Fiscal responsibility, our shire should only rate for the needs to operate a lean efficent council and no more. I think an audit of all council activities should be taken to evaluate the benefit to the community.

Council employees should not be asked or ordered ”not to comment” on any thing, just because they work for the council they do not become second class citizens who can not express their opinions. Council employees should be encouraged to speak out on any matter that concerns them.

Divisions need to be restored to allow residents access to councellors. Divisions make one or two councellors yours with a responsibility to look after your area of the shire. If we do not have divisions councellors will tend by human nature to look after the squeeky wheel and not look after all the areas. Divisions are more important in a bigger shire to break down the work load to something managable.

Water supply to our community is a subject that our shire needs to have discussion and debate about, considering we have been paying high costs for water in the past and present. If the money collected for water was spent on water, we should have a guaranteed supply of water and not be threatened with third world restrictions.

Garbage will be a big challenge for our shire in the near future. We need to real competitive tendering and maybe  we should consider tendering to manage garbage as a council operation.
Dump sites, incineration, recycling and land fill are going to challenge our shire soon. We can deal with these issues in an enviromentally acceptable way at reasonable cost.

Traveston Dam. The council um’s and arh’s about cutting up rural land for developements into housing and yet has done only a token resistance to loss of a significant track of great farming land to a dam of doudtful capacity. The impact of this dam is huge and the people of Gympie will suffer for it as will the people of Maryborough, Hervey Bay and The Great sandy Straits including Frazer Island. I oppose this dam and the distruction that comes with it.

Gympie Bypass, the only logical route for this is through the forrestry area that takes up over 50% of Cooloola Shire. The other proposed routes so far are not really bypasses but through roads. If they were true bypasses they would not need to knock down homes and displace families. The council should be more active to protect the homes, amenity and lifestyles of our residents.

Roads in our shire are not being maintained and developed as they should. Funds are available to do more. These funds are rolled over and are not spent, I believe we should have better roads. We should not have a rollover of road funding, this is mismanagement and should be fixed.

Local Grants and monies given to local groups should be proportionate to the number of residents who would benefit from the grants.