7 August 2024

CENTRAL Coast Council is holding a referendum on the same day as the Council elections asking residents if they wish to reduce the number of Councillors from 15 to 9 in four years time.

At a meeting this week, the Ratepayers’ Choice Group of independent candidates in the upcoming council elections, Kevin Brooks, Lee Anne Erlin, and Stephen Sizer have agreed to advocate for a no vote in the Council referendum.

Lead Candidate for Gosford West, Kevin Brooks, said “I have served on two UK Councils with 55 and 33 Councillors respectively, and I can see no logical reason why a reduction from 15 to 9 Councillors would lead to better governance."

"Even with the current fifteen Councillors, Central Coast is already the fourth most under-represented Council in NSW," Mr Brooks said.

"If we go down to nine, we will be the most under-represented Council in NSW by some distance, with one Councillor per 38,700 residents.  We would be almost 50% more under-represented that Blacktown in second place with one Councillor per 26,600 residents.

"When I served as a Councillor in the UK, I typically served Wards of about 6000 residents.

"We held ward surgeries on Saturday mornings where residents could raise issues and ask for help, and we had time to see everybody who came."

Source: OLG Time Data Series 2021/22 (the most recent available).

The Grapevine reported last week (31 July) that the Central CoastLabor Party branches would support the status quo on Central Coast Councillor numbers and not support the referendum to reduce councillor numbers on Central Coast Council from 15 to 9.

The Liberals have said that will also support the status quo on Central Coast Councillor numbers, according to Godfrey Franz, president of The Liberal Party Central Coast Local Government Committee.

Mr Franz said the key reason was that councillor numbers were reduced from 20 to 15 when the two former council areas, Gosford and Wyong, were merged in 2016 to create the Central Coast Council.

He said evidence from the Public Inquiry into Central Coast Council in 2021 showed that ordinary councillors were overworked and relatively underpaid for their work, which he estimated to be about 20 hours a week.

"The new councillors would have a lot of work to do and nine councillors would give the public less access to them," said Mr Franz.

Councils are monopoly suppliers of public services and those who receive poor service, or feel they have been treated unjustly or that the system is letting them down, sometimes have nowhere else to turn but to an elected representative.

If the referendum were to succeed, there would be too few Councillors to adequately meet community needs.

This may not suit the dictatorial agenda of certain individuals, who are irritated when Councillors raise such concerns, but it will not be in the interest of the local community if a quasi-dictatorship was allowed to continue.

Not surprisingly, the only people that have been pushing this expensive referendum are senior bureaucrats within the Council. Why?

SUBSCRIBE FOR FREE to the Grapevine News Online and to the monthly e-book edition of the Grapevine Community Weekly. Our online news platform and monthly newspaper is about real local news and events. We will not spam you or share your details with third parties.