Final chance for decisions

Baw Baw Shire councillors faced a mammoth agenda for their last full council meeting last week before going into caretaker period today.

Wednesday’s agenda featured 14 items, some of which could not be dealt with after today. Council is still required to deal with planning matters in accordance with the Planning and Environment Act.

A special meeting also was held last night to finalise council’s position on its rural land use review.

During caretaker period, council is restricted in its activities, decisions and communications.

During this period, which begins today and concludes with the October 22 election, council cannot make any major policy decisions, award contracts, adopt new policies and is required to limit public consultation and council events.

Because of these restrictions, many items had to be crammed into last week’s agenda for a decision ahead of caretaker period.

Being policy related, council also had to hold an 11th hour meeting for the rural land use policy last night so it could tick off the matter.

Crs Tricia Jones and Gerard Murphy were apologies for last week’s meetings.

Because of conflicts of interest in some matters, particularly the C89 amendment when three councillors had conflicts, chief executive officer Helen Anstis did question at one stage if there were enough councillors to have a quorum to hear submissions and make a decision.

With three councillors out of the room, there would have been only four councillors left, meaning council would not have been able to sign off on the amendment.

A community member in the public gallery pointed out that the councillors should only have to leave the chamber for sections of the amendment they had the conflict in.

Given council moved to deal with each section of the amendment as separate motions, a quorum was able to be maintained, voted on and ticked off before caretaker period.

The current council will hold one more meeting on October 12.