Meander Valley - Northern Midlands merger off the cards, but no frosty relations

After drawing a line in the sand over forced amalgamations resulting from the Future Local Government Review, Meander Valley Council mayor Wayne Johnston said a shared services model would be far more beneficial.

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Cr Johnston said "there's nothing wrong with reviews" as they could drive progress however amalgamation would be the wrong course of action.

"We had hoped that there would be some positives come out of it," he said.

"We hoped that there would have been something that we could take to our community and say 'okay, this is a good thing,'.

"We didn't get any."

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Meander Valley councillors recently endorsed a submission to the Local Government Board which rejects all potential merger scenarios put forward.

This cites potential negative economic impacts on small communities a lack of information about the benefits of amalagamations.

The results of a survey were included in the submission which showed most of the 333 respondents were firmly against mergers in any circumstance.

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About 71 per cent of those surveyed were against forced amalgamations compared to 19.5 per cent in favour, while about 48 per cent were against voluntary amalgamations but 38 per cent were supportive of the idea.

The submission supports the investigation into how more services could be shared between councils.

Cr Johnston said existing agreements between the Meander Valley and Northern Midlands councils showed agreater sharing of resources, infrastructure and protocols - but not centralisation - was a better option.

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"From our point of view, it would be really good if the state government could put out some templates or some guides for local governments," he said.

"These can be related to IT systems, procurement, accounting, or other services local governments provide that we could use.

"These could be replicated in other local government areas and make everything far more streamlined and efficient across the sector.

"If they can work efficiently for councils and why wouldn't we do that? Why would we try to be isolated and do everything ourselves?"

Cr Johnston said creating these frameworks was the responsibility of the state government, not local councils.

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