Port Hedland council meeting blows out to over four and a half hours

The troubled Port Hedland Council has once again seen its meeting blow out to more than four and a half hours in length despite State Government intervention to shorten the meetings earlier this year. The August ordinary council meeting was called open at 5.30pm and was not called closed until 10.04pm, some four hours and 34 minutes later. Public questions and statement time itself took more than an hour to complete with councillors’ lack of knowledge around meeting procedures causing continuous delays throughout the evening. Councillor Camillo Blanco descented to most of the council motions and debated nearly every item on the agenda, stretching the length of the meeting. Pro-Putin councillor Adrian McRae also debated many of the motions at one time bringing a forward an amendment to remove a required $100,000 contribution from a developer to public artworks. While debating another item, Cr Adrian McRae said residents and council officers had expressed to him that council was “dysfunctional” because meetings went on for too long. He pushed back on their concerns and said meetings should be even longer. “We meet once a month, in my mind we should be going much longer,” he said. “The longer it goes the more I learn.” Councillor Ambika Rebello pushed back on assertions made by Cr McRae and said he had failed to attend council training sessions repeatedly. “We do not just meet once a month. We meet a minimum of two times a week. There are several hours that we have put in so to say that we do meet enough is not right,” she said. It came as the council considered implementing an improvement plan in response to concerns from the Department of Local Government, Sport and Cultural Industries. In March, a letter from the DLGSC outlining concerns over the proper functioning and cooperation of council cited “excessive duration of council meetings” as one of the main areas of dysfunction.