Dirty water rebate denied

Cr Jones put forward a motion at the ordinary council meeting on Wednesday night saying that if residents could prove they have had problems with discolouration and odour, by submitting a photograph or by providing a description of water quality from three separate occasions over the billing period, they should be entitled to a $10 refund for the next two quarters.

“When you turn on the tap in the morning to brush your teeth and by the evening it’s still brown when you’re running the bath for the kids, how long do we expect our residents to run their water for?

“I think if they can detail it and prove it, I think they deserve $10.”

But the motion was denied, with only Cr Jones and Cr Geoff Frost supporting the idea.

Cr Jones said residents shouldn’t pay for poor quality services.

“This one is for Councillor [Garry] Ware, if I was at your former pub and you had to flush the pipes with dud beer before you got to the good stuff would you expect me to pay for it?”

Councillor Geoff Frost agreed and said it was only a small amount of money.

“This is probably the hottest issue out there in the community at the moment and people that are getting bad water are very angry with us” he said.

“We tell them to turn on their tap and tell them to run their tap until it becomes clear and all the time that they have their tap turned on that [water metre] is going ‘click, click, click click, click’ and at the end of the time we charge them... this is an excellent way to give some of the money back”.

Director of Operations Simon Cassidy said Cr Frost and Cr Jones had their facts wrong.

“Firstly we don’t advise people to flush their tap until the water becomes clear we advise them to flush it for a couple of minutes and then if it doesn’t run clear we say ‘let us know and we’ll come flush the mains’.”

He added that providing $10 was an unreasonably high amount.

“$10 equates to around 3500 litres or about seven and a half hours of running a standard tap,” he explained.

“So the cost of running a tap for two minutes, even if you had to do that every day for two or three weeks which is about the timeframe that we have the issue, is insignificant almost.”

Mayor Rowena Abbey said she thought council should try to be saving not spending.

“One of my concerns is we just spent a whole lot of time talking about how we are going to save $200,000 [for all the other operational services next year] and there’s $30,0000 or 40,000 of it that we are just going to spend.”

Councillor Ann Daniel believed the administrative costs would be “absurd”.

“If you want to make a grand gesture to the people take a dollar off every water bill for the whole of the area but don’t impose this administrative cost on the front of office staff saying ‘bring your water and we will look at it’… I mean come on.”

Only councillor’s Jones and Frost were in favour of the motion and it was lost.