Monday night's community forum on the proposal to demerge Cootamundra-Gundagai Regional Council was urged to write to the Boundaries Commission to make Cootamundra's opinions crystal clear.
The forum, attended by 70 people at the Stephen Ward rooms, was addressed by local government expert Professor Joseph Drew.
Professor Drew outlined a detailed study showing that the council would be $2.4 million better off in ten years, at the very least, if it were to deamalgamate.
He said the Boundaries Commission would soon open for submissions from residents and citizens, when it would be made clear how they could be contacted.
He recommended the best submission was a handwritten "one liner", on paper, sent in by snail mail, clearly stating that your attitude was either in favour of deamalgamation or against.
"I don't care which way you go - well I do care, but I don't have a personal investment in it. What I really care about is that this time you guys make it crystal clear what you want, and that you put it in writing in a way that people can't ignore.
"You need to get that pen out and write I want deamalgamation because it's clearly consistent with my attitude and the attitudes of everyone I talk to - or similarly I want to stay amalgamated.
"If they get an avalanche of these papers and it's short and sharp signed and uses the specific words in the legislation it will be really hard to ignore.
"In fact by law they must, must take the attitudes of residents and citizens into account.
"It's not a choice - they don't get to choose which bits of the law they want to object and which they don't, just like we don't get to choose which bits we obey.
"I've set out the terms of the legislation in that first video (the videos are on the council's website) and I'm expecting lots of hits on that because it has the words they must consider."
Professor Drew said the first question he was always asked was can you do a deamalgamation and his answer was clearly you can because there've been five before.
As an example he gave the Delatite in Victoria in 2002, which almost parallels the situation here: a forced amalgamation between Mansfield and Benalla, two different communities.
"Every year in Victoria they did a citizen satisfaction poll and it showed clearly that people were much more satisfied with their council after deamalgamation."
He has done a detailed study of the costs of deamalgamating Cootamundra and Gundagai, estimating it will be around $1.75 million, $477,000 of which would be for communications and branding.
