Mayor vows to restore trust in council
HUON Valley Mayor Bec Enders concedes she has likely lost the trust of some members of her community because of the way the council handled a conflict of interest in the recruitment process for its general manager.
Ms Enders said she didn’t want her time as mayor to be defined by the situation, after it was revealed the successful applicant, Jason Browne, was in a relationship with the head of the recruitment agency contracted by the council.
Prior to the council meeting on Wednesday night, which was Mr Browne’s first as GM, community members protested outside the Huon Valley Town Hall.
Many called for Mr Browne to be suspended and some called for Ms Enders to resign. “Clearly there are people in the community who are extremely upset,” Ms Enders said.
“I absolutely can see why they are upset.
“Yesterday I apologised to them in regard to how council managed the conflict of interest.”
A review of the process cleared the council of breaching the code of conduct and local government Act but said the council’s handling of the conflict was not up to scratch.
There is no suggestion Mr Browne is not qualified for the role.
“The main thing is for us to learn from that and undertake all the training,” Ms Enders said.
“There will be some people in the community who will not be satisfied with that response.”
Ms Enders didn’t believe all community members shared the views of Wednesday’s protest group.
“We have 17-and-a-half thousand residents in Huon Valley,” she said.
“There are, of course, people that have approached councillors that have been disappointed but many are relieved there were no breaches,” she said.
But the mayor admitted some trust had been lost.
“Without a doubt the people who were protesting yesterday for example will certainly have lost trust,” Ms Enders said.
She said she would now focus on regaining that trust.
“This is three years of a four-year term and I’ve had a very good relationship with the community up until this event,” she said.
“We’ve been through the bushfires together, we’ve been through Covid together, there’s been some really good work here done by council.
“I certainly don’t want to be defined by one event in three years in a four-year term.
“My aim is to get out into the community more frequently as well as meeting with businesses again to build up the relationship I had with them for a considerable amount of time.”
Despite calls for her to do so, Ms Enders said she had no plans to resign.
“I’m not going to resign,” Ms Enders said. “I’ll leave that up to the authority who I an
swer to. If they find a reason why I need to resign, they will tell me and I will do that.”
There have also been calls for the council to release the report into the review of the process, in full and with no information redacted.
“The advice we received was it did need to be a redacted form,” Ms Enders said.
“That was to protect the council from breaches of confidentiality, privacy and possibly defamation.
“We discussed that and the risk was too great to the council to release the full report based on the advice.”
The mayor also poured water on rumours she was planning to leave her position and run for the Upper House seat of Huon, which is set to become vacant when Labor’s Bastian Seidel steps down in December.
“No, I’m not,” Ms Enders said.
“Gossip is a big thing isn’t it?”