WAKOOL Shire Mayor Neil Gorey has revealed he submitted a complaint last year to the Office of Local Government (OLG) regarding concerns he’d had with council processes.
Trying to distance the council from its disgraced proposed merger partner, Murray Shire, Cr Gorey said Wakool Shire has made itself “functional” again after a tumultuous period last year when the mayor made the complaint.
Cr Gorey said he appealed to the OLG last August to assist it with an internal review into untoward “administrative processes” within the council. He claimed the council has had to go it alone with the investigation since then after the Office didn’t respond.
“As the mayor of Wakool Shire, I had become increasingly aware of concerns within the community regarding some operational aspects within our organisation and I responded to those concerns,” he said.
“With those concerns I contacted the Office of Local Government seeking their assistance, and they assured me they’d get back to me by November last year.
“It hasn’t even been started and they have no intention of conducting this investigation. Their intention is for Murray and Wakool Shire to merge, so Wakool Shire will cease to exist and there’ll be no need to conduct this investigation.”
An OLG spokesperson said it was not the Office’s normal practice to confirm or deny whether it was dealing with specific complaints about a local council or council officials.
“However, given that Cr Gorey has identified that he made a complaint to the Office of Local Government, the Office can confirm the receipt of his complaint and advise that it has made extensive enquiries into the matters raised by Cr Gorey. Those enquiries are not as yet concluded,” the spokesperson said.
The spokesperson denied that the merger proposal process influenced the Office’s response to the complaint, or that the complaint shaped the merger decision.
“There are not specific timeframes for managing complaints as this varies depending on the complexity of the matters raised with the Office of Local Government,” he said.
“All merger proposals have been informed by four years of consultation with NSW councils, independent assessment, council merger preferences, and feedback from communities and stakeholders,” he said.
