information.
Such queries could normally be thrashed out by elected councillors in general council business, but that, as we know, has been abolished and now councillors are timed for how long they talk, even though meetings were usually over within a couple of hours.
All councillors, not just some, should be demanding more, not less, transparency on behalf of ratepayers.
The fact they aren’t, and that this sort of “trust us” mentality is gripping the council, is of serious concern to anyone who remembers that it is the ratepayers who, just like Rupert, are the boss.
Find more in The Vault here…