Carol Altmann – The Terrier

The Warrnambool City Council is claiming its budget is tight, yet it spent more than $10,000 to send seven people – including the CEO of the Warrnambool Racing Club – to a tourism conference at a Mornington Peninsula resort last July.

The council has confirmed two councillors, WRC chief Peter Downs and four council staff attended the Victorian Tourism Industry Council annual conference held at the RACV Cape Schanck Resort from July 30-31.

The council has put the total bill for the conference at $9034, including $3934 in accommodation and $4830 in conference fees and only $270 in food.

I have received reliable information, however, that the final cost also included more than $1000 in drinks in the resort’s Lighthouse Lounge and more than $400 on meals and drinks in its cafe.

A council spokesman said “any food /drinks beyond (the $270) would have been settled by the individual(s) themselves as a personal expense”. Perhaps the big drinks bill was repaid, but I have not seen any evidence of that.

Those who attended the conference included now-mayor Tony Herbert, who is chair of the council’s Visitor Economy Advisory Committee, fellow committee member Cr David Owen (both funded their share through their councillor allowance), the council’s head of Visitor Economy, David McMahon, and three other council staff from Visitor Economy.

The final delegate was racing chief Mr Downs, who nominated and was chosen to join the council’s Visitor Economy Advisory Committee when it started in May 2017.

The conference, by the way, included sunset drinks at the St Andrews Beach boutique brewery which has been converted from first class racing stables and was worthy of a tweet from Mr Downs (see below).

There are two things about this story that don’t sit right.

First, as we know, the council is surveying ratepayers right now as part of a process to try and lift rates above the 2.5% cap.

The council is saying that it must save at least $700,000 a year for the next three years and the only two options we have been given are to either cut services, or raise rates.

Given this, what a double-standard – or perhaps a better word is insult – for the council to have sent seven people off to Cape Schanck to learn the latest in tourism trends, funded by an obviously healthy professional development budget.

The issue here is not only the money, but the mindset: while ratepayers have to expect cuts to services like childcare, council networking opportunities can roll on as normal.

The second unsettling aspect of this story is the inclusion of Mr Downs.

It is no secret that Mr Downs’, as CEO of the WRC, has been a major player in pushing for commercial racehorse training at Levy’s Beach, in the Belfast Coastal Reserve, and lobbying to make sure this happened.

In fact when Mr Downs was chosen for the council committee in 2017, it was just eight months after racehorse training was banned at Levy’s because of concerns raised by Aboriginal Victoria and the push by the WRC to get racehorses back on the beach was in full swing.

This council doesn’t seem overly fussed by potential conflicts of interest around the racehorse training issue, but I would have thought the decision to appoint Mr Downs’ to the visitor economy committee in the first place – given the political context – was questionable.

The issue here is not that Mr Downs has done anything wrong – he is only taking what is offered – but that the council considers all of it acceptable.

On any measure, Mr Downs has been given the sort of out-of-hours access to key members within council that others could only dream of, if they were lobbying in the same manner.

In this case, it has even paid the bill.

According to a lengthy council statement in response to my questions, Mr Downs was chosen for the conference after the council asked for “expressions of interest” from all six community members of its visitor economy committee and only Mr Downs responded.

The statement also says it is appropriate that Mr Downs is on the council committee, because the WRC is a significant player in the local economy and tourism.

Further, the council says, nothing about racehorse training or the Belfast Coastal Reserve Management Plan has been raised in the committee meetings. Nothing at all? Really? What about before the meetings, or after?

By coincidence, the final Belfast Coastal Reserve Management Plan, which said racehorse training should resume, came out during the tourism conference.

Was this hot potato raised during drinks at St Andrews brewery or over dinner at Cape Schanck? We don’t know.

We do know, however, that Cr Tony Herbert – within three days of becoming Mayor on October 29 last year – placed sorting out the racehorse training issue at the very top of his to-do list.

You can read the full council statement on this whole issue here. 

