HCC tries petition cost-shift

HOBART City Council will ask the State Government to pay for elector polls petitioned for by the community.

A letter from HCC general manager Nick Heath to local government director Alex Tay, approved by council last night, asks the State Government to bear the costs of public polls brought on by constituents.

It comes as Hobart ratepayers are set to pay $198,000 for a building heights plebiscite.

Mr Heath’s memo also suggests ministerial intervention could be an option to defer an elector poll if council was already actively dealing with an issue.

“The cost of conducting an elector poll is significant,” he wrote. “It is submitted that the cost associated with undertaking a poll initiated by the community ought to be borne by the State Government.”

Alderman Marti Zucco, chair of the council’s finance and governance committee — where the matter was raised last week — said if the government believed the poll provision was important enough to have in their Act then they should pay for it.

He said the State Government was not subject to any similar requirement to hold a plebiscite based off a petition from constituents.

“No one envisaged in 1993 when the [Local Government] Act was enacted it would cost $198,000,” Ald Zucco said.

“Nobody would have envisaged it would have been so easy to get 1000 signatures.

“No one can say the Hobart City Council hasn’t acted on the concerns of residents on height limits.”

The letter addresses Part 6 of the Act, that requires a council to hold an elector poll if it received a petition signed by at least 5 per cent or 1000 constituents requesting one within 30 days of a public meeting on the same issue.

At the committee meeting last week Mr Heath said electronic petitions had been a “nightmare” and the signature threshold for calling public meetings and elector polls was “just too low”.