Rescission does nothing to sway team Krieg on waste

An Extra Ordinary Meeting of the City of Lismore Council was held last night to respond the a request for a recission on last week’s Waste Operation Review which saw a majority of Lismore Councillors vote to outsource the service and work to private enterprise.

Councillor Vanessa Ekins moved the rescission motion with Councillor Cook seconding.

As happened last week, the arguments began over the merits of moving the debate into a confidential session.

Before that argument could begin, there was a debate, instigated by Cr Rob, about whether the speeches should be reduced to three minutes from four to save time.

Time ladies and gentlemen

Cr Vanessa Ekins suggested if Cr Rob was so concerned about timing and an impending workshop then the matter could have been deferred to the December meeting. ‘I’ve got time to be here. Every Tuesday night, actually. I was kind of disappointed that this meeting was held at four o’clock in the afternoon, which meant I had to leave what I was doing early to be here on time. And I’m sure that was same for members of the public and everyone else who wanted to be here.

‘So we’re already inconvenienced by being here. Shortening our time to speak to this matter, which is a really important matter very significant strategic decision in this chamber, and shortening our time so that we can have some training on something else is a little bit ludicrous.

‘In my view, I think we need the full time that is available to us to consider this very important matter. And we owe it to the people who are sitting here waiting to hear the debate, or at least expect that their representatives are going to give the appropriate amount of time and consideration to this matter.

Cr Andrew Gordon’s rainbows and unicorns

Cr Andrew Gordon spoke about  the confidence in this chamber. ‘Speaking for five minutes – all we hear is the same old rhetoric it wanders off topic instantly, so what we get, we start out in a great place and then we just wander off. Historically, that’s all we ever do is venture down that path and we start bringing in fossil fuels, we start talking about rainbows and unicorns. So why don’t we get to three minutes and get it over and done with.’

The vote went as expected and the speech time was reduced to three minutes – six minutes would have been saved without the debate…

Keeping it confidential

On the matter at hand, the Waste Operation Review rescission, and whether to debate is behind closed doors, or not, Cr Vanessa Ekins it was a major change in the Lismore strategy. ‘This is an adopted strategy that this Council adopted last year and was widely consulted with our community. 

‘We had numerous workshops and it’s been adopted and now this is a complete change in approach after two secret workshops where we were presented with some flowcharts – no financial information, no consultation – and we don’t even know who the potential contractors are, or what kind of price that we’re looking at. We don’t know. 

‘A comment was made at the workshop that contractors would sign a contract the next day. But Councillors don’t know any details. The community doesn’t know what option “C” is and our waste management staff don’t know what’s going on. 

‘If we’re going to actually change a massive strategy like this behind closed doors, well we shouldn’y. We need to do it in the open chamber where the people it affects can actually hear what the rationale is, even though they don’t know what the actual strategy is. 

The Local Government Act says keep it transparent

‘The other problem I have with us going into confidential for this, is that under the Local Government Act, Section 10 A, we are supposed to discuss matters in a transparent fashion. Transparently. Under Section B1B it says that we can only close this meeting to directly deal with matters that concern particular individuals. There is no discussion in there about particular individuals. Now there are some general individuals it might affect and they’re all sitting in this room. They already know about this matter, but there is no discussion under the Section about particular individuals. So I put it to you, Mr General Manager, that we do not need to go into confidential session for this and we owe it to the employees of this council and to our community to discuss this in open forum.’

Cr Adam Guise said basically ‘what she said’  and added that is totally unacceptable that the close the chamber is closed to talk about such an important and critical issue to Council’s operations and such a critical issue to our community. 

A red herring

‘We’re certainly not talking about commercial in confidence matters. It hasn’t been raised by the General Manager for the reasons this meeting is proposed to be closed and there’s none of that data about commercial operators in the council report, so it’s preposterous that some Councillors would raise that as a red herring, when in fact this should clearly be done in open Chambers as a matter of transparency. 

‘Waste is the one of our core businesses. We’ve been calling for years transparency, about the management of our waste facility and operations. So to continue to have secret meetings behind closed doors on nebulous, nebulous grounds, flies in the face of open transparency required under our code of conduct and the values that Lismore council hurts to uphold to our community. And that absolutely goes against all our adopted policies. 

‘This is clearly an about-face of our policies. It’s a tearing up of those adopted policies. We have not gone out to consult with our community about this. We have not been allowed to have those conversations with our community as required under the Local Government Act to discharge our duties as counsellors, and therefore, this should not proceed. 

‘This should be deferred. We should openly consult with our community.’

Existing waste strategy was endorsed by community

Cr Darlene Cook said she supported the the sentiments that both Councillor Guise and Ekins have expressed. ‘This is a matter that should be dealt with in the public arena. Our existing waste strategy was endorsed by our community overwhelmingly last year. 

‘We should be engaging with our community. We should be talking to them about any major restructure of the waste facility because it affects them, it affects their pride in this town. We’ve had a great deal of pride in this town and our history of recycling being leaders in the recycling field.

‘We should be debating this in the public arena because we’re not debating individual personnel matters. We’re debating the overturning of our waste strategy. Well, governance is about engaging with our community. It’s having debates open to the community and while we need to privatise services, whether we restructure whether we lay off workers, this should these are overriding reasons we should have this debate in the open chamber. 

