CORANGMITE chief executive officer Andrew Mason is backing a call to replace the three councillors representing the shire’s central ward with a single councillor.
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In his report to tonight’s council meeting on the recommendations of the Local Government Electoral Review, Mr Mason said the review raised concerns about councils with a mixture of single-member and multi-member wards.
He said the review was concerned that candidates in a multi-member ward did not face the same quota requirements to get elected as those standing for single-member wards
Mr Mason’s recommendation that the council adopt the review’s call is likely to provoke vigourous debate at tonight’s council meeting.
Abolishing multi-member representation in the central ward could lead to an increase in the number of wards.
Mr Mason said if the council did accept the review’s call, the options might include seven single-member wards.
If the council accepted another review recommendation to increase the number of councillors to nine, a further option might be to have three three-member wards, Mr Mason said.
However, he said he did not agree with that recommendation.
Mr Mason said there had been little community pressure to increase the number of councillors and to do so would impose more cost on the council.
However, he did back another recommendation by the review to shift to the optional preferential voting system that would give voters the options of making only a first preference or indicating more than one preference if they wished.
Optional preferential voting would reduce the number of informal votes and dummy candidates, Mr Mason said.
In other issues to be discussed at tonight’s meeting, the council will vote on a recommendation to ask state Planning Minister Matthew Guy to to rezone eight parcels of land to industrial 1 and one site to industrial 3 as part of the council’s industrial land strategy.
An independent planning panel last month recommended that 50 Graylands Road be included in Cobden Site 2 and rezoned to industrial 1 at the request of the landowner.
Other sites to be rezoned industrial 1 include the Camperdown saleyards site; the corner of Cobden-Terang Road and Graylands Street Cobden; N. Graylands Road, Cobden; Princes Highway, Cobden; and Lavers Hill-Cobden Road, Simpson.