Mornington Peninsula Shire community council meeting, Rosebud Memorial Hall, 25 May 2015. No personal account can be given of the meal, but it was up to the usual high standard, according to usually reliable sources. THIS is a Council Listen rather than a Council Watch, as your correspondent was absent from the meeting. But there’s always the shire’s recording, which is posted on its website a few days later. So let’s soak up the drama and atmosphere without actually having been there. Unsealed car parks appeared a straightforward agenda item until it was pointed out the shire had more than 250 across…
Author: David Harrison
THE struggling Moorooduc Coolstores commercial centre is being thrown another lifeline in its long battle to remain viable. Its trading future has not been helped by the advent of Peninsula Link, which now diverts most peninsula tourist traffic away from the extensively renovated heritage buildings just south of Frankston. Although the centre now houses several businesses, including an Endota Spa and a cake shop, it needs more tenants. At the 22 April Mornington Peninsula Shire planning meeting councillors resolved to simplify the procedure for approving changes to use of the site, at the corner of the Moorooduc Highway and Eramosa…
RATEPAYERS are again being asked for their views on the shire’s waste recovery plan as pressure is said to be growing on the landfill at Rye, predicted in some Mornington Peninsula Shire reports to be full in two years or less. The current draft ̔Municipal Waste and Resource Recovery Strategy’ follows several previous similar documents, including the 2009 ̔Municipal Waste Management Strategy’ and a proposal in 2013 following the Environment Protection Authority’s refusal for a tip at the old Pioneer quarry on the Arthurs Seat escarpment. The new community consultation was approved by councillors at the 11 May meeting. It…
IMAGINE a chilly May day such as the peninsula has been enduring, a decade or two into the future. The rain is, as now, hammering on roof and windows: the wind is keening through the trees. But you are snug, heater on day and night, with no great concern about the cost. Your home has been retrofitted to deliver never-ending geothermal heating, with power bills far below what you would incur for gas and electricity. In summer a cooling liquid is fed to your house via the same pipes. How will this be achieved? Peninsula dwellers live above a giant…
SHIRE rates will rise 5.9 per cent for 2015-16, councillors have decided in the budget document now available at shire offices, libraries and online. Further budget submissions can be made on 11 June at a special meeting in the Rosebud shire office. The rate rise is the same as last year’s and, for the third successive year the municipal charge has been held at $180 a property. CEO Carl Cowie told a recent council meeting the charge would be reviewed for the next budget. Some took this to mean it might be reduced or even abolished entirely. The mayor Cr…
MORNINGTON Peninsula’s population will surge 20 per cent from the current 150,000 to nearly 180,000 in the next 20 years, research done for the shire predicts. The peninsula has long been regarded as a stable population area, which makes the newly calculated growth pattern a bracing challenge for Mornington Peninsula Shire and other authorities responsible for infrastructure such as roads and public transport. The strongest growth would occur on the Port Phillip side from Mornington to Dromana, Safety Beach and Rosebud and across to Fingal and Cape Schanck, stated the recently released demographic forecast undertaken by consultants Informed Decisions. Populations…
DROMANA resident and shire councillor Graham Pittock is off to Ireland in June, at the invitation of the matriarch of the 21st generation of FitzGeralds to occupy the land on which Dromana House stands. Cr Pittock and his wife Prue will, with the FitzGerald descendants, celebrate 800 years of continuous occupancy of the land on which the splendid new house stands, high above the River Blackwater near Lismore in County Waterford, southeast Ireland. The invitation reads: “Your township is named after our demesne and this unique link in history creates an important link, for you and for us.” It came…
