Mayor Lyon has a nerve accusing the Mullumbimby Residents Association of presenting a ‘one-sided’ view of the Rous County Council (RCC) Lavertys Gap water supply issue.
Byron Council has two reps on RCC, being Crs Michael Lyon and Sarah Ndiaye, both of whom were invited to attend a recent meeting of the residents’ association but instead sent their apologies. Cr Lyon thus had the opportunity to balance the arguments but was apparently reluctant to expose his hydrological ignorance. His assertion that Mullumbimby water bills will be $1,000 higher if the Lavertys Gap option is favoured sounds like standard right-wing scare tactics to me.
RCC is an association of four North Coast councils which each contribute two councillors to what might be usefully described as an octopus.
My one encounter with this organisation was in the 1980s when there was a proposal to build a dam on Wilsons Creek at Federal, which would have flooded at least one third of my property. Curiously, I challenged a statement made by the bureaucrat in charge, only to be met with the response that that statement wasn’t meant to the taken literally and was only provided ‘for information’, whatever that is supposed to mean.
Soon afterwards I received a suspiciously generous offer for my property from an undisclosed buyer; the real estate firm which conveyed the offer could only cite another real estate firm which was totally tight-lipped about who was behind it.
Needless to say millions of dollars of construction work were in play here, and when you get to the bottom of RCC’s current proposal you’ll no doubt find a pecuniary motive at its root. It always seems to be about snouts in the trough in those rural organisations .
For four decades The Echo has printed the stories some people loved, some people hated, and some pretended not to read. If you want us to keep telling the truth, the real truth, not the sugar-coated version. We’ll need your support to keep the presses rolling. 
