Nominations open next week, closing on August 9. 

Some interesting new names are being thrown around who are preparing to run, plus I’m told existing councillors Monica Morse, Warren Aubin and Ian North are looking to form tickets.

I hear the latter, Cr North, is angling to form two separate groups of candidates to run on separate tickets at the upcoming local government election.

Is the strategy to get four individuals elected to sit on the nine-member council?

Well, Cr North, I’ve got some advice for you: getting one team together is hard enough, but I’d say two is impossible. 

Listening to voters for the past six months, Cr North may himself struggle to be re-elected after still not disclosing, despite his long-term mantra of supporting transparent governance, why he resigned as deputy mayor last December.

THINGS must be quiet in council's engineers’ department for them to dig up a proposal that most Bathurstians thought had died years ago - the Southern Ring Road idea. 

If councillors or the engineers’ department have lost the previous reports, please give me a call and I'll dig my copy out.

From memory, the idea was a dog and was written off as too expensive because extensive bridging would have been required to be built across the Macquarie floodplain and the Vale Creek floodplain.

And the road would have had to somehow cut across the bottom of Mount Panorama and through the Robin Hill residential estate to the Orange Road. 

I'm guessing a total cost exceeding $150 million – and that’s at the lower end.

I can't see the state or federal governments warming to this proposal in a hurry and it's clearly too big a job for ratepayers to fund, so why bother giving CPR to a corpse?

THE recently announced parking review by state Member for Bathurst Paul Toole at the Bathurst Health Service created plenty of discussion, especially on social media.

The horror stories – in particular, from mothers with sick children – simply reinforced that the parking there is inadequate. 

I have also made the comment that staff would be healthier if they walked an extra few hundred metres each day instead of parking at the front door. 

I hope this review includes council. Parking restrictions and the need for timed parking zones and monitoring by the mobile camera car needs to be considered, as do the parking habits of staff in neighbouring streets. 

All too often, cars are parked illegally, restricting the access and exit of private property as vehicles are parked too close to driveways.

FRESH names being thrown up preparing to run for the upcoming local government election. Gluttons for punishment, clearly.

COUNCIL reviving the “dog” Southern Ring Road proposal. Things must be quiet within the engineers’ department.