Goodness gracious me they are in a bloody mess

Goodness gracious me they are in a bloody mess down there in St John’s Street. If it were not so, so serious you’d think it was comedic and you might even consider buying the rights to start selling tickets. However the audience for self-flagellation is quite small and really this is no joke. 

Step right up and take your pick as to which bit of nonsense you might want to take a look at first. Well, let us start with the shonky ‘rates deal’ designed, apparently to relieve the pressure of city landlords. In reality property values in the CBD should be falling but that would get the landlords seriously wagging their fingers at the incumbents at ”THE COUNCIL”. So, for whatever reason they’re looking for rate relief and CITY PROM seems to offering an element of it.... there we go 

At first look it all seems so innocuous but dig a little deeper and oh my goodness there is something going on here that quacks like a duck if you get the metaphor. Listening to the quacking it's possible to see some bureaucratic empire building going on as an operation (CITY PROM) is gradually being drawn into the council bureaucracy to build a bigger empire still. 

VOILA, Parkinson’s Law kicks in with work at ‘THE COUNCIL’ expanding to fill the time available for its completion followed on by the need for more underlings who in turn will need their own underlings. MISSION … get more money for the administration coffers! 

CONFUSED? Well the sales pitch is, the current mob are not delivering and if, sorry when, we take this into ‘THE COUNCIL’ we’ll be able to deliver and it will only cost all ratepayers, each and every one, say 4BUCKS PA (a cup of cheap coffee) instead of $500K plus to CBD ratepayers – somebody needs to do the numbers here. The privileged ratepayers who are apparently whinging about not getting enough BANG for their buck are off the hook. They’ll stop complaining when the cost of their BANG goes down to 4BUCKS. This is equality in service with the load spread everywhere. 

AS FOR THE INEQUITY, wwweeeeeeeelllllll we’ll just look the other way having convinced ourselves that we can get away with doing that. It usually works once it is made official and all, well most of,THE GOOD BURGERS pass the proposal in the back room and then around the table.

As each mayor, and each city manager, steps up history tells us that this strategy of what is in fact administrative fiscal rape gets used more, and more often if one listens to the punters. Somehow it passes the pub test but when in Launceston be very careful about which pubs you go to – apparently some spike the beer. 

But the talk around town is about an old, old alderperson, ex-Alderman rather, who is asking “what could the council actually do with $500 to $800K in the way of promoting the city’s CBD?” It’s a very good and well aimed question. A reasonable answer might be, announce that the council has set aside say $600K to promote the city and that council is looking for expressions of interest from organisations, entrepreneurial people, community groups who believe they have the ability to deliver appropriate outcomes. Stand back, and the council will be swamped with proposals just so long as the process was ‘open and transparent’. But apparently that bit might be problematic or it is already indeed.

Then there are all the businesses that THE COUNCIL handed out grants to and that didn’t bother to prove that they had spent it for the purposes for which it was intended. Now why would you if you were told that you needed it and could have it long before anyone knew that the money was available. Needless to say there were a few struggling businesses that were a tad peeeeeeeeed OFF. While that might have been ever likely it was more than unsmart for THE GOOD BURGERS to do it the way that they did. .

You see blowins like me have seen it all before somewhere else and on the odd occasion seen it done well. 

Shaming these noncompliants in the press is not going to touch any raw nerves at all. Its like a bad haircut, time will let it be forgotten. So what do THE GOOD BURGERS do? Yet again they resolve not to be accountable and open to public scrutiny, they resolve to look away and let these noncompliants off the hook with a smack around the ears with a wet cabbage leaf. 

What they should have, or could have, done was serve them with a 30 day notice telling them that they were in breach of contract. The consequence being that if they could not demonstrate that they’d used the grant for the purposes for which it was intended they would be required to pay it back NOT TO THE COUNCIL but the city’s ratepayers for a community project. However, that would mean beating up on people whose support you need or who you just like for whatever reason. .

Now that is enough from me right now, this DrL signing off until the next time …   

QUOTE FOR THE TIMES ... “No matter how bad things are, you can always make things worse.” ― Randy Pausch, The Last Lecture