Councillor has no time for $20,000 calender

By Shaun Inguanzo
A CORPORATE gift calendar that cost Greater Dandenong council $20,000 is riddled with errors, according to one councillor, and the city’s mayor has called it a “waste of money”.
Noble Park North Ward councillor Maria Sampey said the calendar, which replaced the council’s 2005 Christmas cards, was distributed by council departments to businesses, and by councillors at their own discretion.
But Cr Sampey was infuriated with the calendar’s design process, which she said had “fallen on deaf ears” when suggestions by councillors were discarded.
Cr Sampey said the calendar’s boxes were too small for anyone to write information on, and captions below each month did not match their respective pictures.
“In the caption for April, it says ‘a favourite place to be’, under (a picture of) the words ‘Lest We Forget’,” she said.
The page for June features a picture of a horse race, with a caption reading “Great city … great place for older people to get involved.”
Greater Dandenong mayor Peter Brown said the issue was “trivial”, but the calendar had been a “waste of money” and he hoped that if another calendar was produced for 2007, it was “a much better one”.
Greater Dandenong director of corporate services Ross Hepburn defended the calendar.
“I think the final product, when compared with its predecessor, was a vast improvement, and the concept of sending out calendars in lieu of cards to a great many people, where the Greater Dandenong brand is going to sit on people’s desks or telephone tables for whole a year, was a fantastic improvement,” he said.
Mr Hepburn said councillors’ suggestions were taken on board, but the presentation was purely to bring them into line with the marketing team’s vision of how to create a stronger brand presence by replacing cards with calendars.
“All of these marketing and communications items get reviewed each year, but from a management perspective we tend to leave the creative exercise to the experts,” he said.