MORNINGTON Peninsula Shire’s contentious Municipal Charge, now $180 per domestic rate notice, is to be reviewed, shire CEO Carl Cowie told the 13 April council meeting. Responding to a question from Joe Lenzo of Safety Beach, Mr Cowie said the review could result in a change to the flat-rate charge starting in the 2016-17 financial year budget. Mr Lenzo had asked if the shire would “consider discontinuing this regressive and unfair tax”, collecting it instead by increasing the rate in the dollar. He had provided figures showing its disproportionate effect on the less well off. The highest dwelling rate, excluding…
REVISED Arthurs Seat Skylift gondola plans received a reluctant green light from shire councillors last Wednesday night, but with some suggested changes – a new colour for the gondolas and reservations about the location of heritage objects, which Skylift initially proposed to house inside the summit station. The matters may be negotiated with the applicant. Other changes Skylift wants appear likely to reduce costs. They included removing a toilet block from the bottom station – and thus off the Skylift budget – on to public land and deletion of several original design features. After the meeting, several members of the…
THE popular T’Gallant restaurant in Main Ridge is for sale as part of owner Treasury Wine Estates’ cost-cutting plan. Up for grabs is the restaurant and the T’Gallant’s winery interests. About eight hectares of grapes are grown at the 16-hectare Mornington-Flinders Rd property but wine is no longer made there. Grapes from all over southeastern Australia are marketed under the T’Gallant label. The vineyard–restaurant has had a chequered career over the past decade or so, having been fined for permit breaches when owned by Foster’s Brewing Group. Mornington Peninsula Shire never collected the fine after Foster’s challenged it. The shire ignored…
THE Mornington on Tanti Hotel’s request for another 17 poker machines – almost doubling its number to 40 – is following the community support fund route argued successfully by the Western Bulldogs-owned Peninsula Club, which was successful in lifting its pokie numbers from 20 to 35 a year ago. Tanti is proposing “to formalise an annual community support fund and undertake new works to improve [the] venue” if granted its additional electronic gaming machines (EGMs). The hearing was listed for 23 March but at deadline no one at the Victorian Commission for Gambling and Liquor Regulation was available to provide…
A VCAT appeal by Melbourne billionaire John Gandel against shire councillors’ rejection of a restaurant and sculpture park development in Merricks has been headed off following approval of a revised application that resolves major planning problems in the earlier proposal. Councillors voted on Monday 23 March in favour of the revised plan, which consolidates blocks of land to satisfy green wedge requirement that a restaurant cannot be built on land less than 40 hectares and must be “in conjunction with” agriculture – in this case, a vineyard, now included on the restaurant land. The Victorian and Civil Administrative Tribunal case,…
Monday 23 March. Venue: Mt Martha Life Saving Club. Briefings at 5pm, meal at 6, council meeting at 7. Salmon and salad for a pleasant change and a naughty second helping of dessert. A very good crowd, overflowing available seating when the meeting started. Extra parking at nearby shops for latecomers. CHANGE can creep up on you, or crash through like Brendon McCullum taking hold of the bowling in the run to a ton. Was it change at the council meeting when the redoubtable Fred Crump of Mornington got away with an 84-word question on illegal rubbish dumping? No matter. The…
HILLVIEW Quarries had an obligation to rehabilitate its Boundary Rd site once it stopped extracting rock, sustainable environment director Steve Chapple told the 10 March council meeting. But Hillview’s application for a 10-year permit extension meant the matter was on hold, he said. In response to a question from Mark Fancett of Peninsula Preservation Group, a leading figure in the successful fight to stop the old quarry being used as a tip, Mr Chapple said the shire would soon contact Hillview “to request an acceptable time frame” for details of its proposals for the site. Quarry owner the Ross Trust’s…
LARGE tracts of Arthurs Seat State Park near the summit will be taken over for car parking to service the proposed Skylift gondola ride, a meeting organised by Save Our Seat was told last week. More car parking will also be developed near the gondola’s bottom station, beside the historic Dromana cemetery, the 70 attendees were told. There were gasps from the audience when pictures were shown of the total car park area, which will accommodate well over 600 vehicles. An audience member and local resident, Gabrielle Johnstone, protested that the summit’s number two car park would cover an area…
