BOWLING CLUB PRESIDENT PAT HOOPER GOES FOR THE JACK BUT WINDS UP WELL AND TRULY SKITTLED

 (Postscript added 2 September 2016)

No apple for the teacher this time, just a few friendly words of advice

Mark Lloyd, my opposite number at York & Districts Community Matters, has kindly passed on to me a letter he received from a certain Mr. J P McG. Hooper, JP, of this parish. 

Some readers may remember Mr. Hooper.  He is a former York shire president, exposed by York’s blogs as author of the so-called ‘Minority Report’ that in 2014 encouraged Local Government Minister Tony Simpson to suspend our democratically elected council of which Mr. Hooper himself was at the time a member.

Mr. Hooper secretly submitted the report to the minister after publicly voting with other councillors to oppose the proposed suspension.

Since then, Mr. Hooper has crawled out of his funkhole and craftily reinvented himself as president of York’s bowling club.

I recall observing on his taking up that office that ‘underarm’ was a step up from ‘underhand’.

Mr J P ('Pat') Hooper, President, York Bowling Club and author of 'The minority report'

Anyway, back to his letter.  It is addressed as an ‘open letter’ to me, rudely styling me as ‘Mr.’ James Plumridge  (just ‘James Plumridge’ would have been fine if ‘Dr.’ was sticking in his craw).   

It is a letter of complaint demanding that I make a public apology.  Mr. Hooper asked Mr. Lloyd to publish the letter in September’s YDCM.

However, Mr. Lloyd wisely and fairly decided that I should have the opportunity to respond to the letter in The REAL Voice of York, where the matter Mr. Hooper complains of first appeared.  He has informed Mr. Hooper of his decision.

Without further ado, I give you Mr. Hooper’s ‘open letter’.

(Click to enlarge)

In effect, Mr. Hooper accuses me of misleading readers of the blog by making false claims about the bowling club’s past indebtedness to the York Shire Council.

Here is the text of my remarks touching on the bowling club exactly as they appeared in my article on York’s hungry ‘white elephants’, posted on 23 June 2016.

I was under the impression that the expense of providing services for the benefit of sporting clubs would be to some extent defrayed by agreed contributions from the clubs.   

Apparently that was once the case, but is no longer so.  Council waived that requirement a couple of years ago.

I recall that in 2012 or thereabouts, the Shire took out a loan for the Bowls Club that the club agreed to repay at the rate of around $30,000 per year.  It appears the remaining balance of that debt was also waived. 

Next year, the Shire expects to spend $11,350 on turf maintenance for the bowling greens and to receive green fees of $8,320 (a net cost to ratepayers of $3,030).   Of course, the club wasn’t responsible for the sinkhole, so we’ve really no right to grumble.

Allegedly false claim No. 1:  That in 2012 or thereabouts the bowling club obtained a loan from the Shire with annual repayments of around $30,000.

My response:  The date was wrong (a typo, mea culpa), but otherwise the claim was correct.

I refer Mr. Hooper to page 39 of the minutes of the special council meeting held on 5 September 2008 to confirm the proposed annual budget for financial year 2008/9.  I believe he was at that time shire president, but did not preside over this meeting because he was on approved leave until 19 October 2008.  Acting Shire President Brian Lawrance took his place. 

Other councillors present were Trevor Randell, Tony Boyle, Ashley Fisher and Tricia Walters.

Under the general heading ‘Loans and Self Supporting Loan Information’, the minutes record a self-supporting ‘contingency loan’ to the York Bowling Club of $250,000.00 repayable over 15 years by instalments of $29,799.00 per annum.  If the loan had run full-term, the club would have had to repay a total of $446, 985.00 with a total interest component of $196,985.00. 

It was billed as a ‘contingency loan’ because the York Bowling Club had asked for it ‘in case they [were] not successful in gaining sufficient grant funding to replace the existing grass greens with synthetic bowling greens’.  Those must have been the greens at the club’s old premises, because the YRCC was still in 2008 not much more than a slowly brightening gleam in CEO Hooper’s eye.

I searched council minutes for later references to the loan but found none.  That doesn’t mean they don’t exist, merely that I failed in my search.  If they do exist, and Mr. Hooper knows where they can be found, let him please point me in their direction.

A further point:  if the loan was accepted, and repayments have not been waived, then the club is contractually obliged to go on paying nearly $30K per annum to the Shire until 2023.  