In a nutshell it justifies the conference by saying the council values professional development opportunities, that the funds came out of a professional development budget and that there were several important outcomes, including: a follow-up meeting by VTIC in Warrnambool, a range of new marketing tactics, valuable networking and contacts, and passing on “key learnings” to other staff and councillors.

Worth every cent? I will leave you to decide.

(Mr Downs was contacted for comment last week on this piece. He is yet to respond.)

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Management Plan for the Levy’s Point Coastal Reserve

Carol Altmann – The Terrier

Here is yet another plan for Levy’s Point that was started, never really finished, and then forgotten.

Warrnambool Mayor Tony Herbert recently claimed that the Belfast Coastal Management Plan was the first plan for the area in 150 years.

This is not true.

There have been several plans, including this one commissioned by the Warrnambool City Council back in 1998.

Nowhere does it mention using the area for large-scale racehorse training.

In fact it doesn’t mention racehorses at all, only recreational horse riding and a small horse riding ring.

It also mentions the potential for illegal four wheel driving and motorbike riding to worsen, due to numerous management tracks leading into the dunes.

Some of these dunes, the plan says, had already blown out, and other “large, active dunes” needed “stabilisation and revegetation”.

These “large, active” dunes are in the very area where commercial racehorse training will now be permitted – having been illegal –  and up to 40 racehorses a day, five days a week, will be allowed to pound up and down what is called “Hoon Hill”.

How this fits into any plan for “stabilisation and revegetation” is beyond me.

Just the fact that – 20 years on – authorities now refer to this area as “Hoon Hill” says it all really.

Those in charge of looking after Levy’s Point gave up on the place.

The illegal four wheel driving and motorbike riding was not stopped, so it worsened, until it got to the point where some dunes were so damaged that they are now considered suitable only for large-scale racehorse training, which, of course, will ruin them even further.

For any councillor to claim that they did not know the history of this area and the extent of the damage done is ludicrous, unless, like the current President of the United States, they don’t read, don’t research or don’t want to know.

This 1998 plan follows the government’s Land Conservation Council plan of 1978, and pre-dates the council’s Coastal Management Plan of 2013.

They all say the same thing: the need for conservation, restoration, protection, promoting low-impact activities and eco-tourism, controlling four-wheel-drive access, and not repeating the mistakes of earlier times when sand mining and rendering plants were considered okay.

And yet here we are, not only about to repeat a mistake, but doing so with our eyes wide open.

[This is a modified version of a Facebook post that ran after the meeting.]

Carol Altmann – The Terrier

An urgent meeting will be held by the W’bool City Council this Friday (21/12) to allow large-scale racehorse training at Levy’s Beach, starting almost immediately.

Planning Minister Richard Wynne, as predicted, has intervened and asked for interim changes to the local planning laws – the same laws that found racehorse training was illegal in this section of the Belfast Coastal Reserve.

The council is now classing the matter as so “urgent and extraordinary” that a special meeting will be held on the last day before the holiday break to endorse this decision.

Not a word of this was raised in public last night (17/12), when the council held a meeting to talk about waste management and new signs at the entrance to the city.

Once that meeting finished, however, the real fireworks began with councillors called to a confidential “briefing” where they were given details of Mr Wynne’s intervention.

All of this in the last week before Christmas, when everybody is distracted and busy. But, of course, that is precisely the point.

Governments of all persuasions know the best time to bury controversial decisions is around the biggest holidays of the year.

What a gift to the racing industry. What a slap – again – to our precious environment.

Those councillors who vote for this on Friday night and call themselves environmentalists are a bit like self-declared vegetarians who eat meat once a week.

You can’t, pardon the pun, have a bet each way.

You either stand for the environment, and the endangered species and fragile dune system at Levy’s Beach, or you don’t.

To pretend this is some sort of “compromise” is simply a cop-out. Parks Victoria don’t want this. The majority of people who responded to the management report for the reserve don’t want this. Racing people who love the environment don’t want this (Clare Lindop, I am looking at you x)

The only people who want this are a handful of wealthy, well-connected, well-resourced trainers who stand to make a lot of money from brutalising our beach.

I am going to be there on Friday night, just to witness the capitulation, because that is exactly what it will be.

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