Community meeting, Monday, 23 February. Venue: Sorrento Sailing Couta Boat Club. An outstanding chocolate cake was served (with real cream) following the usual very healthy repast in honour of Cr Tim Rodgers’ birthday. Cr Rodgers took home the edible “Happy Birthday” message that had adorned the cake. No candles were seen – but surely few more than two score would have been needed. CHANGE is upon us apace across the shire, in small ways and large, with (so Council Watch believes) a couple of humdingers on the way. New shire CEO Carl Cowie’s review of the shire was due to…
MORNINGTON Peninsula Shire would have to spend $56.5 million to build new headquarters in Rosebud or $51.7 million at Mornington. The shire bought Rosebud Central shopping centre on Wannaeue Place in 2012 as a possible site for Southern Peninsula Aquatic Centre (SPA) and is now looking at housing all shire staff there. Employees would be moved from the shire’s three existing offices in Besgrove St, Rosebud; Queen St, Mornington; and Marine Parade, Hastings. Councillors were briefed about the radical change to shire office arrangements on Monday last week. They have been offered six options ranging from retaining the three offices…
REMOVAL of the carbon tax should curb any rate rise next year, according figures drawn from the Victorian Auditor-General’s report for 2012-13. The federal Labor government’s tax, abolished by the current federal Coalition government after it was elected in 2013, is the fourth largest driver of rate increases, the report, Rating Practices in Local Government, stated. The three bigger items were “maintaining services/cost shifting”, “general/other costs” and the state government’s landfill levy. The report was compiled using figures supplied by Victorian councils. Both federal and state governments “cost-shift” services on to local councils, often to achieve savings in their own…
THE summit of Arthurs Seat is in danger of being turned into another Mt Dandenong “car park and tourist cafe” unless great care is taken to avoid past development errors, according to Mornington Peninsula Shire councillor Hugh Fraser. Cr Fraser used his Australia Day address at Sorrento Bowls Club to warn of “unresolved tension in the use of our national park public open spaces for private development”. “There is the proposed private development of the historic Quarantine station in the Point Nepean National Park and also at the magnificent summit of Arthur’s Seat in the state park,” he said. The…
Council meeting at Besgrove St, Rosebud, 12 August, 7pm. Small gallery crowd; tea, coffee and biscuits provided. THERE were a few new faces among the usual gallery veterans at 2015’s first council meeting on 27 January. Three of the faces were there to ask questions about the RACV proposal to build a five-storey addition to its Cape Schanck resort. Five storeys! Thirty metres! Council Watch visualised such a monster rearing up out of the flat Cape Schanck landscape beside Boneo Rd. Cape Schanck resident Phil Gledhill asked if all councillors had “fully informed themselves” of the impact the building would…
MORNINGTON Peninsula Shire is under pressure to cut its rates as the state government promises to force councils to justify any increases above the rate of inflation. Councils will be required to send their budgets to the Essential Services Commission for permission to raise rates above inflation under Labor’s new policy. The shire’s 2015-16 budget is well under way. Officers are assembling the data on which our rates and charges will be struck – under the experienced financial eye of new shire CEO Carl Cowie. For the first time in perhaps a decade, those who put their views annually to…
MORNINGTON Peninsula Shire spent more than $6 million on consultants in the 2013-14 financial year. The figure has been provided to council watcher and southern peninsula resident Barry Robinson, who for several years has been asking the shire how much it spends on external advice. It is not a complete response, but a significant change in what appeared to have been a policy of denying info to ratepayers over a number of years on a wide range of issues. In 2013-14, $6.24 million was spent on consultants. As to being given more detailed figures, shire sustainable organisation director Bruce Rendall…
