Letter to the editor
Beagle Weekly
Since there's been the usual dearth of official council information about what had gone on behind closed doors regarding our councillors' recent decision to give a new five-year $1.5 million contract to the current General Manager (without any of that tedious market-testing or interviewing stuff), I was encouraged to see Wednesday's letter from Clr. Nathan that promised to tell all.
Somewhat disappointingly, her letter proved to be a little bit shorter on important detail than I had hoped for but I did take up Clr. Nathan's suggestion that the readers of the Beagle should start to peruse the Eurobodalla Shire Council's official website if they really wanted to know the facts about what's been happening in this shire.
So I had a skim through the council's media releases of the last couple of months. I soon stumbled across an impressive story about this council's gold medal winning performance in a recent national competition amongst Australia's local government councils. The media release told me that -
“Council has been judged the top council in Australia for customer service general enquiries in a quarterly national benchmarking report.”
“For the March 2017 quarter, Eurobodalla was judged the top council in Australia for customer service general enquiries ahead of Blacktown City Council in second place and the City of Perth in third.”
Now that's pretty impressive, but I don't know – there's a bit of a cynical streak in me. So I decided to ring a friend of mine who is known to ferret out a thing or two about council matters. Sure enough, she had just recently received a reply from the council to her question about exactly how many of Australia's hundreds of councils had been in this survey.
Well, it seems that the answer was 24. (No, there's not a zero missing!) Hmmm.
Anyway, not to be deterred, I resumed my search of the ESC website looking for more real facts and information and soon came across the 'What's On' in Eurobodalla section.
Having been a keen follower of the Narooma Huntfest debate, my attention was quickly drawn to the council's description of the delights that had been available at this month's annual event. I was particularly pleased to see that common sense must have finally prevailed within the council as there was not a mention of a single gun or bullet being for sale in the list of this year's activities.
“Camping, 4WD, clothing, field cooking, meat processing and preserving, game hunting, bushwalking, and fishing stalls.”
But that cynical streak in me was restless again for some reason. So I rang another person who knows a thing or two about what's going on around the place. Sadly, I was quickly assured that there must have been an unintended 'typo' on the ESC website as there had been as many guns and bullets for sale at Huntfest this year as there had been in previous years. Hmmm.
Sorry Maureen, but you know what, I think I'll go back to the good old Beagle Weekly for my information about what's really happening in this shire!
Jim Bright Narooma
