Toowoomba - drinking recycled water? Not in Thorley's political lifetime ...
Premier Beattie's recycled water plans for SEQ do not automatically mean that Toowoomba residents will be drinking a cocktail of Brisbane recycled water.
First, there's no pipeline linking Toowoomba to the SEQ water grid and one is not planned until 2011 or 2012 once the Traveston Dam is finished.
Second, Toowoomba would apparently not take water from Wivenhoe unless it was above 40% (and, above 40%, Beattie shuts off the recycled water pipeline - or so he says).
Third, between 2007 and 2012, there are two Toowoomba City Council elections where new Councillors will be elected and new water strategies formulated.
Toowoomba may even become a net exporter of water to the SEQ grid.
Mayor Thorley was bleating on Channel 7 news this evening that 6 months out from the Toowoomba poll, it still hasn't rained and Toowoomba has no options.
It has rained - not enough to boost the dams but enough to green Toowoomba so it doesn't resemble the desert wasteland that Mayor Thorley is so fond of telling people that Toowoomba has become. (She is such a great advertisement for Toowoomba tourism!)
Toowoomba is currently accessing groundwater supplies.
Toowoomba also has several other water source options - but while the Thorley-controlled Council sits in City Hall, they refuse to look at them.
A new Council will be able to sit down with regional Councils and discuss real options, something Mayor Thorley still does not seem able to do.
With the Council election due in March next year, it seems that Mayor Thorley's life in local government politics will be drifting off into the sunset ...
posted by Concerned Ratepayer at 6:07 AM
1 Comments:
In the Chronicle today, Mayor Thorley hints at trying to revive the carcass of her Water Futures project.
She seems to think Premier Beattie's Singapore style democracy will work in Toowoomba.
Fundamental error.
Premier Beattie had his early election and doesn't face the voters again until 2009 (if he's still around!). Mayor Thorley is on the run down to the Toowoomba City Council elections next year.
Premier Beattie's decision to cancel the March poll pushes the issue of drinking recycled water to the Council elections. Mayor Thorley seems to want to help it on its way.
By trying to resuscitate a dead project (which would have bankrupted the city), she is sealing her political fate.
Does she think the Federal government will give her funding now, notwithstanding the July 2006 referendum result? Or perhaps she thinks Premier Beattie will fund it - except he's gone cap in hand to the Feds for funding for his own recycled water project.
10:13 AM, January 30, 2007
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