NEXT year could be the most lively and productive year Mornington Peninsula Shire has had in a long time. A new chief executive officer, Carl Cowie, and councillors appearing to bury their differences are welcome developments. Here are a few items, dealt with briefly, for councillors and officers to consider over the summer break. The subjects can be classed as boring but important: no soaring visions, just matters of tidy housekeeping. An astonishing amount has already been accomplished but there’s more to be done. Rates They have been going up at well over the rate of inflation, more than doubling…
Mornington municipal office. A full agenda. Notably, the first council meeting attended by the shire’s new chief executive officer, Mr Carl Cowie. By David Harrison IT WAS new shire CEO Carl Cowie’s first public appearance at a council meeting and, so far as Council Watch knows, his first peninsula public outing, full stop. Mr Cowie is the shire’s first new chief executive officer this millennium and the first new CEO for all councillors bar Cr David Gibb, who has sat in the chamber since at least 1999. Mr Cowie arrived in the chamber without fanfare. He sat quietly at the…
Mt Eliza Community Hall, Monday 24 November. The usual fine nourishment followed by some feisty debate in a meeting that ran over time. DID Council Watch detect a frisson running through the meeting as it ranged across topics from growing fruit and vegies on your nature strip (who owns them?) to who chairs council meetings? Was the frisson in any way associated with anticipation about the meeting two days later, at which the new shire chief executive officer was to be announced? The councillors all knew the new CEO’s identity and were commendably, annoyingly for CW, zipper-lipped. Perhaps the secret…
THE Graham Pittock conflict of interest case, now concluded, has pulled the focus squarely on to the deep dysfunction afflicting Mornington Peninsula Shire Council over the Southern Peninsula Aquatic Centre. The case began with a 2012 allegation of conflict of interest – anonymous, as is allowed, to the secretive Local Government Investigation and Compliance Inspectorate – and ended last Friday with a fine and costs order. Almost a modern-day “Jarndyce and Jarndyce”, for those who read Dickens. For more than two years Cr Pittock was prevented from voting on the financially huge and physically expanding SPA, such is the cracking…
Council meeting Monday 25 August, Rye Civic Hall. Presentation on Point Nepean development proposal, a fine dinner, council meeting highlighted by the swearing-in of new Red Hill ward councillor Tim Wood. THIS was The Moment, especially for residents of Red Hill ward. Effectively disenfranchised since former councillor Frank Martin fell ill in December 2013, we hinterland wardies were keen to see new man Tim Wood, declared byelection winner on Saturday, sworn in and taking his seat at the council table. Word was that the induction was not to occur until 8 September, but councillor-elect Wood is a man in a…
Newly elected Red Hill ward councillor Tim Wood may not be able to begin his duties until 8 September, despite Local Government Minister Tim Bull advising there was “no impediment” to him being sworn in on Monday 25 August and beginning work at that evening’s council meeting. Red Hill ward has effectively been unrepresented since last December, when former ward councillor Frank Martin fell ill and took extended sick leave. He resigned in May. According to Cr Hugh Fraser, “Management has fixed the taking of the Oath by the person declared elected for Red Hill Ward as an item of…
Shire CEO Michael Kennedy will apply to get his job back after councillors decided Monday last week in a shock decision to advertise his position rather than to reappoint him. In an email to staff the day after the councillors’ decision, Dr Kennedy wrote: “I firmly believe that I am the very best person for the role of shire CEO.” Councillors made their decision after what is believed to have been a long and at times bitter meeting. Sources say that only three of the 10 councillors at the meeting voted to reappoint Dr Kennedy for another term. He has…
MORE than half of the 17 candidates in the keenly contested Red Hill ward byelection have been denied the chance to meet representatives of six ward residents’ associations and a shire-wide “post office” organisation. Only those candidates with an address in the ward – which takes in some 45 per cent of the Mornington Peninsula – were invited to put their views to a meeting last Thursday of the Red Hill Ward Consultative Group. One “local” candidate, Barbara Porter, did not receive an invitation as it was considered she does not spend much time in the ward. The groups that…