We head to the polling booths on September 14 to elect nine new councils across the Hunter.
Aspiring mayors and councillors need to nominate by Wednesday this week. We wish them well, their task is enormous, probably impossible.
Across the Hunter locals think they get a poor deal from councils. Potholes are never repaired properly, people say. Kerbside drainage is a muddy mess. Local playing fields are neglected. Children's playgrounds are old and unshaded. Picnic grounds are uninviting. Toilet blocks are unusable.
Main streets are neglected, local pools want for maintenance. Beachside amenities are inadequate. Parking is a sham.
While few among us have any idea of how to run a social security system, a navy, a hospital or a prison, we are all experts on the things local councils have responsibility for.
Roads, footpaths, drainage, parks, playing fields, swimming pools and beaches are part and parcel of daily life. And all of these are the responsibility of local government.
Can our councils do better? Probably not, I reckon, at least not with the cards they are holding, their miserable budgets, their limited powers and their growing responsibilities.
In the mid-nineteenth century, the colonies established local councils to build and maintain local roads. Other responsibilities were added through time to an extent that mayors of yesteryear would shake their heads at what councils are now expected to do.
We live in a time of big projects and they all need complex financial, engineering and logistics expertise from local councils.
The increased intensity and frequency of natural disasters require more and better local emergency services and the management of painstaking, expensive recovery programs.
Damage from storms and floods along eastern NSW in 2022, in February then in June then in September, is still being dealt with.
Councils are in the front line of Australia's housing crisis, and the relentless demand for apartment blocks, for subdivisions on rural lands and native woodland, on old industrial sites. Councils have major responsibility for environmental and congestion effects, and for ensuring every new lot has access to a full suite of local government amenities and services.
The Hunter has added extra 120,000 people in the past 20 years and over 50,000 new dwellings. The region's urban growth is planned and managed - for better or worse it needs saying - by local councils. But local government is pressed for money. The funding squeeze is complex. Rates are pegged by Macquarie Street. State and federal funding to local government is falling as a proportion of GDP, with surviving funding increasingly locked up in competitive grants schemes.
The federal government's Roads to Recovery scheme is an example. Council staff are hamstrung by endless form filling, eager to get their local road or bridge project under way. The small number of winning projects become back-slapping announcements for federal MPs. Yet a long list of unfunded projects grows and grows.
Sure, local government has problems. It has always been a place for shysters, developers after easy rezonings, officials pocketing kick-backs from service providers, rooky politicians seeking a launch pad, retired politicians shoring up their Order of Australia nominations.
There is, too, a size problem. Local government needs to be big enough to do the job, but small enough to be sensitive to community needs and aspirations.
Yet efforts to find local government's Goldilocks spot have been lamentable. The NSW government program of amalgamations over the last decade has created more problems than solutions. Look no further than the merger of Wyong and Gosford councils.
So, on September 14, we decide who gets to spend four years in the swamp of local government. The ballot winners face an end to family and recreational life, a miserable stipend, an inadequate expenses account, rude constituents, a straight-jacket of state-government rules and procedures, rising community expectations, the impacts of climate change, and failing council budgets.
Be sympathetic, choose well.
