DON’T MISS DAVID TAYLOR’S RAVES ON RATES!

Readers, if you haven’t done so already, I implore you to read, mark, learn and inwardly digest David Taylor’s two recent articles, posted under the title YIN YANG on the other York blog (http://shireofyork6302.blogspot.com.au) on 23 and 27 July.

I hope that every one of our councillors will find the time to read them.  I recommend them especially to those councillors who like to pretend that they never read either blog because they are too tied up in the onerous obligations of their office.

David’s articles compare the rating levels imposed by local governments in metropolitan districts with those in York. 

His most telling statistic, I think, is that domestic properties in York are rated at a massive 11.8490 cents in the dollar against GRV, compared with a mere 5.3090 cents in Joondalup. 

That’s a staggering additional impost on York ratepayers of 6.54 cents in the dollar.

Amenity

As David makes clear, the disparity has nothing whatever to do with a superior provision of publicly funded amenity in York.   

The ratepayers of Joondalup enjoy many more government and local government services, of a far higher standard, than we in York are used to.

So far as public amenity is concerned, there’s very little by comparison for which the majority of York ratepayers have reason to thank the Shire. 

It’s Mother Nature, not the Shire, which deserves most of the credit for making York a beautiful place to live. 

Credit must also be given to a handful of struggling business proprietors doing their best to keep the town ticking over, some of them in the teeth of unfair competition from the Shire itself.

As I understand it, David’s diagnosis is that the Shire is crippled by debt and habits of profligate spending inherited from previous administrations—mainly, but by no means exclusively, debt and spending associated with our Great White Elephant, the Splurj Mahal aka the YRCC.

Only a fool would disagree—not that we’re likely to be short of fools who do.

David’s prognosis is even more depressing than his diagnosis.   It amounts to this: we’ve stumbled blindly into a morass of excessive expenditure and indebtedness, and no government angel is going to swoop down, on golden wings, to pull us out.

Please, read David’s penetrating analysis of our present fiscal discontents.  He tells it as it is.  What it is isn’t pleasant, but we can’t afford to go on ignoring the truth.

Who got the Shire into this mess?

Anybody who has followed the blogs since 2014 will know the answer to that one.

Most of the blame must be sheeted home to the major Shire players during the years of the Hooper-Boyle-Hooper ascendancy. 

They said that the YRCC would have no serious financial consequences for the Shire.  That was a deliberate lie, propped up by a conga line of costly ‘consultants’ who told them, as consultants tend to do, more or less what they wanted to hear.

It amazes me that one of those major players then on council—who has since been publicly discredited as the author of the deceitful so-called ‘minority report’—continues to exercise a disproportionate influence over the decision making of the current council with regard to the future of the YRCC.

It amazes me no less that another of them was re-elected to council, and will doubtless be elected again if he sticks up his hand in September.

The Chalkies fiasco

Some of the blame belongs to senior bureaucrats in the Department of Local Government, who either from laziness, or stupidity, or more likely both, ignored for years the glaring incompetence of successive York councils and past shire administrations.

When at last they did step into the ring, it was only to protect their own soiled reputations from the wash-up of the Fitz Gerald Report.

And how can we forget the comic-opera outcome of their intervention, namely, the calamitous reign as York's commissioner of James Best, the visionary peacock from South Perth?

Best was the man who immediately after telling us with a straight face that we, the ratepayers, were driving the Shire into bankruptcy by exercising our legislated right to ask questions, wasted $625,000 of our money on the purchase of a derelict building—worth at most about half that amount—from a York business couple who had for some inscrutable reason befriended him.

If ever there was a transaction crying out for CCC investigation, it was that one.

 I wrote to the local government minister of the day, the ineffable Tony ‘Tip Top’ Simpson (known to his electors as ‘the Byford baker’) pointing out, with great restraint, that the transaction might be technically corrupt under section 83 of the WA Criminal Code.

You can probably imagine Tony’s response. 

If you can’t imagine it, I suggest you look up a couple of articles posted on this blog nearly two years ago: ‘Another open letter to Minister Simpson’ (7 August 2015) and ‘No, Minister, this won’t do at all’ (3 September 2015).

You’ll see that Tony and his departmental advisers couldn’t even get the law right.   Fortunately, I was able to expose and explain their error by citing the learned opinions of two Supreme Court judges.

Not that that would have made a jot of difference to Tony and his zombie scribes.   Frankly, I doubt they understood the explanation.

Council recently deferred further consideration of a business plan for Chalkies on the grounds that Shire staff had found ‘irregularities’ in the purchasing process. 

If, as I suspect, those irregularities turn out to include elements of corruption, will councillors be game to refer the matter to the CCC?  Somehow, I don’t think they will, but while we're waiting I’ll light another candle to St Jude.

Is our Council dysfunctional? 

The primary business of a council is to make decisions on issues affecting a local community and to instruct its chief executive officer to see that those decisions are carried out.

Confronted with having to make a decision about the future of the YRCC, our council has shown that it has no stomach for the job.

