Councillors’ performance tonight in unanimously accepting the East Virginia structure plan signals how little these individuals are willing to stand up for residents and for common sense.

Magee’s grandstanding has become habitual plus lacking all logic when he can begin his statements with –‘I will be speaking against the motion but voting for it’!!!!

Hyams continues with the old arguments that this is only the first step in the process blah, blah, blah and then spending 9 minutes on regurgitating what the documents contain but in a totally uncritical way.

The only ‘news’ that came out of Hyams’ mouth was the naming of the individuals involved in the Community Reference Group – for the very first time. How on earth a COMMUNITY REFERENCE GROUP can function without anyone knowing who they are is beyond belief. If their role was to represent the community, then it is incumbent upon council to ensure that the wider community knows who these individuals are so that they may be contacted and ideas exchanged. But that is not the way this council functions. No agendas or minutes of these meetings have ever been published. We don’t even know how many meetings occurred. As for the individuals named what is their background? How many are associated with the development industry? How many were tapped on the shoulder and asked to apply? We note, and with no intent to cast aspersions on these individuals, that the vast majority have never asked a public question, have probably never attended a council meeting and certainly are not active on social media. Thus on what basis was this community reference group selected? For all the talk about transparency and accountability the way these Community Reference Groups have been set up and function is anything but transparent and accountable. The $64 question of course remains – how many suggestions made by OUR community reference group saw its way into this final structure plan? We would hazard a guess that very little produced the desired outcomes.

As a further example of council’s failure to address the gaping holes in this structure plan we present one speaker’s question (and statements) to council from this meeting. It is significant we believe that she received not a single word from anyone in response to her comments! So much for ‘public participation’. The only saving grace of tonight’s meeting was that it only lasted about an hour!!!!!!!