General News
4 August, 2024
Community's faith in council sinks deeper
Another "action plan" will be presented to Horsham Rural City Council in the wake of the fallout from last week's dismal community satisfaction survey result - one year after a similar promise fell flat on its face.
The survey, conducted by JWS Research for the Victrorian government, awarded the council a record low score of 43 per cent in overall performance - two per cent lower than last year, after which CEO Sunil Bhalla pledged to "turn things around".
Instead, the community's perception of its elected members and council operations has gone from bad to worse as residents grow increasingly distraught with a disfunctional council chamber.
One councillor went so far as to tell last week's heated council meeting that the result painted the current incumbents as "the worst council in this municipality’s history".
Another conceded that relations between councillors was continuing to deteriorate - a point acknowledged last year by mayor Robyn Gulline.
"Conflict between councillors is the main reason that people have told me they've marked us down," Cr Guilline said after the 2023 survey results.
“I’m only one voice and one vote. All seven of us have to take responsibility for that. That's actually our job."
She added: “We want to reassure residents we are working on becoming a more unified and accountable council.”
This year's survey - and last week's meeting - have done nothing to appease those concerns, and demonstrate the community's faith in council has plummeted even further.
Council's failure to address these and other issues now must pose serious questions ahead of the municipal elections just three months from now.
Councillors were discussing a recommendation that they “receive and note the Horsham Rural City Council (HRCC) 2024 Local Government Community Satisfaction Survey results and note that an improvement plan to address the low scores will be presented to an upcoming meeting of council”.
But Cr Ian Ross said a “park it and leave it” approach to a second successive slide in residents’ appraisal of council was not acceptable.
“Overall we scored very poorly - worse than last year - and we can’t spin our way out of it,” Cr Ross said.
“Who’s responsible? We as councillors are, and I believe this motion highlights perhaps what the problems are: ‘Receive and note…’.
“To me that means ‘park it and leave it’.”
Cr Ross said having an improvement plan prepared by HRCC’s officers also was “not good enough”.
“We should be involved in committees to work together strategically on how we can get a better outcome for this municipality and our people," he said.
“We owe that to our citizens at least. “We’re going down as the worst council in this municipality’s history. We must do better.”
Cr Les Power agreed: “The seven councillors here don’t really get along too well, it’s as simple as that, and people out there in the community actually see that.”
Cr Bob Redden said Horsham was the smallest city in the regional centres group within the survey “and consequently we have a smaller budget (that) limits our capacity to do things we’d like to improve our council’s performance”.
Cr David Bowe said the low scores for questions regarding sealed and unsealed roads did not surprise him “as most of my discussions with the community revolve around roads and the council’s direction and decisions”.
He said because many of the region’s roads were managed not by HRCC but by the state, “we need to advocate more strongly both to state and federal governments to effectively address these road issues”.
Cr Penny Flynn said a representative of the survey company JWS Research spoke to council about the trend of people moving from cities to regional areas such as Horsham where fewer resources were available for infrastructure and facilities.
“Rural people aren’t happy... very unhappy,” Cr Robyn Gulline said.
However, she said that having been a rural resident of HRCC for the past 29 years she could list 68 examples of services, facilities and infrastructure that she and her family had used or continued to use, ranging from council-owned buildings in the city centre to roads, bridges, the livestock exchange and the airport.
Cr Claudia Haenel said: “We are below state average in every core measure, with the only one positive being the increase in customer service interactions.”
Cr Ross described this as the “one highlight of the report… so congratulations to our staff at the coalface, in the office and those who work out in the field and take requests”.