So ratepayers can expect more ho-hum for the next three years – or can we? 

I calculate there are four separate groups within nine councillors, so it might be a three-year period of total instability and inaction.

It’s just what we don't want.

THE silent majority are still chuckling to themselves after Saturday's Western Advocate story about landowners in the Capertee Valley blowing up about receiving Bathurst's relocated kangaroo population from Mount Panorama over recent months. 

I note, too, not a whisper from local ecologists about Professor David Paton's suggestion that Australia should increase its appetite for roo meat to ensure roo carcasses are not wasted during culls. 

Professor Paton, from the University of Adelaide, says the booming kangaroo numbers need to be brought under control to protect other species.

As an interested ratepayer, I hope the Bathurst Kangaroo Project reports back to council this week with an update on the proposal.

In particular, I'd love to see a movement report for those roos fitted with transmitter collars.

Where have they been and where are they now?

There is an unsubstantiated report that one collared roo was found dead along the roadside at Duramana, some 50 kilometres - as the crow flies - from the drop-off zone. 

COUNCIL has cleaned up the majority of Appleton Orchard on College Road, but I think the recently installed sign on the boundary gate is ambitious. 

"No trespassing. Council land," reads the amateurish looking sign, with no reference to council as is normal. 

I'm not sure who the target is for this sign: kangaroos or humans! 

Good luck on preventing both, I'd suggest.

LAST week’s announcement of $1.2 million by state Member for Bathurst Paul Toole for additional parking at Bathurst Hospital is great news, but it’s only part of the solution. 

To be serious, Western NSW Local Health Service needs to address the wider issue of staff parking - that is, policing of staff, including doctors, who lazily park for extended periods within the front and undercover car park. 

Council, too, needs to reintroduce timed parking in Howick Street between Mitre and Commonwealth streets to ensure turnover - again, due to staff parking at the door. 

So where are those who, back in 2004, opposed a greenfield site for the new health service that would have had plenty of parking?

Instead we have a parking problem that will get worse and worse each year as more and more services are added, resulting in more staff and patients’ cars.

THE NSW Government funding a new car park at Bathurst Health Service. It’s a help, but management changes are needed too to ease the parking problem.

NOT many new faces on council.