Ed, Local ratepayers, no matter where you live, will need to be completely mad to invite the Clarence Valley Council (CVC) to help themselves to even more of your hard earned money. Survey forms using the heading “Roads to Sustainability” are now arriving in local letterboxes asking ratepayers to support a special rate variation of an 8 percent increase in general rates per year for 5 years. Council utility service charges are separate issues and may also rise but at unspecified levels. There may be a few ratepayers who believe that they should reward the mismanagement and incompetence shown by CVC in recent years or who think that by giving this council more money it will improve their performance. To these ratepayers I’d like to suggest… Who can forget the ongoing fiasco of the cafe lease at the Grafton Regional Gallery? What about this council paying consultants thousands of dollars to report on the management of local swimming pools and then ignoring that report and treating their most competent managers with utter contempt? Remember 3 months of chaos as Council attempted to resurface just 800 metres of Yamba Road in 2014? What about the blunders and the massive cost over-runs of projects such as the Grafton Olympic Pool, the South Grafton Indoor Pool, the Maclean Sports Centre, the council works depot at Maclean, etc etc…..let’s not even talk about the Maclean supermarket…… Now this Council is intending to spend some $27 million of your rates restructuring their Grafton depots….it’s a semi-secret project so you won’t read much about it or see it listed for discussion as part of this special rates increase. Finally, ratepayers in Iluka, Yamba, Angourie, Maclean, Brooms Head, Wooli…..you have been consistently slugged rate increases massively above rate pegging levels since 2008….do you believe that the proposed 8 percent annual increase will not be set substantially above 8 percent for your town? Other ratepayers will be mad…..but you will be stark, raving mad to sit back and just let it happen. Bill Day, Yamba