Interview CEO South Gippsland April 28th, 2020-Part 4

“Council is putting through a four-year plan 2020 to 2024 in last week’s budget. Now normally they are started the year after a council election. Can you comment on why this is occurred now and not after the next council election?”

“Well the answer is it will probably it’ll probably be both so a council no matter how it’s constituted is required to have a council plan and the council plans required to be for a four-year period. So this council which as you know has got administrators was required to adopt or develop a council plan which they’ve done but obviously once we have a new council elected in 18 months’ time they will then have the opportunity to develop and adopt their own council plan and now have the choice about actually they won’t have a choice because under the new local government act 2020 act any new councils required to adopt A new council plan so effectively what I’m saying is that this plan will see through the life of the current administrators and hopefully provide for some transition”.

“So, what you said is the new council will adopt their own-that’s good. Will the Vision document be produced with the same consultation process as the budget and the four-year plan?”

“We haven’t had that conversation yet with the administrators so I can’t answer that at the moment I know that it’s on the least I understand it was in the current council plan as a commitment and I know that it’s on the administrators radar but we haven’t yet had a conversation with them so I’m not sure what the plan is there certainly when there is clarity on that will communicate that.”

“Has Council made any reduction in costs since Covid and is it still paying any closed businesses for work not done.”

“Let’s take those two questions as separate because I’ll answer them separately the first one is yes we are always looking at ways that we can do things more efficiently in order to fund other things and that will be part of our thinking because obviously there will be some sources of revenue that we would normally receive that we won’t because it is coronavirus so we’re going to need to find ways that we can absorb that and that when we are doing that we do that all the time so the answer to the first parties yes. In terms of closed businesses are you talking about things for example like the ######## at #### is that an example or?”

“Yes, that would be an example, but I wasn’t meaning specific cases.”

“yeah yeah okay well to keep it general then the answer is yes there are some contract commitments we have got in current contracts where we’ve negotiated to bring those costs down as much as we possibly can but there are some commitments that we still need to make and that’s particularly the case if you look for example at something like the ####### contractor our main building at the moment there’s very few people in that building so we probably could be really hardnosed about it and tell the company we’re not going to pay them but there are local small business too and it would only save a matter of you know possibly a couple of $1000 at the most and it would significantly disadvantage small local business so we’ve kind of come up with a happy medium which is that will pay them an amount of funding that’s less than normal but it keeps them in business and it means that when we need to open the building again they can come in and return of service provision we’re trying to work with our contractors but you know they’re all in their own challenging positions as well as you can understand .”

“Will there be any people who work for the Shire that are on a very low wage being laid off in this situation and getting the government to keep it for example would be better for them.”

“No council employees are eligible for job keeper unfortunately which frankly is a source of concern to a lot of councils because staff at that lower end who aren’t getting shifts for example that would benefit from job keeper but council employees aren’t eligible.”