Ed, It was with great pleasure, and several cups of coffee, that I note the Council’s General Manager’s claims, with regard to the ‘Clarence Valley Independent’s’ reporting of the requests, and the petition asking for details of where council spend over half a million dollars of our money each year on their advertising (CVI 20/4/16). To quote Mr Greensill: “Council has done nothing to keep this information from the public. Any member of the community, including the Clarence Valley Independent, can obtain information on where Council’s advertising is spent”. If all that is required is the payment to Council of $30 and if, in exchange, Mr Greensill publicly guarantees to provide the dollar amounts of where Councils advertising money is spent (including the amounts given to the Daily Examiner and 2GF); I will be in his office tomorrow morning with the cash in hand. While ‘letters to the editor’ are not usually the way a Council’s GM conducts business, now that Mr Greensill has opened up this public dialogue I am looking forward to his early reply. In conclusion, I would like to express my thanks for the accurate and reliable reporting found on the pages of our locally owned newspaper and, as the person responsible for the ‘last electronic petition this council will accept’, I can assure you that the response from Council was definitely a refusal to provide the information requested by the people who had signed the petition. It was also a little disappointing that neither Council nor the GM appear to have had the manners to write to the person who organised the petition, and hand delivered it to their Grafton office, with any news of their decision to refuse to provide the information requested about where this public money was spent. John Hagger, The Clarence Forum