General News
22 February, 2025
Contractor request irks councillor
A REPORT to Tablelands Regional Council has raised the eyebrows of Cr Kevin Cardew who has questioned why the full council would need to give its approval to source an electrician and a scaffolder for a job being done by the organisation.
The report asked for council’s approval to source the two tradespeople to undertake the replacement of the roof for the Lakeside public amenities which was one of two jobs that council will now do inhouse after Cr Cardew objected to using contractors which would have cost $364,000.
When the report seeking to use two tradespeople on the Lakeside job came to council’s January meeting, Cr Cardew was taken aback and questioned why it had been allowed to come forward to the full council.
“I can’t express strongly enough my disappointment in this report,” he said.
“I cannot understand why a report needs to come back to council asking for permission to get an electrician to disconnect power to a project that we are doing in-house – it’s a given.
“If you need a specialised trade (person) to do a project that we’ve approved, then you just engage the electrician to disconnect the power or someone to put up the scaffolding.
“I just can’t understand why this report is coming back to us asking for permission – do we do this when we’ve got to change a light bulb in the building and we’ve got to get an electrician to turn the power off?”
Mayor Rod Marti defended officers, saying that the report had been triggered because council had made it clear at the December meeting it did not want the project going to external contractors.
“Because we haven’t got those resources or capacity so council officers have done the right thing, they’ve come back and said ‘look, we still need to get some contractors’ and they’re seeking our approval because they didn’t want to contravene the previous motion,” Mayor Marti said.
“You can disagree with it or don’t like it but you can’t say it’s wrong. Council officers have done the right thing.”
“So Mr Mayor, if that’s the case, then all the projects that we approve in our budget that have an electrical component to it, do we have to have a report come back to council asking if we can turn the power off?” Cr Cardew retorted.
Infrastructure Services Mark Vis said the report was necessary given the specific instruction officers had been given by council at the last meeting.
“With all those other projects, we don’t get a specific instruction from council to use internal resources only to deliver those – this is a specific situation because we have got a very specific resolution from council that limits our capability to use external resources to deliver the project, that’s the difference,” he said.
