October 10th, 2025Just sayin’…

Lots of things happening around our shire this edition.
First up, some people were not happy with Hepburn Shire Council CEO Bradley Thomas having his say in the last edition.
Basically Mr Thomas said that council staff were being given a hard time by ratepayers and the harassment needed to stop.
Now some people wrote on social media that he had gone whining to his mates at The Local for the “puff piece”.
Just not true. I had been watching Facebook posts and was pretty horrified at some of them so asked if someone at council wanted to address them. So not initiated by Mr Thomas and I don’t think a puff piece. Although I am open to bribes for good news. Jokes. Maybe.
Also, are we friends with the council? I think we have a professional relationship but we don’t hang out together. And I reckon we’ve done a few columns that the council has read and thought were not that nice. All’s fair and all that.
Anyway, two people in the planning game had their say in this edition and I get where they are coming from. When your life is about getting planning applications happening for clients, and they are not happening, life is not great.
Absolutely keep it polite but when your clients are threatening to sue you because they are not happening, then life is getting pretty bad. We had one planning issue – a simple subdivision – that took three years and I was close to exploding any time we could get anyone on the phone. So times that by 100 and you get the picture.
But if you read the story, things may be looking up. Perhaps.
Another council story which I noticed in the minutes from the last meeting was that unintended traffic impacts since the opening of the Djuwang Baring all-abilities 60-kilometre mountain bike trail network in Creswick, will see Hepburn Shire Council spend at least another $300,000 on the almost $9 million project.
Is it just me, or would you think that part of the project’s early days would have included a traffic management plan. Did no-one think: “World class bike track – more traffic, dust from unmade roads, parking congestion.”
It’s so Utopia. And I love that the report’s conclusion is that “while Djuwang Baring presented a fantastic opportunity for regional tourism, local business and supporting participation and active recreation, council acknowledges that it is essential to balance patronage with residential amenity and safety”. I don’t even know if it is a balance, surely amenity and safety come first? Followed by patronage. And maybe at the start of all that a decent traffic assessment? Sigh.
Then there was a little media release sent out from the state education department. I think it was them. Maybe it was Mary-Anne Thomas’s people. Hard to keep up.
If you read the Just Briefly section, you will have seen that Daylesford Primary School is one of 30 schools to share in over $16 million to undertake 31 maintenance projects between them.
That’s great news and then you read the school was allocated $545,783 to rebuild five ramps across the school. That’s $109,156 per ramp. Now I don’t know what sort of ramps these are – I imagine for mobility – but it seems a lot. I guess it’s right.
When we had old dogs we built a ramp to the deck. Two bits of wood for sides and two bits for the ramp. Just one dog wide. And that is where we came undone. We imagined the dogs would look before they ramped, and if one dog was already on the ramp, they would wait. Yes, we are quite stupid. Just sayin’…