Good afternoon. Thank you for the opportunity to address Council regarding GMR 23/033 Sculpture for Clyde Event Funding Request, which is largely a repackaged version GMR23/032 from the November 21st Council meeting.
I am presenting as Co-Convenor of A Better Eurobodalla (ABE), a community forum dedicated to having open and inclusive government in our region. ABE has previously addressed Council on transparency and open communication, key principles of good governance.
In a nutshell, today’s agenda paper is recommending that Council provide $20,000 in funding, plus an additional $8,074 in kind support through waiving the usual venue hire fees as well as providing the services of Council’s Rapid Response Team and meeting the costs of installing the prize winning sculpture. This public funding request is for an event whose prize money has doubled in the last 3 years (from $50,000 in 2021 to $100,000 in 2024), and which has already received $20,000 funding from Council earlier this year when it requested “one off” financial assistance for relocation costs.
This request comes at a time when Council is experiencing an annual $4.5 million loss from the Bay Pavilions as well as multiple external cost pressures, and Eurobodalla ratepayers are being advised to prepare for steep rates increases and cuts to services.
My ABE colleague Bernie O’Neil identified key governance, equity and precedent-setting problems with this funding request in Public Forum when it was presented to Council on the 21st November. These problems remain, and have been compounded by the events of the Extraordinary Meeting of the 5th December outlined in today’s agenda.
The procedures adopted at the Extraordinary Meeting were not consistent with the requirements specified in Office of Local Government (OLG) Guidance, in that the decision taken to not allow any debate or deliberation on the rescission motion while still allowing Public Forum to go ahead was not derived from a formal public vote of Councillors in the chamber.
The OLG Meetings Practice Note States :
“Once the agenda for the meeting has been sent to the councillors, an item on the agenda should not be removed from the agenda prior to the meeting.
If it is proposed that an item of business which is on the agenda not be dealt with at the meeting, council should resolve to defer the business to another meeting or resolve not to consider the matter, as the case may be.”
In contrast, today’s agenda paper states that “The Extraordinary Meeting went ahead when Councillors reached consensus just prior to the meeting that the nine registered speakers, most of whom had already arrived at the Chamber, should be given the opportunity to speak at Public Forum”.
It is notable that there was no formal public vote of Councillors to support this pre-meeting decision. Noting that the Cambridge dictionary defines consensus as “a situation in which all the people in a group agree about something”, in the interests of good governance and transparency it would have been desirable for a public vote on this proposal be undertaken in the chamber and put on the formal public record. This is the second successive Council meeting where OLG specified procedures were not followed by Council in dealing with this funding request.
There are also ongoing issues regarding ‘conflict of interest” aspects. For example, when the previous Sculpture for Clyde funding request was considered by Council in February 2023, Councillors Schutz, Grace and Dannock and Mayor Hatcher disclosed non-significant, non-pecuniary interests in the issue, and stated that they did not believe their interest would preclude them from voting on the matter. All 4 indicated that a donation was received from the event organiser for their teams in the 2021 local government election. However, when a similar request from the same organization was submitted in November 2023, Mayor Hatcher chose to recuse himself from voting on the issue. The Council agenda item provides no explanation for this change in approach between the 2 meetings. It is also anomalous that, while recusing himself from voting on the proposal, Mayor Hatcher has been present and participated in pre-meeting Council deliberations on this issue, which is at odds with relevant OLG guidelines which state :
4.29 The councillor or council committee member must not be present at, or in sight of, the meeting of the council or committee:
a) at any time during which the matter is being considered or discussed by the council or committee, or
b) at any time during which the council or committee is voting on any question in relation to the matter.
In a time of widespread and ongoing financial stress, it would be unfair to existing Eurobodalla Hallmark events, such as River of Art and Narooma Oyster Festival, for Council to agree to the disproportionate level of funding sought by Sculpture for Clyde without rigorous and transparent documentation of anticipated event expenditure and activity budgeting. This would set an extremely bad precedent for any future requests for this type of funding support. Any future applications for event funding of this scale should be expected to meet comparable requirements to those laid down for other Eurobodalla Hallmark events.
Approval of the current proposal would also be at odds with relevant principles for Councils spelt out in the NSW Local Government Act, which include :
» consideration of social justice principles; and
» ensuring decisions are transparent and that decision-makers are accountable for decisions and omissions.
On the basis of the significant governance, transparency, credibility and equity issues outlined above and in Bernie O’Neil’s Public Forum presentation on the 21st November, ABE urges Councillors to :
- offer the 2024 Sculpture on the Clyde event a similar level of funding that other established and well-documented Eurobodalla Hallmark Events have received, which is $8,000, and
- require the organisers to provide the same level of reporting on the outcomes and expenditures of the event that other Hallmark Event recipients are obliged to provide.
This is the very least Council can do to ensure that public money is well spent and accounted for.
Thank you for your attention.
Dr Brett Stevenson
Co-Convenor
A Better Eurobodalla
19/12/2023
A Better Eurobodalla 