Exclusive Carol Altmann – The Terrier

Dumped Warrnambool City Council CEO Peter Schneider is seeking an injunction to stop the council from hiring a new chief until his Supreme Court challenge against his sacking is decided.

In a story that has more twists and turns than a back road to Halls Gap,  there are now not one, but two court actions in response to Mr Schneider being unceremoniously dumped by the former council last July.

As Jim Burke wrote on his Facebook page on Sunday night, the new council closed a portion of last night’s (1/3) meeting to the public so it could discuss where things were up to with hiring a new CEO.

The job was advertised in January, applications closed 15 February, and a short list of candidates has been drawn up.

But tonight I can reveal Mr Schneider is seeking a legal intervention to put the brakes on, blowing away rumours swirling through the ornamental pear trees in Liebig St that he may have been negotiating with the council to sort out a settlement.

Uh uh. There is no talk of a settlement: Mr Schneider wants his job back and he is fighting tooth and nail.

Documents lodged with the Supreme Court show Mr Schneider’s legal team served a summons on the WCC on 19 February, demanding it appear before the court at 10.30am yesterday, 1 March: just hours before the new council was due to meet and discuss the latest on his replacement.

The council’s lawyers, however, have pushed the date of the hearing to 12 March.

Oh Lordy, what a mess.

If Mr Schneider is successful in his injunction, the council will have to wait until the outcome of the judicial review into his sacking, set down for 23 March.

That hearing was supposed to be on 1 February, but was deferred by the court.

The WCC has said it had no choice but to press on with recruiting a new CEO and was obliged by law to do so but, like so many things that are “law”, this is obviously open to interpretation.

If it wasn’t, Mr Schneider’s lawyers would not be bothering with an injunction. Acting CEO Vikki King would also not be in place for up to 12 months.

At the same time, there are also varying opinions around whether Mr Schneider’s judicial review – if successful – will see him automatically get his job back.

Some say yes, some say it will be up to the council.

One thing, however, is now certain: Mr Schneider will be asking the judge to ensure that, if he is successful, the council is ordered to give his job back.

Meanwhile, somewhere off stage right, there are a bunch of short-listed candidates who are now no longer sure if there is even a job open to apply for.

Depending on what happens on 12 March, the whole recruitment process could be stalled.

And depending on what happens on 23 March, the old CEO could become the new CEO again.

I will say it again, Oh Lordy, what a mess this new council has inherited.

I will make contact with the WCC tomorrow to see what, if any, response there is from the Acting CEO to this latest chapter.

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Carol Altmann – The Terrier

Will it be a new face, or an old face? The Warrnambool City Council recruitment of a new CEO has officially begun.

The  job advert has gone out, just four days before a Supreme Court hearing which will decide whether the former CEO, Peter Schneider, could get his old job back.

The advert was posted online yesterday by top local government recruitment firm, McArthur, with applications closing on 15 February.

On Monday, however, the judicial review into Mr Schneider’s sacking begins and will sort out one way or the other whether he was denied natural justice when he was dumped by the former council in July last year.

If the judge rules in Mr Schneider ‘s favour, then the new council will have to decide whether they will rehire him.

No witnesses will be called for Monday’s hearing, with a judge instead deciding the case on the written evidence and affidavits put before them.

We can only hope the judgment is made quickly, for the sake of Mr Schneider, the new councillors who inherited this mess, and the good people of Warrnambool, all of whom have been sitting in the equivalent of a Jetstar flight circling over and over the airport, unable to land because of turbulence.

I asked the council spokesman and Mayor Vicki Jellie today how the council could start advertising for a new CEO, when the former CEO is still yet to learn his fate?

The response was that, under the Local Government Act, the WCC is legally bound to get things moving and must “…make a permanent appointment to the position of Chief Executive Officer as soon as practicable after a vacancy in the position occurs”.

“Given the then impending elections, and the intervening caretaker period, an earlier appointment was not a feasible option,” the statement said.

But, the statement added, ” the appointment of a CEO is a priority for the new councillors”.

I bet it is.

The whole process from here will be overseen by the council’s  CEO Employment Matters Committee, which will also have all new faces at the table, including Mayor Jellie, two councillors and an independent chair.

This chair is being recruited as we speak and will be in place after the 1 March council meeting.

Monday also marks the first council meeting for 2021 and, I feel, when the real work begins for this new council.

They have a lot to clean up: appointing a chief who can finally land that plane, get us all through customs, and get Warrnambool out into the fresh air is the first of them.

Only then can our city move on.

Carol Altmann – The Terrier

Update: Turns out the new, swish piece of illuminated corporate branding at Lyndoch Living is illegal – there is no permit for this sign to be installed on the side of Swinton Wing.

As readers know, this sign, which is bright-white at night (disclaimer: I live not far away, but these photos were taken by another nearby resident), was installed last week by Cassign, which is the business owned and operated by the husband of the new Lyndoch board chair, Sue Cassidy.

We still don’t know if all the signage works undertaken by Cassign at Lyndoch Living these past months went to tender (Steve Moore, did you have any luck finding out?), but I do know that there is no council permit for this one.

This means a permit must be sought retrospectively from the Warrnambool City Council.

How does Lyndoch think it can get away with it?

Meanwhile, as the corporatisation of Lyndoch rolls on, I continue to get calls and emails and messages every second day from families worried about staff shortages, staff exhaustion and the impact of both on some residents.