 A council that can’t make up its mind on an issue as simple as this one isn’t fit for purpose.  In other words, it’s dysfunctional.

After wasting time and money swanning around the Wheatbelt looking at other people’s mistakes, Council has put its trust in the time-honoured local government maxim ‘Keep calm and call in a consultant’.

I don’t know how much of our money the Shire has expended on consultants over the past ten years.   It must be rather a lot. 

I’d like to know how much.  In particular, I’d like to know exactly how much it has shelled out to consultants for advice about the YRCC.

Well, I’ll give our councillors all the advice they need on the subject—and I won’t charge them a cent.

Here’s my advice.

1.     Accept that the YRCC is a hideously wasteful encumbrance on ratepayers that offers nothing to the great majority of residents and will never be able to pay its own way—as it was originally supposed to do—no matter how it's run or what use or uses it is put to.

2.     Accept that the Shire has to pay off loans and maintain the building’s fabric but is under no legal or moral compulsion to renew sporting facilities like tennis courts and bowling greens.  That should be the responsibility of the clubs that use them.  If, for whatever reason, those clubs can’t cut the mustard, too bad.

3.     Accept that the Shire ought not to be running a munching and swigging station in competition with local business proprietors—especially if it has to be subsidized from the rates but still operates at a loss.  Give up the tavern licence, close down the bar and café/restaurant and fire the staff.   That will save ratepayers hundreds of thousands of dollars every year in subsidies and wages.

4.     Hire the centre out on an ad hoc basis to groups wanting to use it.  Keep the keys at the Shire office when the centre isn’t in use.  Add the task of promoting and hiring out the centre to the duties of Shire staff already employed to facilitate tourism and community development—no new position/s to be created.

5.     Start searching for other ways to reduce the rates to a civilized level.  (I can help free of charge with that, too.)

Oh, and stop listening to former shire president Pat Hooper and his cronies.  They’ve had their day, and look where it got us.

NOTE:  The moderator of David’s blog is still refusing to accept comments from those of us who aren’t members of his team.  I think that’s a shame.  If you’d like to comment on the articles referred to above, you’re welcome to do so here.

MORE ON THE SPLURJ MAHAL

Yet again, Shire appoints consultants to sort out its problems, favours opinions of sporting club representatives over those of everybody else

At its ordinary meeting on 26 June 2017, Council considered a report from Suzie Haslehurst, Executive Manager, Corporate and Community Services, regarding possible management models for the YRCC.

You can find Suzie’s report as appendix SYO69-06/17 on pages 49-53 of the current unconfirmed minutes.

I was delighted to see that Suzie’s report does not contain a single instance of the much-abused word ‘stakeholders’ (see my article posted on 23 May 2017) but refers instead to ‘users’ of the YRCC.

Having considered the report, Council resolved to ‘request’ the CEO to engage a consultancy firm, SGL Consulting Group, to investigate how each of the proposed models might work and at what cost to the Shire.   

Reformed community firebrand Cr Jane Ferro proposed the motion, which was seconded by Cr Pam Heaton.

I’m not too happy about the use of the word ‘request’.  The Council isn’t a supplicant.  It’s the CEO’s boss.  Its role is to instruct, not to request.  The CEO’s role, in summary, is to advise and, if legal to do so, obey. 

I mean no disrespect to the excellent Paul Martin, but as every blueblood knows, if you say please too often to the servants they will end up telling you what to do. 

And before you can say ‘Your Majesty’, you’ll have created a problem our mediaeval pommy ancestors called that of ‘the over-mighty subject’.  I think we know all about that problem in York.

By my reckoning, SGL Consulting Group is the seventh or eighth consultancy firm engaged over the last decade to advise on the operations of the YRCC.  It will be paid from an allocation of $10,000 included in the Shire’s draft 2017/18 Budget.

I’ll be pleasantly surprised if SGL is willing to do the job for such a paltry reward.  I would expect them to follow the example of their predecessors and bill the Shire for several times that amount.

SGL and kindred branches of the WA consultancy industry might well go broke were it not for local governments like the Shire of York lining up like chickens outside those sumptuous Perth offices and squawking ‘Go on, pluck us!  Pluck us till it hurts!’

Management models

SGL will be asked to recommend ‘the model that provides the best outcome for the Shire, users and the community’—note the presumed descending order of importance—and to ‘report back to Council with a recommended course of action and timeline for implementation’.

Its job will involve reviewing three competing models:  the Goomalling model—to which we are told participants in the workshop were ‘cautiously responsive’—and two ‘outsourced models’.

The Goomalling model turns over responsibility for operating the bar and kitchen to a user-based incorporated association.  The association is also required to service the capital loan that paid for the centre, while the Shire provides maintenance, insurance and ‘some cleaning’.  The bowling club is responsible for maintaining the surface of the bowling green.   

Presumably, if this model were adopted in York, both tennis club and bowling club would have to maintain the surfaces of their greens.   As recent experience tells us, that would be a notable saving for ratepayers.

The Goomalling model seems to rely heavily on the availability of eager, hard-working volunteers from the sporting clubs.  That goes some way to explaining the cautious nature of the York sporting club response.

