IT WOULD appear Wingecarribee Shire Council has lost the plot.
The number crunchers are paid handsome wages - the GM gets a whopping $250,000 a year.
I'm no mathematician, but it would appear to me that someone on these big sums has failed to do some sums.
The dismissal (and there's really no other word for it) of three senior, experienced and well-liked staff members - Mike Brearley, Barry Paull and Scott Lee - is conservatively going to cost the council (read ratepayers) $400,000 in redundancy payments and recruitment costs.
For what? To replace those three with two acting general managers for what has been stated as a cost-saving measure.
It's obvious Brearley, Paull and Lee are victims of a personality clash or of internal politics. Why else would they be overlooked for these new positions?
It is common practice by employers today that if you want to sack someone you make their position redundant, create a new position and make the incumbent basically apply for their own job.
Then you bypass them.
Back to the $400k. Greg Franklin's sewer pipe predicament would have initially cost about $12,000 to rectify. That's a drop in the bucket of what many would say is a squandered $400,000. Just $12,000 would have been money very well spent in terms of a gesture of goodwill and for some positive publicity for this council.
It's hard to fathom the reasoning behind these negative decisions.
To the outsider, they make no sense. To the outsider, they appear to make no business sense, let alone common sense.
This council has a seriously poor image problem and these latest events have only added to it.
Bring on September and some new councillors - or bring in an administrator.
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