Allegedly false claim no. 2:  That the Shire waived all debt relating to the loan.

My response:  That isn’t quite what I said.  The words I used were ‘the remaining balance of the debt’.  Admittedly, after only a few years of repayments, the remaining balance would have comprised most of the loan.

I have no access and seek none to the financial records of the York Bowling Club, but it seems clear to me that if the club were still forking over nearly $30K a year to the Shire, its president and management committee might by now have come to notice the continuing drain on their funds.  Mr. Hooper’s letter makes it clear that if ever such a drain existed, it ceased operating a while ago.

It’s possible that the club received sufficient funding from other agencies and had no reason to take up the Shire’s offer.  Information obtained from a usually reliable source indicated that that was unlikely to have been the case.

The same source also indicated that the club had in fact accepted the loan but that further repayments were waived because the club had transferred its activities to the YRCC.  

If Mr. Hooper would like to take issue with this version of events and to clarify the club’s actual position regarding the loan, he is most welcome to do so on this blog. 

Regular readers of the blog will confirm that I am always happy for my mistakes to be corrected and have never failed to accord space to such corrections on the rare occasions when they have been necessary.   

I also said I was ‘under the impression’ that the sporting clubs had agreed to contribute towards the expense of running the YRCC, but that the Shire had waived that requirement.   I didn’t direct that comment specifically at the Bowling Club.

Allegedly false claim no. 3:  That the club was granted ‘special favour by waiving of funds they never received or sought’.

  

My response: The club did seek the funds mentioned in my article.  Mr. Hooper is in a better position than I am to say whether or not the club received them.

There was no suggestion or implication in what I wrote that the club got ‘special favour’ from the Shire, if by special favour Mr. Hooper meant a favour not available to other clubs.

I confess that my remarks in the same article about the Hockey Club, Shire President Wallace’s tender nursling, might reasonably be construed as an accusation of special favour. 

As I indicated at the time, those remarks were made in a heightened state of irritation because my English nephew, Kyle, a talented hockey player, had turned his back on the rest of his family, Brexiteers all, and voted to remain in the EU. 

But my tongue-in-cheek animadversions on that occasion had nothing to do with the Bowling Club.

A reminder

Mr. Hooper and his committee remind me that the Bowling Club ‘contributed $80,000 to the Forrest Oval reconstruction’, and relinquished its former premises as well as its former liquor licence.

I knew about the premises and the liquor license, but not about the $80,000.  I think club members were very foolish to let CEO Ray Hooper and his acolytes on Council con them into handing over such a large sum to the Shire and giving up their former premises and liquor licence in exchange for the dubious privilege of shifting their activities to the YRCC. 

By now, most Bowling Club members must surely agree with that verdict.  

The Bowling Club should have followed the example of the York Croquet Club, which eager to preserve its freedom, and guided by wise and intelligent leadership, elected to stick to its current venerable premises and flip the Shire the bird.

Recent photo of giant sinkhole, YRCC bowling green (Groundswell Images Pty Ltd)

Apologies

Mr. Hooper has demanded that I issue a public apology to the Bowling Club if I have no evidence to support my claim that the club entered into a loan arrangement with the Shire.

I think I have produced enough evidence to render such an apology superfluous. 

But to the extent that I have misrepresented any factual detail, or may have misled anyone in relation to matters of context or principle, I AM SORRY.

However, Mr. Hooper is absolutely excluded from the scope of that apology. 

I will not apologise to him about anything whatsoever, not even if he manifestly deserves an apology, until he has had the good grace to apologise to the people of York for his deceitful and treacherous conduct as author of the ‘Minority Report’. 

In that capacity, he played a significant part in unleashing the curse of James Best on York and must accept a corresponding degree of responsibility for the demoralising months of grief and strife that followed.

No apple for the teacher—Mr. Hooper’s language bloopers

I’m told that Mr. Hooper was for many years a teacher and deputy principal in the York District High School.

It’s therefore surprising that his letter contains some elementary English language bloopers.

Blooper no. 1:  The material he complains about was ‘brought’, not as he says ‘bought’, to the attention of his committee.  Sadly, this error is commonplace in Western Australia.  I wish I had a dollar for every time I encountered it in a student’s work.

