A report to the 6 October Environment and Planning Committee puts Council’s
section 7.11 and 7.12 balances at $230.49 million at 30 June 2026, excluding internal borrowings. In
2025-26 it spent $6.21 million from them and earned $9.39 million in interest, and the report calls
significant unspent balances a financial and governance risk. A draft section 7.12 plan aims to lift
annual spending.
Council’s draft Natural Disaster Resilience Strategy is on public
exhibition until Tuesday 20 October, with ten priorities and fifty numbered actions. The
exposure case it builds is demographic as much as geographic: 22 per cent of the local
government area aged 65 or older, 28 per cent of them living alone, 11,142 active NDIS
plans. Three pop-up sessions remain.
A notice of motion to the 22 September meeting asks NSW agencies to
investigate PFAS in fish and yabbies in Ourimbah Creek, seeks sediment cores in Mardi Dam, and
asks whether residents who pump untreated creek water should stop during and after floods.
Officers say detections trace to a licensed site, fall away downstream and are below detection
at the extraction point, and that NSW Health advice is that treated water remains safe. The
minutes are not published, so the outcome is not yet known.
Cr John McNamara was elected Mayor on 29 September 2026 and Cr Rachel
Stanton Deputy. It was a mid-term election the Local Government Act requires of every NSW
council that elects its own mayor, so it happened everywhere this month. Two years for the
Mayor, one for the Deputy, a $118,530 mayoral fee, and the Deputy’s $10,000 deducted
from it.
83 complaints to the Office of Local Government in 2024-25, up from 48,
and the first rise since the 256 recorded in the year the councillors were suspended.
Complaints rose right across NSW too. What the Central Coast’s are about does not look
like anywhere else.
The 3.2 per cent peg is set by IPART, not the council, and it caps the
council’s total general income rather than your notice. IPART says so itself, and it
says the peg does not touch stormwater, waste, water or wastewater at all. The three
legitimate ways your bill outruns it.
The adopted plan names the line item, gives it a dedicated section and
lists the twelve projects whose money now sits in it, from a Charmhaven sewage plant to two
Gosford road upgrades. The plan’s own funding split matches those twelve almost to the
dollar.
The agenda published Friday runs to 41 substantive items. Section 3
carries two motions to undo decisions the council made four weeks ago, one of them the
Gosford Coming Alive 2040 endorsement.
The new Bateau Bay stairs cost about $650,000, with $245,000 from the
state’s Crown Reserves Improvement Fund. Three rounds of that fund’s
approved-project records, downloaded and totalled: $2,017,745 into the Central Coast LGA
since 2023-24, two of the eight grants to the council, and four to one reserve at Tuggerah.
Five compliance priorities a year for three years, from unhealthy land
and Gosford CBD parking now to illegal dumping in 2028-29, plus the distinction that decides
what the list actually means. Submissions closed on Friday 21 August.
A deliberative panel and 189 survey respondents produced near-identical
rankings, splitting only on whether affordability or reliability belongs second for water. On
sewer they agreed completely. The engagement feeds Council’s IPART submissions.
David Farmer retires on 2 September, and an extraordinary council
meeting this Tuesday 28 July will appoint an internal acting chief executive and begin
recruiting a permanent one. What the transition means for a council mid-way through
re-tooling itself to deliver major projects.
The one document that decides what gets dug up, repaved and
built across the Coast this year, place by place: $40.2 million at the Charmhaven
sewage plant, $8.65 million for the Woy Woy intersection, an oval bought in
Kincumber, and $38 million of added local priorities.
