Kind tourist
Thank you to the tourist who handed in my wallet. I lost my wallet in Palmer Street car park the other evening. Fifteen minutes later the police rang me to say a tourist had handed it into the Police station. It is great to know we have honest people in this world.
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Ron Douglas, Merimbula
Thank you
I wish to thank your newspaper for its continued support of the Bega Valley Parkinson Support Group.
Your reporting of our monthly meetings keeps the work done by the group open to the public domain. Many new members become aware of the group from your newspaper.
Bob McDonald, president
Irresponsible people
What do you do when you feel like a party on the beach? Some people do the responsible thing and leave it as they find it, but not the group who left this mess. Hot coals, broken beer bottles and fish bones. Leave it to the locals they probably drunkenly thought!! Take responsibility for yourselves and respect the environment and the people who use this beach.
Colin Dunn, Pambula Beach
Council top heavy?
Five Directors on $190,000 total remuneration packages, plus General Manager on a lot more than that. Six-person executive team salary bill over $1.3m a year for Bega Shire, with just 35,000 population. Are we topheavy?
Jon Gaul, Tura Beach
Airport expansion
In September, 2016, the Bega Valley Shire Residents & Ratepayers Association (BVSRRA) made a formal submission to Bega Valley Shire Council (BVSC), detailing its concerns that council had not assessed the social, environmental and fiscal implications of its $7m plan to expand Merimbula Airport.
While the association has yet to receive a response from council to its submission, it has now received a separate advice from council’s general manager bluntly confirming: “There will be no community consultation on these broader areas”.
But council had managed to find the time to engage with the shire’s business community and successfully solicit formal letters of support for its plan from 18 organisations.
While council insists that it is not ‘expanding’ the airport, its project involves a 200m extension of the runway, expansion of the terminal, freight handling and baggage security capabilities and is intended to facilitate access for larger aircraft as part of a plan that envisages nearly 600,000 tourists flying into the airport annually via Canberra, Melbourne and Sydney: a 12 fold increase in current annual passenger movements.
The Association believes that even with the use of larger aircraft, the forecast passenger volumes are such that there will likely be a six-fold increase in aircraft movements in and out of the airport: an issue for those living anywhere near the flight paths.
In the circumstances, the Association believes that Council’s pretense that the airport is not being expanded is laughable.
The Association believes that Council’s failure to take steps to identify the social, environmental and fiscal implications of its project and share these with the community before committing to the project is completely irresponsible. We cannot accept that just because the majority of the proposed expansion works are to be funded by the state and federal governments that it eliminates or diminishes the need to carry out due diligence in assessing the big picture implications.
We were hopeful that our newly-elected Council would recognise the importance of properly assessing the issues we have raised. Unfortunately it would appear that such is not the case.