Blooper no. 2:  Mr. Hooper in his fifth paragraph suggests that I might have to apologise for ‘an inference’.  I think he should have said ‘an implication’.  An implication is ‘something implied or suggested as naturally to be inferred without being expressly stated’ (Macquarie).  An inference is a logical consequence derived by deduction from a statement or premise whether expressed or implied.  For example, a speaker says something, at the same time implying something else; the listener infers that ‘something else’ from what the speaker says.

The erroneous reversal of meaning between ‘imply’ and ‘infer’ is now so commonplace that for more than 30 years the Macquarie lexicographers have classed it as ‘colloquial’.  Colloquial it may be, but surely it should be out of bounds for members or former members of the teaching or any other erudite profession. 

Blooper no. 3:  ‘Repayments…was’ in Mr. Hooper’s first paragraph should of course read ‘repayments…were’.  (Too obvious to merit further comment.)

I also have a problem with Mr. Hooper’s arithmetic.  In his second paragraph, he calculates that annual repayments of $30,000 meant that the loan must have ‘been in excess of [i.e. ‘more than’] $500,000’.

Well, no.  Annual repayments of $30,000 over the prescribed period of 15 years would amount to $450,000, which is not ‘in excess of’ half a million.  Assuming that the repayments included interest, we might reasonably infer that the actual loan would be much less than the total repayments, as indeed it was.

By the way, I thought Mr. Hooper was disputing the existence of the loan.  So how could he have known that the loan period was 15 years, which he must have done to arrive at anything like the (erroneous) figure he suggests?

My article gave no details of the loan other than the amount of the annual repayments.

Can it be that Mr. Hooper’s demand for an apology has arisen solely from a childish cavil regarding the date when the loan was taken out?

Hooper’s bloopers—jeepers creepers!  Sometimes I just want to pull a rug over my head and quietly give way to despair.

POSTSCRIPT:  At last month’s Ordinary Council Meeting, Mr. Hooper asked Council to confirm ‘that in 2012, or thereabouts…the Shire did not secure a loan on behalf of the York Bowling Club’.  (See pp. 7-8 of the current minutes, just released.)

He gave as his reason for asking the question that ‘a Dr James Plumridge’ (my word, he knows how to make a fellow feel special) had ‘blogged’ that the Shire had during the period stated taken out a loan for the club and had subsequently waived the balance of the debt.

I’ve confessed to having typed the wrong date.  But these questions remain:

1.              In 2008, did the Shire secure for the Bowling Club a contingency loan of $250,000 repayable by annual instalments of $29,799?

2.              Did the Bowling Club take up the loan?  If so, how many repayments did the club make to the Shire?

3.              If the club did take up the loan, did the Shire at any stage waive the balance of the loan, and if so, when?

4.              If the balance wasn’t waived, is the club still making annual repayments to the Shire?

5.              When he asked his question, did Mr. Hooper know that the Bowling Club had in fact been offered a loan in 2008—when he was Shire President—more or less matching the description given in the blog article he quotes from?

6.              If he did know that, why didn’t he mention it either in his open letter to me or in his question to the Shire?  In other words, was he just trying to be smart, presumably at my expense?

‘Open and transparent’

In a second question, Mr. Hooper raises concern—as he claims, community concern—over the possible closure of the YRCC.

He calls on Council to ensure ‘that there will be open and transparent processes… regarding any planned changes to the YRCC and that all users of the YRCC and the Forrest Oval complex are full [sic] consulted about planned changes’.

He adds darkly that ‘If the YRCC was closed the Bowling Club would not have a home’.  Well, Mr. Hooper, whose damned silly fault is that?

‘Open’ and ‘transparent’ aren’t words that spring unbidden to the mind when Mr. Hooper’s name comes up in conversation.   

His attitude to openness and transparency has been fully on display since his exposure as author of the ‘Minority Report’—not to mention the Shire’s refusal during his presidency to publish details of corporate credit card transactions.

But on this matter, he has my support.   I would be very sorry to see such an important question as the fate of the Splurj Mahal decided by a handful of people behind closed doors.  

There’s just one point of difference between us.

It’s not only the small minority of York residents who use the centre who should be consulted about its future.  So should the majority of residents who don’t use the centre but are compelled to pay for it anyway.

Priority No. 1 must be shutting down the tavern restaurant and bar.   I’m sure Mr. Hooper and his entourage, regular users of the tavern, will have no difficulty finding alternative munching and swigging stations closer to the centre of town.