Try cutting the costly exercises

I AM beginning to wonder how far Casey councillors Paul Richardson and Steve Beardon will go with their council moneysaving campaigns.
Cr Richardson has a long history of asking for costly reports and Cr Beardon now wants to establish a waste watch committee to oversee council spending that will achieve nothing.
Taking into account that Four Oaks Ward councillor Richardson was asking for reports three years before he became a councillor, the cost of officers’ time in research and preparation of the reports must be enormous.
He now wants to hold council meetings at Endeavour Hills, which in itself is a costly and useless exercise.
We have seen that from the regular sojourns to Cranbourne for meetings.
The council has a long and exhaustive budgeting process that goes on for weeks each year and involves a team of officers with 11 councillors submitting wish lists for services and capital works in their respective wards.
Surely that is where these councillors should argue for leaner and meaner administration.
No doubt they do, but they also must provide urgently needed services and infrastructure.
Local government officers are paid extremely well, so reports they are asked to prepare can be costly.
They should be applying their time to ongoing council business, not digging up the past.
My view is that the two new councillors should do their cloth cutting as new projects come on line and perhaps even argue that some works be abandoned to save money.
They are now on a ‘popular theme bandwagon’, but let them see how popular they will be if they start cutting back on expenditure for services in their wards.
Cr Richardson put another damper on progress of the longsuffering Berwick Village Street beautification scheme.
He had no part in the years of planning for the streetscape that has been delayed for all manner of reasons and now wants to know why the money is being spent.
He asked during the recent council meeting held at Cranbourne that costs thousands of dollars to transfer from the civic centre, for officers to provide all costs and financials to him about the Berwick scheme.
What’s the point?
“I query what this special rate at Berwick is?” he said.
Edrington Ward councillor Mick Morland responded that the special rate was applied to business people in the village years ago.
Then River Gum Ward councillor Janet Halsall said she had a document that would explain the scheme to Cr Richardson.
She said one point was that the council collected $150,000 a year from business people to help pay for the streetscape.
Perhaps Cr Richardson should have discussed the issue with the ward councillors and then asked for a report on why business people have been waiting so long to have the streetscape completed after putting up their own hardearned cash.
Cr Beardon has asked for a waste watch committee of all councillors to look for areas of possible saving.
He said he wanted to be able to assure his residents that the council was operating efficiently.
However, councillors go away for budget weekends where I have no doubt they work quite seriously and hard.
They also hold a series of budget meetings.
That’s where their waste watching should be done, without involving officers in another series of ‘votecatching’ grand standing.