The Central Coast has a new Mayor. The agenda that elected him also says the Deputy’s fee comes out of his

What happened

Council’s own announcement, published on 30 September, is brief and clear: it has elected Councillor John McNamara as the new Mayor of the Central Coast at the Extraordinary Council Meeting held on 29 September 2026, with Councillor Rachel Stanton elected as Deputy Mayor.

Mayor McNamara said he was honoured and excited to have been entrusted with the role of Mayor of the Central Coast by my fellow councillors, and named his focus as working collaboratively with my fellow councillors, Council staff and our community to deliver the services, infrastructure and advocacy that matter most to our residents. Council’s accompanying biography says he was a Councillor and Deputy Mayor of the former Wyong Council from 2008 to 2012, came to the role from a career in global telecommunications, and will prioritise road repairs, debt management and infrastructure development.

He thanked the outgoing Mayor, Councillor Lawrie McKinna, for his leadership and service as Mayor over the past two years, and the outgoing Deputy Mayor, Councillor John Mouland, for twelve months in that role.

It was a required election, not a contest anyone called

The framing matters, because a mayoral change outside an ordinary election reads like instability if you do not know the rule. The agenda states it plainly. Under section 290(1)(b) of the Local Government Act 1993, councils that elect their Mayor from among the councillors are required to hold a mid-term mayoral election in September 2026, and the agenda cites Office of Local Government Circular 26-15 as the advice to that effect.

So this happened on a timetable set in Sydney, at every NSW council that elects its own mayor, in the same month. The Central Coast is not an exception to anything here.

Two years for the Mayor, one for the Deputy

A Mayor elected by councillors holds office for 2 years under section 230 of the Act, and the agenda records that the office commences on the day the person elected to the office is declared to be elected. So Mayor McNamara’s term runs to the next mid-term election in September 2028, unless a casual vacancy intervenes.

The Deputy Mayor is a different arrangement, and the difference is a council choice rather than a rule. Section 231 lets councillors elect a Deputy for the mayoral term or a shorter term, and the recommendation put to this meeting was to elect one for a one-year term commencing on the date of election and ending immediately prior to the September 2027 Deputy Mayor election. On that basis the Central Coast will run a deputy mayoral election again in twelve months, and a mayoral one in twenty-four.

The money, which is in the agenda and not in the announcement

The same agenda item records what the job pays. At its Ordinary meeting of 26 May 2026, after considering the Local Government Remuneration Tribunal’s 2026 determination, Council fixed the Mayor’s annual fee at $118,530. It also resolved that an annual fee of $10,000 be paid to the Deputy Mayor (if there is one), with that fee to be deducted from the annual fee payable to the Mayor.

Read that twice, because it is the part worth knowing. Having a Deputy Mayor does not cost the Central Coast ratepayer anything extra. The $10,000 comes out of the mayoral fee, so the Mayor receives $108,530 while a Deputy is in place, and the combined cost of the two offices is the same $118,530 either way. The agenda adds that the mayoral remuneration is provided for within Council’s current adopted budget.

Those figures are the fees for the offices, on top of the ordinary councillor fee that every councillor receives. The Remuneration Tribunal sets the range each year and each council fixes its own figure within it.

How the vote itself works, and what we cannot yet tell you

This is the part most people have never seen, and it is set out in Schedule 7 of the Local Government (General) Regulation 2021. The returning officer is the Chief Executive Officer or a nominee, which for this meeting was the Acting Chief Executive Officer. A councillor must be nominated in writing by two or more councillors, one of whom may be the nominee, and the nomination is invalid unless the nominee consents in writing.

Then the key clause: if only one councillor is nominated, that councillor is elected as Mayor. Where more than one is nominated, the council itself decides on the day whether to vote by open show of hands, by ordinary secret ballot, or by preferential secret ballot. The agenda leaves that choice blank for councillors to fill in, listing all three options as the recommendation.

Which of those happened on Tuesday, we cannot yet tell you. The minutes of the 29 September meeting are not on the council’s business papers portal at the time of writing, and the announcement does not say whether either office was contested or how any vote was taken. Those are exactly the facts the minutes carry. We will read them when they appear and say here what they show.

What changes for a resident

Directly, very little this week. The Mayor chairs council meetings, is the council’s public spokesperson and carries the civic role, and a change of mayor does not alter any decision council has already made or any budget it has adopted. What it does change is who sets the tone of advocacy, and Mayor McNamara has named his own priorities as roads, debt and infrastructure, which is a measurable list rather than a vague one. It is a reasonable thing to hold a mayoralty to over two years, and we intend to.

The immediate practical note: council correspondence, meeting chairing and mayoral minutes now come from Mayor McNamara, and the council’s own pages naming the previous Mayor will take a little while to catch up. Our own record page for the council has been updated today.