If you've been thinking about running as a councillor on Blayney council in the September election, you now have extra time to consider it.
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Due to the Covid-19 situation in Sydney the NSW government has pushed the next election back from Saturday September 4 to Saturday December 4.
Mayor Scott Ferguson said that he thinks that it's a reasonable decision.
"Everything just gets pushed back so there's no urgency at this time," he said.
"Council won't be in caretaker mode for another few months although we've wound down a lot of our committees and won't be cranking them up too much."
"Ones like the village committee, the sports committee and the access committee won't have much to do, but the traffic committee will certainly still have plenty to talk about," he said.
One group of people for whom the election date makes little to no difference are the council staff Cr Ferguson said.
"We just adopted the new operational plan so staff have hundreds of projects to continue to work on, so it makes no difference to them at all," he said.
"Tenders are being delivered, the changerooms at King George Oval are going ahead. Covid has made some of it difficult, but they have plenty to do.
"The only difference is for councillors across NSW who may have been looking at retiring in September and may have made plans. They can still retire and it won't trigger a by-election."
Unlike the prolonged July council meeting that ran for over four hours, the next four extra meetings may be fairly brief.
"There's nothing really big on the agenda over the next few months," Cr Ferguson said.
The August meeting which was scheduled for next week has been pushed back to the normal third Monday of the month.
Normally there's never a council meeting in January, but this year the first meeting of the new council will be in January, with none to be held in December.
"Counting the postal votes at that time will mean that the usual December meeting won't be able to be held," he said.
Cr Ferguson hopes that the extra three months will encourage residents to consider putting their hand up at the December poll.
"I'd really like to see people thinking about it over the next few months, talk to current councillors and look at signing up in November," he said.
Mark Logan
Started working in newspapers in the 1990's in the darkroom of the Pastoral Times in Deniliquin before moving to Millthorpe in 2003. Soon after arriving I started as a photographer at the CWD. Now a journalist at the Blayney Chronicle.
Started working in newspapers in the 1990's in the darkroom of the Pastoral Times in Deniliquin before moving to Millthorpe in 2003. Soon after arriving I started as a photographer at the CWD. Now a journalist at the Blayney Chronicle.