Outsourced model 1 would require the Shire to lease the bar and kitchen to a private operator.  The Shire would retain responsibility for ‘operation, maintenance and renewal of sporting facilities’.

This model would ostensibly relieve the Shire from the embarrassment of running a business in competition with local enterprises, thereby exorcising the worrisome spectre of competitive neutrality. 

To my mind, this would be a conjuring trick—mere sleight of hand.  The Shire would still be involved in a business arrangement with the lessee, which would feed some of its profits to the Shire in the form of rent. 

On the other hand, ratepayers would not be called upon to subsidize meals (as at present) to give the business a competitive edge.

Frankly, I don’t see a private operator being able to run a profitable gorge and guzzle business at the YRCC unless propped up with various forms of subsidy from the Shire. 

If I were SGL, I wouldn’t waste too much time and ratepayers’ money on this one.

Outsourced model 2 means that the Shire would pay a successful tenderer to manage the YRCC lock, stock and barrel ‘against agreed performance criteria’. 

Suzie is right to say that this model would reduce the burden on club volunteers, but I’m not sure I can agree with her that it would reduce the burden on the Shire, or more specifically on ratepayers. 

Is the premise of her argument that under this model the operator would be able to run the YRCC in all its aspects more cheaply and efficiently than the Shire can, with the result that the Shire would have to pay the operator less than it would otherwise have to spend?  Why would that necessarily be so? 

If she means that this model would reduce the moral burden on the Shire (competitive neutrality again), this too would be sleight of hand, because the operator would simply be paid to carry out work that the Shire would otherwise have to do.

Closer, but no cigar

For my money, the Goomalling model, whatever its imperfections, is the only one of the three that offers a plausible alternative to the current ramshackle, hideously costly arrangement.  It would have a modest chance of reducing the financial burden on ratepayers, while giving the sporting clubs opportunities to raise revenue for their activities.  

I don’t buy the nonsense about ‘the burden on over-stretched volunteers’ (Suzie’s report, p.51).  If people love their sport, they will work hard to keep it going—which is what sporting clubs used to do in the days before empire-building local governments and other public authorities opened the gate to mendicancy and profligate spending.

But the Goomalling model is no panacea.  It seems likely that whatever SGL may recommend, the hapless ratepayers of York will continue to be bled dry into the foreseeable future—or ‘going forward indefinitely’ in the current jargon—by the vampirical sporting clubs and their hangers-on, the gourmands and guzzlers of the tavern tosspot tippling team.

Suzie’s report lists the names of those representatives of ‘key user groups’ who attended the workshop held on 18 May 2017—from which, need I remind you, York ratepayers in general were rigorously excluded.  The name of former shire president Pat ‘Minority Report’ Hooper heads the list, proving as if further proof were needed that there’s no show without Punch. 

The report states that ‘It was acknowledged by attendees that the YRCC provides significant benefits to the community’.  I’ve yet to see any indication anywhere of what those ‘significant benefits’ might be in relation to the community at large. 

I’m almost willing to accept, to complete the quotation, that ‘the current operation works well for the majority of users’, but how, how often and how well does it work for the rest of us who are obliged to pay for it whether we use it or not?

Competitive neutrality

My impression from studying Suzie’s report is that the Shire is a tad uneasy about the issue of competitive neutrality, while the sporting club representatives don’t give the proverbial volitational exchange of gender-based bodily fluids about it and regard the opportunity to go on sucking up ratepayer-subsidized grub and grog as an inalienable human right.

According to the report, the tavern and restaurant are in business for an average of 23 days per month, with staff time averaging 531 hours per month.  The restaurant serves an average of 59 adult meals on Friday nights and 31 on Sunday nights, i.e. 90 such meals per week, as well as 23 children’s meals for Friday and Sunday combined.

At the YRCC, the Shire is running a retail hospitality business in competition with private operators.  Leaving aside any negative impact on competitors, I should like to see a full cost-benefit analysis of that business—one that compares the Shire’s full outlay, including all staff costs, with financial returns flowing as profit to the Shire.  Perhaps SGL will give us one.

No intangibles please, no nebulous platitudes—just dollars and cents will do nicely.

Having your say

Last week the Shire issued a media release (see below) inviting residents to a ‘drop in session’ on Wednesday where they will be able to ‘provide input’, i.e. share their opinions on what should be done about the YRCC.

Actually, there will be two drop in sessions: one in the afternoon for ‘interested community members and ratepayers’ and the other in the evening for ‘user groups’. 

As I’ve pointed out in the past, user groups have already been given greater opportunity than the rest of us to make their views known to the Shire.  

Why not organize a single drop in session for everybody?  Is this ‘divide and conquer', or an attempt, in the best James Best style, to allay fears of a riot?

I don’t think I shall be ‘dropping in’ to share my opinions.  I’ve said everything I want to say about the Splurj Mahal in the pages of this blog. 

Besides, I suspect that my turning up to such an event would be about as welcome as a rasher of bacon at a Muslim barbecue.