Casey to lose by split decision

SPLITTING the City of Casey to create another municipality would be a disaster.
One small section of the municipality has been working hard to have the old Cranbourne Shire section split from Casey, and now councillors have called for a report on ways to prepare councillors for a split.
Why?
The City of Casey is one of the biggest and most populace municipalities in Australia and is growing at an enormous rate. Casey has its administrative structure well in place and working well, thanks to strong administrative leadership.
The council last week embarked on a most ambitious project when it called for expressions of interest to develop the Fountain Gate civic area.
The project is expected to provide the council with a massive retail sector in addition to the Westfield Shopping Centre and a freeofcost civic centre, art gallery, performing arts centre and people places.
This, without having to hand over ownership of the land.
If the Cranbourne sector is hived off you can bet the benefit of the Fountain Gate plan will be retained for the northern sector while Cranbourne sets about finding money for a new civic centre, perhaps on the Casey Complex area at Cranbourne.
Casey has taken advantage of a unique situation at Fountain Gate that could provide the municipality with savings of and assets worth mega millions of dollars.
This situation does not exist in the Cranbourne area so development of a new municipality at any time would fall back on ratepayers in that area.
That sector would also have heavy debt on things such as Casey Fields, and its new aquatic centre, let alone roads, children and community facilities, while the Casey ARC is debt free.
Cranbourne has done very well from Casey despite earlier protestations that it was the forgotten poor cousin.
Cranbourne has the significant Casey Complex, the developing Casey Fields that will include topline sports, a criterium track that will bring many millions of dollars into the economy, and a promised aquatic centre as good or better than the highly popular and successful Casey ARC at Narre Warren.
How can a small municipality sustain these things?
The beauty of all this is that little opposition is shown to Cranbourne receiving these facilities, and neither should there be.
Councillors calling for a split have expressed concern that their workload would be too heavy for parttime councillors, but would they be parttime councillors in a council with 320,000 or 350,000 people.
Officers seem to be doing a good job servicing the community so we could see fulltime career councillors with staff, just as we do with members of parliament.
Casey chief executive Mike Tyler pointed out to a Monash University business breakfast last week that the municipality would have several members of parliament within its borders. Mr Tyler said this provided a great opportunity to lobby.
“We would be in a very strong position if we could lobby so many MPs,” he said.
Mr Tyler said Casey could do much as a large municipality.
My view is that we would do well to heed Mr Tyler’s advice and tread very carefully on this one.
Why would councillors want to destroy something that they spent years building and boasting about?
Why fix something that isn’t broken?
Only the State and Federal Governments need to fear a large and powerful City of Casey, and that because of the threat of fairness to its ratepayers.