An extract from Community News Issue 234, 17 June 1993
Gosford City Council has been losing representatives on advisory committees for some time now. Many community representatives have abandoned their positions on Council committees claiming that their role has been tokenistic and not taken seriously, while others have said that the committees themselves are irrelevant to Council decision-making processes.
Gosford Council has a structure of advisory committees that are supposed to be representative of a wide community interest. These committees, at least in theory, ‘advise’ Council on specific specialist areas and policy issues.
Disenchanted community members of these committees have been leaving in increasing numbers, from such committees as the Waste Recycling Committee and the Tree Protection Committee. Waste Recycling Committee ex-member, Richard Corkish of the Australian Conservation Foundation, left because critical recycling issues were not being referred to the Committee. Tree Protection Committee ex-member, Tim Raymond-Jones, says that the Council has no real commitment to preservation of trees in the city.
The latest in the long line of casualties is Alderman James Adams, who has resigned as Chairman of the Coastal Open Space System Advisory Committee. His resignation came in the wake of the last Council meeting where parcels of land crucial to Gosford’s award winning Open Space System were allowed to be developed.
Alderman Adams says the Council is hopeless. ‘It has failed to recognise how important recreational open space is to the well-being of residents’, he says. ‘This is the first Council to sellout our public open space system at a time it is most needed’.
Alderman Adams has chaired the Coastal Open Space System (COSS) committee since his election to Council two years ago and has lead the push for the completion of the much-celebrated open space plan for the city. He claims that the current Council has clearly indicated its reluctance to continue with the programme to bring more land into public ownership for recreational and conservation purposes. ‘The new Council came into office with one-third of the Open Space lands to be acquired. Now it appears that the COSS will be lost forever due to the pro-development nature of the Aldermen’, he says.
Alderman Adams says that the COSS programme is the most visionary piece of town planning ever devised. ‘It is unique in Australia and has taken over a decade to establish. Now it is being sacrificed by ignorant Aldermen to greedy developers in for a quick buck’.
More from past issues of the Community News in the next issue.
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