After considerable discussion at today’s Council meeting it was unanimously agreed that Council will not be demolishing the toilet block at Albert Ryan Park as they had proposed and will be not be removing the park furniture and decommissioning the reserve so that it might be sold off at some later date. Part one of Councillor Lindsay Browns motion was about the legal ownership and was considered by some councilors to be rhetorical and unnecessary. When Councillor Constable made the point it was explained that the legal ownership was all described so as to have it in writing. This was reinforced by Lindsay Brown saying that “we all know what the RMS is like” in regards to selling land that they no longer needed. Now that it was clearly in writing this would serve to preserve the care and control vested in Council even though that had been very clearly done by Government Gazette as was advised during debate. Councillor Constable offered that the notice of motion put forward by Lindsay Brown was generally redundant in the first section. He then pressed on to ensure that there was far better clarity of Council’s intent in the second part to NOT go ahead with the decommissioning of the toilet block that staff has recommended. Following two excellent public presentations by Lindsay Brown had little option but to acquiesce and ask for an amendment that gave absolute clarity that the ALBRT RYAN Park toilets would remain and that the notion of any sale of the land was “off the books”. Today has been a good day for the community members who have fought hard to keep this reserve and facility in community ownership. Councillor Anthony Mayne thanked the two public speakers, Leah Burke and Trish Hellier for tier contribution and campaign and said that Albert Ryan Park was an important topic as part of the last election campaign and Council needed to “show we are not going to going to sell reserves and toilets and we should do anything we can to give clarity and assurity to the community.” Click the following links for the presentations of Leah Burke and Trish Hellier
