IT HAS been noted by the Dandenong Mechanics’ Institute that City of Greater Dandenong CEO Carl Wulff seems to be having a great amount of difficulty dealing with fact.
In the article (Star, 14 July) he is quoted as saying the Institute on the second level of the Town Hall complex, belongs to the Crown and was under perpetual control by council. In the past, among other things, he has stated that it was owned by the council.
As Mr Wulff has been provided with all of the facts on this matter by the Dandenong Mechanics’ Institute, the Mechanics’ Institutes of Victoria and Crown Lands Management, it would seem that he would prefer to generate his own notions of what has occurred on the site with regard to actual fact and who should actually control what.
All of the currently available documentation states that the Dandenong Mechanics’ Institute owns and controls all of the second floor of the complex on behalf of the community “in perpetuity” as per the legally binding agreement of 1890.
As to Mr Wulff’s statement that “it’s a piece of Crown Land and we (the council) have been charged with the responsibility for its care and management”, this is only partly true and by stating it in this way, he is giving the misleading impression that this would include the building. It doesn’t, as it only relates to the bit of dirt it sits on.
The council owns the ground floor of the building, the Mechanics’ Institute owns everything above the ground floor and Crown Lands hold the dirt on behalf of the community, all of which is supported in the legal documents available for public examination, which include council’s own minute books.
Not one piece of Mr Wulff’s “100 per cent rock solid” legal opinion, which to date has cost the ratepayers of Dandenong a large amount of money, has come to light and so would seem to be yet another unsupportable statement.
As the ratepayers have shelled out so much money for this legal opinion, then surely the ratepayers have a right to know what is so rock solid about it.
Until the ratepayers of Dandenong start to seriously question what its servants, the officers and councillors of Dandenong, are doing with ratepayers assets, then those assets are going to be squandered on misplaced opinion.
Andrew Russell,
President,
Dandenong Mechanics’ Institute.
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