Clattering over potholes or being offended by unkempt parks and gardens, it’s easy to be irritated by council. But we should be pleased with the way Shoalhaven City Council presented itself at Wednesday’s public inquiry meeting into the proposed merger with Kiama.
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Contrast this with the unseemly behaviour at Wollongong City Council earlier in the week when Shellharbour Mayor Marianne Saliba was ejected after noisily accusing Wollongong Mayor Gordon Bradbery of lying.
That episode was yokel government at its worst.
Like Shoalhaven and Kiama, here are two councils facing the same kind of shotgun wedding but their behaviour was poles apart. While Wollongong and Shellharbour have been squalling like teenagers, Shoalhaven and Kiama have been much more measured and co-operative.
Councillors have sat in on each other’s meetings, have met privately and have kept lines of communication open. We have been spared the spectacle of a mayor being punted from another council’s meeting for carrying on like a pork chop.
That’s not to say Shoalhaven City Council has always conducted itself with such grace. Slanging matches and sledging have all too often been stock in trade but on this, the merger issue, a new level of maturity and common purpose has lifted the tone.
And at the public inquiry meeting on Wednesday, the councillors who spoke did so armed with facts and observations the delegate Greg Wright will find impossible to ignore.
Boiled down to basics, the message was the merger would take two fit councils and create one large entity that would be totally unfit for the future. It would forge an unwieldy entity that would struggle to deliver services and one which face a huge financial black hole in four years’ time when the rates freeze associated with the merger was lifted.
Also highlighted was the gulf in community interest between wealthy Kiama and battling Shoalhaven. Kiama could afford to take a greener stance on the environment while job-hungry Shoalhaven could not, one speaker told the meeting.
Difference has been a recurrent theme in all discussions about the merger but both councils have been mature enough to speak openly and frankly about them without resorting to tantrums. Marianne Saliba would do well to watch and learn.