By CAMERON LUCADOU-WELLS
THE state body charged with policing pollution in Melbourne’s south-east is being trashed by funding cuts, its regional manager concedes.
In a frank discussion with residents last Tuesday, the Environment Protection Authority’s acting Dandenong region manager Leigh Bryant said the 15 per cent staff cuts across the Victorian public service had left the EPA struggling to cope with demand.
Mr Bryant said managers had tried to shield field workers in the region from the cuts but told the Journal its southern metropolitan pollution control officers had been slashed from “six or seven” to four.
This was due to a combination of the austerity drive and workers on maternity leave not being replaced, Mr Bryant told the residents, who included members of Residents Against Toxic Waste in the South East.
Mr Bryant said the EPA’s outsourced call-centre manning its 24/7 pollution hotline was not adequately recording complaints. Since a new data system was switched over in September, there had been problems getting a statistical breakdown of complaints.
“There’s been a number of problems — a turnover of staff in the call centre, then there’s the training of the staff to use the new system.”
Mr Bryant said the call centre company had been given its final warning to lift its performance within eight weeks.
Dave, a Cranbourne North resident at the meeting, was shocked by the revelation: “We as residents are the ones doing the monitoring for the EPA, we are the ones doing the policing for the EPA and then we find out there are glitches. All those things we’ve told the operators just fell off the system?”
An angry resident, who did not want to be named, told Mr Bryant the EPA must close down the state’s only licensed hazardous waste dump in Taylors Road, Lyndhurst and a Hallam Road landfill in Hampton Park.
He criticised a negotiated outcome between the EPA with the tips’ operator SITA Australia over repeated breaches of odour limits, rather than taking court action.
In its latest quarterly report this month, the EPA reported a reduction in odour issues from the Hallam Road landfill.
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