Lindsay Street Carpark Off The Agenda

Launceston Council's Lindsay Street Carpark proposal is now off the agenda.  

Whilst the council has not provided a reason for 'the withdrawal' of a proposal that was masquerading as an ANCILLARY USE because car parking is PROHIBITED under the planning scheme on the Lindsay St site.

Now why is it that the community knows such things and the council functionaries all the way up and down the line seem not to?

Speculatively, the Lindsay St car park might have actually been devised with the intended use being to  supplement the car parking that would (might?) be displaced by UTas on the Inveresk site.

In fact, this project provides insights into the council's processes and more importantly it poses so many questions. In fact, what might have happened if the community wasn't alert to the problems and issues and less than three representors put their hands up?

The advice that the application has been withdrawn from the aldermanic assessment process and that it will no longer be referred to the Council meeting for determination is loaded with questions. A question that comes to mind very quickly is the cost of the process to date. In fact what are those costs? How can they be discovered if none of the aldermen pursue the matter? Who within council was advocating this solution to an unidentified 'problem'? Who bears the responsibility if not the cost?

Its easy to deduce that it'll be the hapless ratepayers who'll foot the bill however much it turns out to be. However, is there any imperative within council to discover such expenditure in order to establish fiscal discipline within the council's operational wing? A ratepayer, or even an alderman by all accounts, asking such a question is very likely to have Section 62 (2) of the Local Govt. Act recited to them. Is this how such inappropriate expenditure gets to be explained away?

The kind of expertise asserted throughout such planning processes is covered by Section 65 of the Local Government Act 1993. It  requires the General Manager to certify that any advice, information or recommendation given to Council is provided by a person with appropriate qualifications or experience, and the General Manager is required to certify that it is so. Even if late in the day it seems that the General Manager discovered himself unable to certify any such thing for this process.

With this information in hand, and knowing that an expert judgement needed to be made, a whole bunch of questions arise that deserve to be answered. Before a site meeting could be held on October 13 at 1pm at Lindsay Street why hadn't the proposal's legitimacy been tested? Why hadn't either the 
outside consultant assessment planner or the in-house applicant, the officer responsible for  Commercial Project Delivery, thoroughly investigated this proposal?

Then there are some rather uncomfortable questions beyond those above. The big one being what are the aldermen actually doing to fulfil their representational role and save the costs that accumulate and get to be passed on to ratepayers with an smothered "oopps" and not even a hint of a "sorry"?

L McKenzie