A dead end pursuit

THE City of Greater Geelong is a huge municipality — both in terms of geographical area and population.

We rely on the council for many functions and decisions that are important to our dayto-day lives.

It sets and collects our property rates, delivers our waste services, provides essential community facilities such as libraries, maternal and child health centres and public playgrounds, and takes care of our footpaths.

They are also responsible for strategic planning to ensure that our future is catered for.

It’s a big, big job. And no doubt takes a lot of time and manpower to pull it all off.

So when something eats into the time needed to facilitate all of those vital jobs, it is fair for us to expect that it is important.

This week at its monthly meeting, the full Geelong council was asked to decide on an application to rename a Point Lonsdale street from Chiton Way to Casablanca Way.

The council officer’s report noted that the recommendation for renaming the small street — which only covers 11 properties — was made by a consultant of the estate’s developers to eradicate the confusion in pronunciation that often made it sound like an offensive word.

Following the complaint by the consultant, the council launched into an advertising and community consultation campaign that netted the grand total of seven responses — four in favour of a name change and three against.

Elected councillors were quite rightly frustrated when the matter came before them for deliberation on Tuesday night, unanimously voting against any name change and labelling the matter “frivolous”.

“The fact we’re all speaking on it is ridiculous,” Cr Eddy Kontelj said.

Which raises the question, how did one complaint — made by a developer’s consultant — on a street with 11 properties, and that garnered only 7 responses, make it to the full sitting of council?

And how many man hours were wasted on this patently frivolous matter?