Long, cold winter ahead in Baw Baw

A well known maxim of business states that how we prepare during good times so will we fare during tough times.

What plans are being made for this right now Baw Baw Shire councillors?All the portents for tough times ahead are in place: rising inflation and interest rates, stagnant wages, housing shortages, titanic COVID debts, increasing household costs and burgeoning natural disaster debt from fire and flood.

Nothing good can surely come from all this. It is also obvious that the looming federal elections will further rattle with these winds of change, amid the growing disillusionment of voters with mainstream political parties.

Council has been living in a long summer of glut from increasing rates, up by 17 per cent last year, plus a huge growth in the number of rateable properties despite the so called 1.7 per cent rate cap, fuelled by massive unsustainable property value rises.

Well, a long cold winter is coming councillors, and the time for more silly decisions, which Don McLean has so aptly listed, must end and real austerity planning put in place. You will lose this property boom soon, for surely boom it will go. Our house values are now the highest in the world , and what goes up must come down. How are you going to manage when your rate increases will have to rely mainly on the 1.75 rate cap? I shudder at the thought. So what your the plan for such a future?

With a history of so much waste as Don outlined so aptly, this question needs obviously to be addressed now, not when winter is here. Throwing another $1.3 million above budget at a bloated inept planning department is clear mismanagement and allowing this departmental crisis to fester for so long is also inexcusable.

In light of all of the above, Baw Baw simply cannot afford the luxury of the proposed library precinct, that nobody but the councillors want. These plans must be shelved. Council's previous effort in the civic precinct has left us with a multi million dollar, architecturally grandiose, and overpriced desert at its entrance, a glaring waste which they now seek to repeat. Some of this space should have been used to provide extra car parking. So instead of the proposed edifice, we now need to have the chronic car parking shortage that is present in the shire's main towns overhauled as soon as, with no tinkering around the edges with parking times, but with real solutions.

The present two sections of Sutton St that are being repaired is another example of grossly overdone works that should have been executed for a quarter of the cost and time that is has and is still unfinished four months later. Come on councillors, the people of Baw Baw demand answers to these important questions, not fob offs and smoke and mirror spin, but fair dinkum ones.

Matt Draisma, Warragul