Councillor Alex Karavas has been hard at work trying to make Mudgee a safer place through the reinstatement of the Community Safety Committee, but he’s hit a major roadblock – not enough committee members.
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“We have one person that is definitely locked in for the committee, and I’ve been speaking to a lot of shop-owners around the town about becoming involved,” Cr Karavas said on the committee’s progress.
“There’s also three more people from the community that are in the process of getting involved, but we haven’t got the six that we need to have our first meeting yet.”
It’s not the first time that a security committee encountered problems in Mudgee either – mayor Des Kennedy was on a similar committee in years past, which eventually failed due to mounting costs and logistical problems.
He warned Cr Karavas at the March Mid-Western Regional Council meeting, when the motion was first put to council, that it would be a difficult ask for the town.
“I was a part of the committee some years ago that moved on this issue,” Cr Kennedy revealed at the March 15 council meeting.
“We met a lot of difficulties in terms of logistics and costs, and the committee couldn’t get past these difficulties in the long run.”
Cr Karavas’ committee plans, whose aims will be to ‘develop a plan for the installation of CCTV in the Mudgee CBD with particular reference to Byron Place and Mudgee Town Centre carparks’ was initially met with great interest from Mudgee.
A poll by the Mudgee Guardian showed that 94.77% of respondents were in favour of actions that would result in the installation of security cameras in the town.
Cr Karavas is now calling on those same interested people to make good on their promises and enact change in terms of town security.
“We need just one or two more people to commit to the meetings and to making the town a safer place,” he said.
“If we got those people confirmed today then we could have a meeting within two months.”