August 23, 2012
Toowoomba Mayor Paul Antonio has warned residents pushing to form breakaway shires that their efforts will have little chance of success.
“It’s been set up to fail,” he said today.
Cr Antonio told southburnett.com.au he had been bitterly opposed to amalgamation at the time and had been quite happy to make his voice heard.
“Peter Beattie put a wrecking ball through local government,” he said.
However there was a different financial model now and the old structures would no longer work.
Cr Antonio said he had made sure that the group in Crows Nest working on a de-amalgamation plan had all the information they needed – and he was not going to discourage them from going through with the process – but he emphasised it was going to be “terribly, terribly difficult” to meet the requirements set by Local Government Minister David Crisafulli.
He also believed Mr Crisafulli would not put much weight on the fact that Crows Nest and Rosalie shires were very close to amalgamating under the the former Size, Shape and Sustainability process.
Cr Antonio said the fact was at the time of the forced amalgamations, Toowoomba was “bursting at the seams” and spilling into adjoining shires at its extremities.
There were urban areas which shared a community of interest with Toowoomba in the adjoining shires, but there were also larger areas further out that didn’t.
He said a larger urban shire and one or two rural shires would have worked, but this hadn’t been taken into consideration at the time.
Another public meeting to discuss the Crows Nest / Rosalie proposal is being held this evening (August 23) from 7:30pm at the Mary MacKillop School at Highfields.
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