Do You believe that these ward boundaries should
be changed
or should council wards be abolished entirely ?
Does the ward system properly resolve the competing requirements
of residents from various areas ?
For example there has been some critism that Central Ward has too much
say over access routes to the Lane Cove shopping precinct. Some claim that parochial decisions made in central ward
committees have greatly
affected simple and safe access to the shopping centre by people from
other wards.
There are also opinions that if
the ward system was abolished completely and everyone voted for 9
councillors each election, we'd wind up with more decisions that balance
the interests of the community as a whole.
Are we smart enough to vote for 9 councillors ?
If we abolished wards would we actually need as many as 9
councillors.
It appears that there are a lot
of ward-specific working parties and committees that derive membership
from members of the public within that ward alone. The story goes that
there is no representation from other wards on these working parties and
they tend to make decisions that are not in the interests of the
community as a whole.
We have tried to get
information from the council to put this issue into perspective for our
members, we asked for information about who is on the various public
participation working parties for each ward but the council officers
claim that they are unable to give us this information because of
privacy considerations. Some people believe these committees are so
stacked that the Council is reluctant to disclose exactly what is
happening. We're told that Council advertises publicly for members for
these committees, surely the public has the right to know who got the
positions on them.
The only way we can think
of to solve this problem is to have an
immediate spill of the public membership of all of these committees. The signing of a privacy waiver
should become a condition for future
participation in any committee. There should be a limitation to the
number of committees a member of the public can be on. All committees should be reconstituted
annually according to a proper constitution. (it would appear some of
them even don't even have a proper constitution)
We've provided a
Council document that purports to list all the Lane Cove Committees that
the council uses. Many of these have ward-specific public
membership, look at the document, it's very unhelpful in this regard,
it does not even state which committees have public membership and how
many public members the committee has. This document contains some
errors as well, we requested all these shortcomings be corrected some
months ago. We're still waiting...
It appears that these
committees are where a lot of important decisions are made that affect
all our lives and where our rate payment moneys go. Perhaps it would be nice to know just who is on these
committees and what their credentials, residential and contact details
are.
Lane
Cove Council Committes Document PDF
(107Kb)
What would you
suggest:
Is there a better way
to arrange ward boundaries ?
Should we abolish wards entirely
?
What should be done about the committee system
?
Should there be an
immediate spill of all committee memberships ?
Should all Committee members
immediately sign a privacy waiver ?
What do you say ?
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