Is it any wonder that Clarence Valley Council management is now frequently referred to as a bucket full of ar$eholes and a few other unprintable phrases?
Spot the not so subtle alteration of the history of Clarence Valley shire councillors’ response to residents’ concerns over the sudden removal of part of the Yamba Road Cycleway by council management without prior community consultation.
These concerns directly related to cyclists' safety when using a section of Yamba Road in the vicinity of the Freeburn Street T-intersection and pedestrian safety on the nearby designated 'shared use' footpath which does not meet council's own minimum width requirements as set out in the Pedestrian access and mobility plan (PAMP) and bike plan (2008).
Click on the images below for a larger and clearer view of the text.
Ordinary Monthly Meeting Minutes of 26 June 2012:
Voting recorded as follows:
For: Councillors Williamson, Comben, Dinham, Howe, Hughes, McKenna, Simmons,
Tiley and Toms
Against: Nil
Ordinary Monthly Meeting Minutes of 17 July 2012:
Ordinary Monthly Meeting Business Paper of 16 October 2012:
Included in this council officer's report as Background was Item 021/12 Yamba Road Cycelway, Yamba, containing the precise wording as is set out in the minutes below.
Ordinary Monthy Meeting Minutes of 16 October 2012:
Yes, that’s right. By including that last item in the October official business paper and minutes as it is written, council management totally ignored the fact that the June 26 Ordinary Monthly Meeting did not fully endorse the NSW R&MS Clarence Valley Local Traffic Advisory Committee recommendation (which had been heavily influenced by the very same management advising this committee) and, as Clarence Valley Council's 9 October Civil & Corporate Committee Meeting Business Paper contained the very same wording this was not a simple mistake.
It is a distinct possibility that council management did not make the Local Traffic Advisory Committee aware of the fact that its recommendations had not been fully endorsed and that this external committee has an imperfect understanding of the true status of its recommendations.
It is also possible that councillors have been voting since the beginning of October under a manufactured misapprehension concerning council's own past decisions relating to the Yamba Road Cycleway.
Council management obviously believed that newly-elected and re-elected councillors would not easily recall the details of the Yamba Road Cycleway debate and therefore decided to rewrite the record in order to do exactly as it pleased.
At the same time as council management improperly seeks to go against the 26 June 2012 OGM resolution and erect additional signs directing all bicycle traffic onto inadequate footpaths, it is avoiding any meaningful in-depth evaluation of the problem it created on Yamba Road in the first place
Thereby showing nothing but contempt for the democratic process and once again flipping the bird to the Yamba community behind councillors’ backs.
