The city council’s Strategic Planning and Policy Committee will be disbanded due to the public nature of its meetings.
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Alderman agreed at Monday’s council meeting that it was difficult for matters to be discussed freely since the SPPC was first opened to the public in 2013.
“Indeed, the public nature of these meetings has caused issues for the council whereby matters are being prematurely released into the public realm before the council and council officers are able to thoroughly work through issues together,” the meeting agenda said.
“Accordingly, it is considered that the current SPPC is not fulfilling its primary purpose of providing a forum for aldermen and senior officers to consider significant long-term policy matters and as such it may be a more appropriate use of time and resources to dissolve the SPPC special committee in favour of council workshops.”
Council workshops are closed to the public and are often held at the conclusion of the committee meetings.
“The opening up of the SPPC meetings to members of the public has caused fewer and fewer matters to be directed to these meetings,” the agenda said.
General manager Michael Stretton said decisions were made only made in public council meetings, and instead the workshops would allow for robust discussions.
“To me what we do need is an opportunity to fully workshop matters which involves aldermen and staff being able to freely bring up points of view that certainly may not be the council’s end positions, but they need to actually explore those,” he said.
“It is hard to have an open conversation and raise points that might not be popular, but you have to for the sake of exploring matters fully, rather than doing it in front of the media and creating issues in the community that aren’t even issues.”
In 2015 the former general manager Robert Dobrzynski told The Examiner the council was “in favour of transparency, which is why we have opened our SPPC meetings to the public …”
Many stories written by journalists at The Examiner have been sourced from information gathered at SPPC meetings.
Some of those from 2017 alone include:
- Interim model for mobile food vans at High Street
- Hart Street and Hobler's Bridge to get flood levee wall
- School starting age changes could mean the closure of half of Launceston's long day care centres
- Australia Day date change debated by City of Launceston
- Petition requests CCTV at multiple locations in Rocherlea
- City of Launceston asked to be proactive on preventative health measures
- Changes proposed to council’s Dog Management Policy
- Tour of Tasmania, seeks $10,000 from City of Launceston