FRANKSTON Council wants to play a bigger part in the regulation of local rooming houses. The state government’s Department of Health and Human Services currently works with Consumer Affairs Victoria to regulate the private rooming house market. Rooming houses must be registered with council. At their most recent meeting, Frankston councillors agreed to write to the Premier and other state MPs appealing for legislation changes to “empower local government”. Those proposed changes included mandating that private building surveyors notify council and neighbours of a property whose owner has plans for a rooming house development, and making private building surveyors advise…
Author: Brodie Cowburn
CENTRELINK’S Mornington office is set to remain open until March 2021. The centre had been scheduled to close for good in September, with local Centrelink services switching to a single desk at the post office. The new service was only set to be manned for 15 hours a week. Flinders MP Greg Hunt announced last week that operations would continue at Centrelink’s Mornington office for an extra six months. “Many Australians are doing it tough right now, and locals on the Mornington Peninsula are no different,” he said. “I know that so many families are deeply distressed by the return…
KINGSTON Council officers are working on a report which will assess the future operation of the Patterson Lakes Community Centre. Earlier this year, the committee which had been running the centre stepped down. Committee members voted to hand over management to Kingston Council in April. Kingston Council’s community sustainability general manager Mauro Bolin told The News this week “Consumer Affairs Victoria has this month approved the application from the Patterson Lakes Community Centre Inc to cancel the association. Now this legal process has been completed, the cancellation of the Patterson Lakes Community Centre Inc is now complete.” “While this has…
KINGSTON Council has refunded more than $850,000 worth of parking fines which may have been illegally issued between 2006 and 2016. Council set up the parking infringement reimbursement scheme last year after acknowledging that their method for processing parking fines may have been unlawful. The issue was council’s outsourcing of their parking fine appeal process. Council outsourced the process to an external agency for a decade, an action that it later discovered may have been a violation of the Infringements Act 2006 (“Parking fines will be refunded”, The News, 6/3/19). Fines issued in the Kingston municipality that were unsuccessfully appealed…
CORONAVIRUS cases in the Kingston municipality continue to rise, with at least 55 cases active in the area as of Monday 27 July. A cluster has broken out at the BUPA Edithvale aged care facility. Mordialloc MP Tim Richardson has confirmed that after one positive test was returned by a worker on 18 July, the number of active cases linked to the nursing home has grown to five. Victoria recorded its worst ever day of COVID-19 test results on Monday, with 532 new cases recorded. A total of around 3 per cent of tests processed statewide came back positive on…