A WARWICK resident has written a letter to the Daily News outlining a lack of transparency by the Southern Downs Regional Council.

Subject: Freestone Meeting

Letter to Editor:

The Editor,

We attended the meeting at Freestone Hall on Thursday. There were a few points I would like to remark on.

First, it was one of the only public meetings we have attended in some time in which the Traditional Owners of the land were not acknowledged, although practically everyone else got a mention.

Communication, or the lack of it, seems to be the major problem leading to the need for such a meeting.

Regarding the Saleyards issue, keeping the Council meetings behind closed doors has proven to provide lots of ammunition for the conspiracy theorists amongst us. Since there was (as claimed at the meeting) no intention of selling the Saleyards, why the Secret Squirrel stuff?

The exercise was, apparently, all about finding out possible alternative methods of running the saleyards. Wouldn't a better approach have been to send a representative to look at the systems in place at other selling centres around the South East?

To me, and, I'm sure many others, issuing an "Expression of Interest" is the prelude to a sale or lease of an asset, not a query for information on possible management options.

As for the Pest Management debacle, why was it a ratepayer who had to point out the actual wording of the Act, that gave respondents some legal relief from the threat of financial penalty? The people who receive a (quite substantial) wage from the ratepayers to oversee this piece of legal bushranging should be the ones to have read and understood the Act. It left Mayor Dobie in the unenviable position of having to offer to the meeting a stay on those proceedings until the end of the year to allow Council to discuss things.

Since communication seems to be the major issue, may I suggest that Council makes better use of the three or four free weekly newspapers/magazines that circulate in the area to explain some of these issues in some depth, to prevent the ongoing conjecture that seems rife as a result of misinformation.

D. Hansford