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.