‘We know privatising our waste is not a secret – it’s definitely  not backing Lismore. the waste staff are very well aware of what’s happening. They’re here in this chamber. They are worried about the jobs they worried about their futures. ‘The media released by the mayor last week dumped on those workers. He said not only had the overall service operated a significant operational deficit for years but the past five months alone we’ve taken calls for more than 1,500 results about missed bins. The reason these bins have been missed, and there’s no proof of this because this council didn’t buy the GPS technology that was needed, it’s because a number of drivers came down with COVID and couldn’t drive and the gravel truck drivers apparently can’t drive garbage trucks. So we have a staff shortage, which is not the fault of the workers. Breakdowns, again, not the fault of the workers, but this council not prioritising investment in the waste sector in the past two years, but our mayor suggested very strongly that the problems were the fault of the workers in our waste sector.

The election campaign

Back in 2021 during the election campaign, USU asked all candidates to commit to keeping council jobs local to maintain core council services using council labour and to oppose the outsourcing and privatising of core council services – Steve Krieg refused to sign it. I signed it. You signed it. You signed it. (Cr Cook pointing to other Councillors). The mayor didn’t.

‘At the same time in response to a question on the survey by Nimbin Goodtimes, about whether or not community consultation should form a significant part of council decision-making. Steve Krieg said he disagreed. 

‘This just shows where we’re going with this matter tonight.’

Cr Kreig reminded Cr Cook her time was up.

It wasn’t me

Cr Gordon was on his feet again inferring that the the decision to send money to private enterprise was the fault of previous councils. ‘What’s unacceptable? Unacceptable is that we’re sitting here faced with this decision. Everyone’s talking about this in this room tonight. We’re talking about this as a problem that has just appeared – it’s just appeared in the last 10 minutes.

This is a problem has been brewing for 20 years and no one’s taking responsibility. This is the fault of this chamber. It’s the fault of management. So fault of these guys (waste staff). 

‘They come to work every day to do the best that they bloody can. It’s the fault of these people paid to look after them. It’s the problem of this chamber. Yeah, you talk about your core businesses. Tell me one that you’ve been successful in? Tell me one core business? Is it the quarry? Is it waste? Is it sewerage? No it’s not – you’ve failed in every single one of them. 

‘In here, in this chamber now, this executive, has to pick up the pieces and make these decisions that are affecting others. That’s what’s going on. 

‘So we’re sit near like we’re pretending this is something just just appeared on our lap. It has bloody not. It’s been brewing, and no one has stood up who had the courage to make a decision to fix it. That’s the problem tonight. 

How’s will consulting the community help us?

Consult with the community? How’s that going to help us? It hasn’t helped in the last 20 years. It hasn’t helped.

‘Secret – having secret conversations. It’s not secret, it’s confidential. Because it’s about these people. It’s about their livelihoods and the difficult conversations that revolve around how we deal with this matter. And what the future looks like. That’s confidential.

‘It’s not secret. Ii it was secret, you wouldn’t be invited. It’s confidential. So let’s just no pretend that this is a matter that we can just sit down here and talk about these guys and chuck them under a bus say it’s their fault. It’s not their fault never has been never will. This is a conversation that needs to be had it confidentially, because some really, really hard conversations need to be had. We need to examine why are we standing here today? Why are we doing this? This matter needs to be confidential. It’s not fair that they bear the brunt of this chamber, because this chamber has been incapable of making a good decision. And tonight, we’re gonna have to wrestle that and come up with whatever we can out of a dog’s breakfast.’

The debate continued for quite some time and a expected, the vote went the way of going into confidential.

An hour later the Mayor spoke to the chamber and announced, not unexpectedly, that the rescission failed.

This week’s press release

Unlike last week when the Mayor’s post-meeting press release came out less than ten minutes after the meeting, this week Cr Krieg’s press release came out just before 5am, which asks the question: was the Mayor up all night crafting it?

‘Council has resolved to further investigate how we might progress with a new waste and resource recovery model and strategy,’ he said.

‘As has already been stated, the Waste Service Review report was long overdue, and the most comprehensive review into our waste and resource recovery services and plans, ever undertaken by council.

‘The report provided transparency to all our elected members on Lismore’s current state, identifying every challenge we face and providing a recommended pathway to get things back on track to being financially, environmentally, and socially sustainable.

‘This is not just about domestic waste collection services; it is a much bigger body of work to ensure the health of our region and the sustainability of our services well into the future.

‘The reality is, with successive leadership changes and through successive natural disasters the overall operations of our waste services and resource recovery for the city is not where it should be.

‘We are being honest about that with our community because it is our responsibility to deliver efficient and sustainable services. No one would expect us to continue to operate with multi-million-dollar deficits year on year.

 ‘As we have stated from the beginning there are no Lismore City Council staff job losses proposed as part of these actions.

‘Council has received the report into the sustainability of the city’s waste and resource recovery operations and has now endorsed further work be undertaken to explore the feasibility of the proposed Option Model C.

‘The reality is however, there are still several steps and separate decision points for council before we can adopt an alternate model of operating.

‘Our priority continues to be our people and will continue working with our teams over the coming months as we start to formalise what needs to be done to transition toward more sustainable operations for our waste and resource recovery.’

One-eyed determination

After the meeting Cr Guise said that the Krieg team’s one-eyed determination to outsource waste to profit-driven operators can only end in pain. ‘How can they expect this to amount to cost savings while still retaining displaced workers?

‘This is the tip of the iceberg for the Nationals’ privatisation agenda, which will see more public funds transferred to private corporations instead of investing in our own workforce. 

‘Waste is a core business of council, and instead of being mismanaged or put in the ‘too-hard basket’, it should be prioritised for reform and innovation that ends us being at the arse end of the waste cycle. 

‘Manufacturers of waste need to take responsibility for the lifecycle of their product from cradle to grave. 

‘It would be a tragedy to see Lismore’s waste being used to fuel the Nationals’ and Labors’ agenda to build a toxic waste incinerator at Casino.