Bird: Work done

Former Horsham mayor Gary Bird has urged the city’s community leaders to be conscious of their potential to ‘waste time, effort and money’ by ‘going over old ground’.

Mr Bird, a Horsham councillor for about 10 years and mayor in 2006 and 2007, said it was with a sense of frustration that he followed latest sport and recreation planning developments in the municipality.

He said in a letter to The Weekly Advertiser that the council, investigating an umbrella river-sporting-business precinct concept, already had relevant study reports and recommendations regarding major sporting assets on file.

He suggested the council should back its ability to move forward and avoid what he considered unnecessary research.

Here is his letter – SIR, – I feel compelled to respond to a Horsham Rural City Council move to further investigate the sport and recreation needs in a precinct connecting the Wimmera River with the heart of Horsham.

If I understand what’s happening correctly, the move involves bringing together many plans that have been developed in the past to create an over-arching policy that guides future direction for the area.

This sounds fair enough in theory, but as a former Horsham councillor and mayor and with a long association with Horsham district sport, I can’t help feel this might simply be a case of wasting time, effort and money going over old ground.

With the fear of sounding over-simplistic, I suspect that a simple change in council personnel over the years has left a vacuum in historical knowledge about what has happened during council debate and governance in the not-so-distant past.

For example, the future of Horsham City Oval, a prize recreational asset in the municipality, has already been the subject of extensive scrutiny. Investigations have unearthed comprehensive recommendations that remain relevant today.

And of course Horsham’s indoor sporting needs were also clearly identified in the past and the truth is, many identified gaps at the time have now been met or are now irrelevant based on changing circumstance. Some of them are obvious.

What I’m saying in a nutshell is that we have already done the backbone of the work and have an enormous amount of information on file at our disposal to help make sound and informed decisions.

I agree times are continually changing and we need to adapt, but fundamental issues remain the same. We can’t afford to, or be seen to, be willing to sweep issues under the carpet with investigation after investigation. How much more do we need to know?

The people of Horsham elected the council to make decisions. And that is what they must do instead of handballing issues around to such an extent that things get lost and forgotten and we end up with a series of unending stalemates.

The average person in the street has every right to question why councils are constantly investigating issues where all relevant information has already been uncovered.

Horsham councillors have every opportunity, especially now they have monthly public meetings, to debate their side of the story behind closed doors as well as in the chamber – to the nth degree. And if they can’t convince their other councillors to vote in their favour then that is simply democracy and they must accept a final majority vote.

Critically, after a vote and decision is made, they then must support the overall council decision instead of running off with personal agendas outside the chamber.

From experience, I admire anyone who puts their hand up to be a community leader who is then voted in by their peers.

But they must have faith and resolve in what they believe is right, vote accordingly and then accept the outcome – and then get on with the next issues.

Gary Bird, Horsham