Mushrooms or chumps?

In August 2015 our former shire CEO was given a spent conviction, the legal equivalent of a slap on the wrist. James Trail had been a naughty boy and accepted a few treats from supplier in return for signing contracts that had not been approved by our elected councillors.

Reporting on Nigeria this would described as bribery of a public official, in Western Australia this was such a routine, mundane and trivial matter that the on-line ABC news feed made no mention of it at all.

A few weeks later the shire president Cr Smart was quoted as saying that former shire CEO James Trail "treated us like mushrooms" what could he possibly have meant by that?

For Smart the comment was a probably nothing more than a damage limitation exercise. With local elections due in October he doesn't want the electors to think him a complete chump for not noticing what was going on right under his nose while he was a councilor.

But do we think better of man who admits he just swallowed up the bullshit that Trail shoveled at him?

Smart is between a rock and a hard place with this one.

Admitting that he could read the accounts and see what Trail was doing leaves us with the question – “Why did he collude?”

A fool or a knave?

Back in 2008, after Trail had tendered his resignation, while the man was still serving out his notice period here in this shire our councillors, including the current shire president Smart, and election hopeful Middleton, employed the services of the Anne Lake Consultancy to undertake a performance review. We don't know what they paid her back then but in 2013 Evershed stated that such a review by Lake would cost in the region of $5,000.

Value for money? What did we gain from such a review?

How many private companies would pay for such a service at such a time, for a departing executive? Just how did she assess his performance and was it her appraisal that provided a character reference to Kalamunda Shire Council?

When our new shire CEO, Gary Evershed, arrived in Margaret River we, the ratepayers, then paid him to undertake what he called a "due diligence". Sadly his diligent scrutiny found nothing wrong at all.

Evershed diligently overlooked that the total cost of CAMMS products and licensing costs to this shire for the period immediately before Trail left was $230,947, and our councillors had only authorised $60,000.

Evershed also overlooked the disappearance of a major planning project, the Karridale Concept Plan. This project was very clearly mentioned in Trail's Annual Report 2006-07, and had been the subject of a shire press release in May 2007, but by the time Evershed authored the Annual Report for 2007-08 the Karridale Concept Plan had been mysteriously dropped.

Did anyone question why Trail did not author the Annual Report before his departure in July 2008? Although a final version might not have completed it would seem more reasonable for the major input to come from Trail.

It would be foolish to think Evershed just didn't notice anything was wrong at Margaret River, after all he did volunteer the fact that he was going to undertake a "due diligence". Explaining this he was quoted as saying he had no reason to think there would be any problems but he needed the reassurance that a "due diligence" would offer;

“I will be doing my own due diligence as an incoming CEO to double check that good compliance processes are in place across a range of governance and financial management areas.”

The commons needed reassurance that compliance processes were in place across a range of governance and financial management areas too. We would have liked him to look at compliance relating to community consultation, procurement contracts, and land development too. Now we are left wondering if Evershed just counted the coffee money and checked that nobody had been given a free tip-pass. (meanwhile we might ask what scrutiny the professional accountant Middleton was applying to the job - was he too a willing mushroom?)

Can we consider the possibility that Evershed sees no issue with a "Council proposes – CEO disposes" manner of working? It's certainly possible. There is evidence that in WA local government the authority of the CEO overrides the deliberations of the elected Council and once this culture is accepted the authorisation by Council becomes more rubber stamp than a very necessary control.

But others in the community had noticed that in his official capacity as our CEO James Trail lied, and that he was supported in the lies he told by others holding public office, namely certain councillors.

On the 1^st April 2008 the Leader of the Greens, Giz Watson, a very determined lady tabled a petition in Parliament that had been initiated by a local resident, Rick Ensley. This was not an April Fool’s Day joke, but it may as well have been. It achieved nothing because the parliament ended before it could be seen by a committee.

When a new parliament was formed under the leadership of Colin Barnett a second attempt to table the petition was made on 12^th November 2008, just around the time that Evershed, who took office in October 2008, was undertaking his “due diligence”. On this occasion the petition actually succeeded in gaining the attention of the Standing Committee on Environment and Public Affairs.

Jamie McCall, former shire president, gave evidence on Friday 13^th February 2009;

“... that Mr Trail lied to the community ... engaging in misleading and deceptive conduct. ... failed in his duty to the community."

McCall wasn’t pulling any punches and fearing more revelations Sheila Mills, the Chair of the Standing Committee on Environment and Public Affairs, decided to take a great deal of McCall’s evidence in secret. What remains in the public domain is sufficient to confirm many of the matters bothering my community of Karridale had also been seriously troubling others in Margaret River. Others who were significantly more knowledgeable and well informed than the majority of rural residents in the Leeuwin Ward.

McCall presented some hard facts that we can now all read and assess for ourselves, and he obviously felt he had enough material evidence to warrant requesting a decent explanation of why our local government was behaving as it was.

His comments on the population figures used to justify developments would be a comfort to all those who felt that democracy and due process had been sidelined. His words suggested we were not necessarily hysterical conspiracy theorists, neither were we uneducated rustics with no ability to understand the complexities of population estimates. More importantly this was an accusation that portrayed Trail as a man who was prepared to lie.

McCall was certainly not a mushroom, nor was he a chump.

tbc