Foolish to waive fees

The report “Planning fee waived for cancer centre” (Gaz 25/10) is hard to credit.

Why was council solemnly debating whether to waive a planning application fee of $9663.30? If it has legal discretion to do this, that power should be explicit in the delegation of operating responsibility to the chief executive officer.

Cr Annemarie McCabe supplies the embarrassing answer: ‘unlike other councils, Baw Baw had no policy on fees and charges being waived or reduced’.

Justifying the waiver because “council had actively advocated for WGHG support and any advancement of its service was critical for the municipality” is absurd.

Advocating a new hospital has nothing to do with it, and a particular concession can’t possibly be justified on the basis of such a broad generalisation.

Does the precedent now set mean that any planning proposal deemed ‘critical for the municipality’ will attract such a waiver? It would be difficult to find something more critical than a new hospital: should all council-prescribed fees relating to the prospective $600 million project be waived accordingly?

That would mean providing free the immense council resources needed to deal with the requisite planning consents.

If the object of the waiver motion was to burnish council’s tarnished image in planning administration, making much of little was futile.

In the same edition of the Gazette, another article, ‘Bakery proposal for Erica a case study of planning woes’, highlighted how bad council’s planning performance can be.

In that case, the applicants for planning permission say they’ve had to spend about $40,000 meeting demands for supplementary information, and they’re still waiting for an outcome nearly a year after lodgement, and the better part of another year of discussions preceding it. Prima facie, these are wholly unreasonable imposts on a small business in a small, remote township.

The councillors and CEO ought to hang their heads in shame, not beat their chests about a paltry waiver. And they ought to think deeply about how to expedite planning permissions for a new hospital, lest its complexities fall hostage to proportionately greater misfortune than the Erica bakery application.

Cr McCabe is to be commended for recognising the foolishness of granting the waiver without there being an agreed policy limiting expectations of future largesse. The slippery slope of precedents has been amply demonstrated by past laxity in councillors’ approvals for dwellings on small rural lots.

John Hart, Warragul

Affordable entertainment

In the complaints from Jeremy Fowlie (Gaz 18/10) about the programming of our local performance venue, he seems to ignore or not understand the considerable running costs involved in such operations and the expectation that they will be largely self-funding.

The new Gippsland Performing Arts Centre at Traralgon is clearly being supported substantially by tax and ratepayer dollars to be able to afford their “sliding scale” charges allowing local groups to pay “what they can afford”.

Would Baw Baw citizens be happy for additional funds to be made available to make that possible here? From comments recently about the community hub project it would seem not.

Further, many local groups such as the Gippsland Symphony Orchestra do put on performances at very reasonable prices (at the expense of the performers no doubt) and achieve audiences that barely cover costs. It is no surprise then that venues put on touring “tribute” copy acts for which Baw Baw audiences fill the venue.

It seems these audiences are living examples of the line from Joni Mitchell “They knew (they) had never been on their TV so they passed their good music by.”

I wonder which local theatre group or musical performance Jeremy has attended.

Paul Strickland, Cloverlea