Archive: Council Meetings
Last Updated 1/12/07
28 November Council Meeting Start Time Changed
(20/11/07 - C) Residents are asked to please note change
If you are planning to go along to the next Ordinary Council Meeting (to be held in Woodend), please note carefully that the starting time of the meeting has been wound forward an hour, and will now start at 6.00pm instead of 7.00pm.
Council Changes Meeting Starting Times - Again
(17/9/07 - C) All regularly scheduled meetings (Ordinary Council, Planning, and General Purpose) will now start at 7:00pm. Go to Meeting List
Change of Council Meeting Venue
(28/8/07 - C) General Purposes Meeting on 5th September will now be held in Gisborne
Residents are asked to note that the General Purposes meeting scheduled for Kyneton on 5th September 2007 has been moved to the Gisborne Centre (former Western Water headquarters), Robertson Street, Gisborne. Renovation works as part of the Shire's office restructure at Kyneton are given as the cause for the change. The meeting is scheduled to start at 7.0pm.
Council Makes Big Changes To The Coming Year's Council Meeting Schedules
(29/5/07 - C) Two become one, later starts, evening briefings for Councillors, Gisborne becomes planning headquarters
At last Wednesday's Council meeting in Romsey, Macedon Ranges' Councillors voted to make substantial changes to how Council's official meetings will run. First off, the Finance and Operations and the Policy and Issues committees have been melted into an omnibus-sounding "General Purposes" committee, starting 1 June, 2007. Cr. Noel Harvey (West ward) will chair this new committee for the next 7 months, with Cr. Tom Gyorffy taking over the chair for the following 6 months to 30th June, 2008. The new committee will continue to operate as a Special Committee of Council, under section 86 of the Local Government Act. Councillors' dinner time will now be earlier, and most meetings will start later, to allow a Councillor briefing time between dinner and the meeting. This is something of a first and should finally allow all Councillors to attend briefings, instead of the few who currently attend afternoon briefing sessions. 2007 will also see Council transfer major operations to the refurbished Council offices in Gisborne, where Planning Committee meetings will be permanently based as from August 2007.
Residents should note that no Council meetings will be held in the first week of November (due to the Melbourne and Kyneton Cups), that the Special Council meeting to elect the Mayor and Deputy Mayor will be held on 5th December 2007 (6.00pm, Kyneton), and that no formal meetings will be held in the month of January, 2008. Click here to see the 2007/2008 meeting schedule.
MRRA Says:
At face value, this is a responsible move. Adoption of a meeting schedule that actually allows ALL Councillors to attend briefings is the only acceptable path. These briefings are currently scheduled in the afternoons because that timing happened to suit some Councillors. The end result of that has been the exclusion of some Councillors from information-gathering processes, and an increased community perception of executive-style decision-making 'behind closed doors'. So we say "well done" to Council on this one (assuming that afternoon briefings will no longer occur), although we have some reservations about other changes.
Will the new timing work, particularly the proposed new meeting closure time of 10.30 pm, especially with 2 of the 3 meetings (Ordinary and General Purposes) scheduled to start 1 and 2 hours (respectively) later than now? Anyone who has sat in the Council chamber gallery until almost midnight will understand this concern.
And hands up anyone who knows just what the new "General Purposes" committee is about... While the names of the previous committees (Finance and Operations, and Policy and Issues) were cumbersome, they at least gave a clue to what would be on the agenda. "General Purposes" comes across as being vulnerable to becoming the meeting for anything, almost a sort-of Council meeting, yet, oddly, still operating under delegation. Are we on our way back to two Council meetings a month, or one meeting and a de facto one? Now that would be a pity, because the Finance and Operations and the Policy and Issues meetings were originally intended to be briefings to Councillors that were also open to the public, which is why these committees operated under delegation and their recommendations had to go back to full Council for endorsement. Initiated in 2004, they took the place of afternoon briefing sessions held by pre-2003 Councils (and unfortunately re-instated by the current Council), and gave residents a chance to see Council processes operating at a less formal level. Now it all seems a bit confused and, well, in some ways directionless, and we just wonder whether the original (and quite clear) objectives for establishing these committees isn't being lost. Mmm... MRRA will be keeping its powder dry on this one until we've seen the colour of Council's pants (so to speak), particularly how it handles the principles of 'open and transparent government' (that underpinned the now defunct committees) in going forward with the new committee.
First Planning, And Now Democracy, Crash In Macedon Ranges
(9/4/07 - C) The way this Council is going, are there any takers on how long it will be before 'Finances' joins Planning and Democracy in the 'not working' bin?
It is pretty well established by now that most of our current Councillors don't seem to know about planning or care about getting good development outcomes (look at how they overturned Panel recommendations on C47, approved Macedon Lodge, etc). And we know they don't seem to have quite caught hold of the concept of accountability (look at the Code of Conduct adopted late last year). So, how are they on consulting the community? No, there's not much joy there either because now most of our Councillors have officially decided that listening to the community is just getting too much like hard work.
At last Wednesday's Council committee meeting most of our Councillors took another step away from 'commitment to the community' when they voted 7 to 1 to set up a 3 Councillor committee to hear community submissions on Council issues (under Section 223 of the Local Government Act). Up until now, those community submissions (e.g. on the budget, land sales etc) had been heard by full Council. Now, what the community has to say will be filtered back to the other Councillors via the Mayor of the day, and one Councillor from each other ward (and don't we all wonder who they might be?). MRRA's information is that only Cr. Rob Guthrie (South Ward) opposed going down this path. NB Cr. Tom Gyorffy (West Ward) left the meeting early and was absent for this vote.