I urge as many resident as possible to come to this meeting which will be chaired by John Turner who is the delegate appointed by the Office of Local Government.

It is imperative to register with the council to attend this meeting and to indicate to the council if you wish to speak at this meeting. If you do not register to attend you will not be allowed to enter. 

Harden and Cootamundra were among a handful of councils who willingly engaged in the amalgamation process, between us we consulted the residents of seven towns and ran a survey involving over 500 residents from both shires. The overwhelming response from the residents was to amalgamate Harden and Cootamundra, but at all costs have nothing to do with Young.

Gundagai was approached by Harden and Cootamundra councils to see if they were interested in amalgamating with the two shires. They were not interested and elected to stand alone, which they were entitled to do.

Cootamundra and Harden worked hard to meet the criteria required for this amalgamation, including the fairly unrealistic timeline, set by the already ill-functioning NSW government, who continued to move the goal posts throughout the entire amalgamation.

So here are two councils, who were compliant and who followed the government’s guidelines to the letter. Neither of us were given any indication that we were off track and we were certainly not expecting anything but acceptance of our proposal.

Through no fault of our own we now face the prospect of amalgamating with an unwilling Gundagai Shire. We will ensure we do everything possible to make the current proposal of the Gundagai and Cootamundra amalgamation be as effective as possible.

We are a very proactive council as we have clearly demonstrated in our former submissions. The tyranny of distance will make the amalgamation much more difficult than it was ever going to be had we been allowed to amalgamate with Harden. We are of course continuing to try our best to have Harden included in any amalgamation with Cootamundra.

The spineless politicians who made these decisions were so fast to leave their armchairs in Macquarie Street for an undeserved Christmas break, none could be contacted. So they didn't even have the strength of their own convictions to stay and face the music. Gutless and duplicitous, why are their proposals better than ours? Who are they representing? 

Did Katrina Hodgkinson, for example, attend any of the consultative meetings held within our communities? No, certainly not. Who does Katrina represent? certainly not Cootamundra or Harden constituents.  

Did any of the politicians communicate with any of us? No.

How extraordinary is it, that these totally disengaged, self-opinionated, self-indulgent politicians have made decisions that have totally ignored the wishes of people that they have been elected to represent. 

It is important for our communities to recognise where mistakes have been made and  more importantly who made them. The councillors of both communities could not have tried harder to meet the wishes of their residents. We did what were were elected to do, and that was to represent the people who put us there. What a shame the same cannot be said about our self-serving state politicians, who in the end betrayed and ignored us.

Rosalind Wight, Cootamundra