Why you should go to local council meetings

A town hall odyssey

I spent over six hours watching Ballarat’s nine councillors plan the city’s future on Wednesday night.

It wasn’t pretty.

The project at hand — a redevelopment of a 60-year-old hall in the centre of town — would reshape the whole Ballarat CBD.

The squabbling between the council watchers, councillors and council officers started early.

There was booing, hissing and muttered accusations of dirty deals.

Throughout this, you could see councillors considering where a yes vote would land them and whether it would hurt their electoral chances in October.

Just before 1am we got a decision — the project would go ahead.

Six votes to three. One councillor changed his mind during the marathon talks (yes I couldn’t run a marathon in six hours either but whatever) and one more looked on the verge of it.

It was this process of passionate pleas, exhortations to see reason or to reveal the true reason council had pushed for the project that slowly (very slowly) brought us to the vote.

The planning docs were an amateur-looking hodge-podge of previous design and submitters were right to lambast the short time it was available to the public.

But this was where the big decision was made.

By the time it went to vote just before 1am, there were 10 people left watching.

The cliché (from de Tocqueville or Sorkin, same thing really) about decisions being made by those who show up applies annoyingly so here.

While it was a garbage process that saw a major decision on Ballarat’s future made at the witching hour on a Wednesday night the beauty of it was that people got to throw their all at councillors right before they made the call.

My tweets from the night show a kind of descent into madness but the exclamation marks were all genuine when a decision was looming.

There was some help from outside, from those who had seen this process before.

Anyway, point is local government sucks sometimes but they make big decisions and are real people, so care what the public thinks and care what you think. Go along.