Yes, yes, we all know these complaints can be taken here, and reported there, but what happens as a result? Nothing.

Nothing seems to change and the staff become more tired, and families of those residents affected become more frustrated.

I know not all families are affected and we all know that Lyndoch’s hard working staff do the very best they can, but the resignations keep coming – from the nursing staff to those working at Waterfront Living.

I hear about them all, and I despair that nothing happens to fix it and turn things around.

All I see is more corporate branding, more executive appointments, more staff surveys, and fluff stories about Lyndoch trying to win awards.

Who will step up? Who is going to step forward and say, enough of this?

This whole story is much bigger than a sign on a building, but that illegal, unnecessary and expensive sign – to me – sums up the changing priorities of Lyndoch Living, the arrogance, and a corporate culture that cares more about image than substance.

We own Lyndoch, we must never forget that, but we have lost control of its destiny and we no longer recognise its soul and I am not sure how we can reconnect with both, but every time I speak to those families and workers who are in the thick of it, I know we have to keep trying.

 

Carol Altmann – The Terrier

I have just learned that an inquest opened today into the disappearance of Barry Collins, a former executive of the Warrnambool City Council, who went missing 30 years ago. This is big news.

Mr Collins, an engineer, disappeared after being accused of a misappropriation of council resources and funds. I remember this terrible story, as I was a wide-eyed cadet at the Warrnambool Standard at the time.

Mr Collins’ disappearance sent shockwaves through Warrnambool. It was terrible.

There has never been a full explanation as to what happened, or the full back story to the allegations. His family, no doubt, have continued to seek those answers.

Now, 30 years after this tragedy, an inquest has opened in the Coroner’s Court in Melbourne, before Coroner Paresa Spanos.

I will follow this up tomorrow, but for tonight, I am just putting this on the public record and hope that it may finally lead to some answers for Mr Collins’ family and for the wider community.

Update: The ABC’s Matt Neal has written a comprehensive piece on this case, which is set to officially clear Mr Collins of any wrongdoing. You can read Matt’s story here. 

Terrier guest writer – Jim Burke*

This week the local newspaper reported that three former councillors thought that the outcome of the recent council election was “undesirable” and that a ward system with three councillors in each ward would prevent “undesirable” results in the future.

Really!  Well let’s unpack that.

Firstly, just how was this election result “undesirable”?

The election was a well-run, open, democratic process conducted independently by the Victorian Electoral Commission. The candidates all campaigned in good will and the community seemed to be fully engaged.

The election results were overwhelming, the community wanted a clean sweep: that is what they voted for and that is what they achieved.

It seems clear that the voters understood that they could likely end up with seven councillors who would come to the job with no previous experience.

Is that what happened? Well, actually, no.

The seven new councillors bring a wealth of skills and experience to the table and they have had the benefit of observing their predecessors and an understanding of just what is at stake.

The result of this election was not “undesirable”: it was the exact opposite. It was clearly the result the community desired.

Now, would a system of three wards, electing three councillors each, have changed the election results?

In the case of the 2020 election, I doubt that a ward system would have changed the outcome. There was a strong mood for change, and this can be seen in the voter turnout.

More were enrolled to vote in 2020 than in 2016, and of these, more people actually voted in 2020 as a proportion of those enrolled than was the case in 2016.

The proportion of informal votes also went down, not up, as implied by the former councillors in the newspaper article.

If we had three wards electing three councillors each in 2020, the outcome may have been different, if only because it might have caused a different range of candidates to nominate.

For instance, all of the sitting councillors who sought re-election in 2020 lived and/or worked within a short walk of Liebig Street; do you think that any of them would have been accepted in a ward that included, say, Allansford?

We had no candidate running from Allansford (or Woodford) in 2020, so perhaps under a system of wards, we would see such a candidate.

I would argue that such was the mood for change, the outcome would have been much the same, whether it was a single electorate, or an electorate divided into wards.

The retired councillors also made some further observations that I would like to challenge:

First, that a ward system would have reduced the informal vote from nine per cent to two per cent.

I am not sure what they base this on, or how they arrived at the figure of two per cent, but in any case the assertion is misleading.

If the 2020 election had been held over three wards, the informal vote (nine per cent) divided among three wards would have been three per cent per ward.

Perhaps with fewer candidates per ward, then the informal vote may have been lower. But a whole percentage point?

Secondly, these retired councillors harked back 30 years when there was a ward system, elections were held annually, and one third of the councillors retired each year. The idea being that this would have avoided the “undesirable” outcome of the 2020 election, by reverting to an enforced system of “old and new faces” at the council table.

This is a bogus argument that needs to be debunked right now.

Whatever the merits of the idea, it will not happen now or ever. We would have to endure three months of election activity every year, and the costs to candidates and councils – in cash and personal and professional disruption – would be unacceptable.

In any case, no State Government would ever commit the resources or pay the huge cost of an election in all 79 councils in Victoria every year. It just will not happen.

But change is in the air for the next election in 2024, with Warrnambool set to return to wards in response to a State Government review.

How many wards, their boundaries, names and the total number of councillors (the review recommended nine), will be decided in the coming months.

For now, however, all eyes are on this new council and the fresh start that Warrnambool desired and achieved.

*Jim Burke, a retired naval officer, ran for the WCC election for the first time and finished 11th after preferences. He is a regular fixture in the public gallery at council meetings and continues to run a Facebook page with commentary on civic affairs.