At their council meeting on April 30, the councillors resolved to adopt all 13 recommendations of a confidential report entitled ‘Time for Change’.

The report acknowledged that “council was a business and a significant employer in the shire and needed to operate efficiently with the right plant, equipment and motivated qualified personnel to deliver a cost effective service with a decrease in external funding”.

It said the recommended staff restructure, which included eight redundancies, was the result of the cessation of State Government natural disaster funding and also the reduction of Federal Assistance Grants (FAG). 

It said the goal of the change was to improve the council’s operations and financial position by reducing staff levels and altering how work was done.

It recommended against major change which was disruptive and recommended instead incremental change, broken down into four parts, which posed less of a risk to the process.

Under the award, redundancies require 28 days of negotiation and consultation.

Assistant general manager, Engineering, Paul Gallagher, said many staff who were to lose their jobs had already accepted redundancy provisions and taken early departure from council.