From Parliament to Local Government
I have served 14 years as full-time Mayor of the City of West Torrens, without having ever been a Councillor.
Plus I live outside the Council area.
Defeated after 14 years as an MP in the SA Parliament (including 4 as Speaker and 7 as Whip), I moved house to be nearer my grandchildren.
But I was still passionate about the area where I had lived for 25 years, and West Torrens Council had received a lot of bad publicity.
Rather than let my political education go to waste, I chose to use it to serve the local ratepayers, many being the same people I had represented in Parliament.
My first step was to get enrolled as a non-resident ratepayer.
I mortgaged my house and purchased a flat in West Torrens to establish my eligibility and started campaigning.
The requirement for the mayor to have previously served as a councillor had recently been removed from legislation to allow for ‘new blood’ to enter
local government.
There was one part of West Torrens where I had not been the local MP, but my pre-Parliament time teaching at a local high school helped there.
With some wonderful phone calls from former students, by then in their 40s, along the lines of ‘Mr Trainer, you taught me years ago, now I and all my relatives will be giving you a big tick in return!’
With that help, I had a landslide win in 2000 and have been re-elected unopposed three times.
Some tensions inside the Council, but not in the community, arose from me being directly elected by the voters as a non-resident Mayor.
And in my first term that Council included two former Mayors of a smaller Council absorbed by amalgamation, a CEO who had been Mayor of another Council, and a Councillor who had been the previous CEO!
The defeated Mayor and Deputy Mayor had both been in a great deal of legal strife, and I take great satisfaction that the previous constant bad headlines gradually vanished after I became Mayor.
Between the CBD and the sea
West Torrens covers several western suburbs of Adelaide between the CBD and the sea, and surrounds Adelaide International Airport, the area’s greatest asset but which also presents significant problems with aircraft noise, traffic generation, drainage and planning.
About 25 percent of the Council’s area (the Airport, plus the State-operated West Beach Trust recreation area) is not subject to our planning controls, nor to paying rates.
However, we have been able to negotiate for the Airport to pay “rate equivalents” which last year contributed $4.3 million to the community, and, along with a differential rate for commerce and industry, this has helped West Torrens regularly have the lowest or second lowest average residential rate in Adelaide.
Quality services.
Relatively low rates have not meant substandard services.
A library that is the envy of other councils opened in 2004, on time and under budget, with community consultation that headed off the dissent encountered elsewhere.
After a far-reaching stock-take, unviable and surplus Council properties were identified for sale, funding a program to consolidate facilities into four new community hubs at no cost to the ratepayers.
My biggest disappointment has been the failure of upstream councils and the Federal and State governments to cooperate on storm water.
Built on a floodplain, we are under constant threat from the Brownhill and Keswick Creeks.
My greatest satisfaction has been from feeling I have been of use to the community.
I may sleep outside of West Torrens, but that community takes up all my waking hours.
