TAPPING INTO BMCS MANAGEMENT BY OBJECTIVES    PART 1

Ron Withington

So just how does your Society go about planning its business?

Each year, the Management Committee (MC) of the Society sets out to establish a series of Objectives to be achieved in respect of the range of issues that confront us.

Some of these Objectives will be short and sweet, others may carry over from month to month or even into the next Committee year. All must necessarily contain an element of idealism.

As with all "the best-laid plans", of course some Objectives are discarded, some subsumed by events and some simply, in this volunteer organisation, under resourced or not able to be resourced at all! Nevertheless we do try to meet them and we certainly set out to monitor and record progress against them.

It would be appreciated by all, especially those who have been attending our recent meetings, that the sudden need to respond to the Taskforce on Tourism and National Parks and the RTA Mt Victoria Bypass threat to Newnes Plateau have created a significant diversion of our resources!

However, in 2008 your new Committee spent a day preparing its updated Objectives Schedule, the officer responsible for each individual Objective taking the lead, but requesting contributions in discussion from other members.

The MC has this year settled on eleven Objectives: Rather than burden you, the member, with a mesmerising spreadsheet covering all eleven Objectives, we have chosen to set out just one or two at a time, probably in random order, in successive issues of Hut News and to post this article and the reviews, in numerical order on the BMCS website.

This month we will deal with tasks and progress on:

2. Water Conservation

This is a strategic project to protect water resources in the Blue Mountains and the Greater Sydney region. There are a number of specific tasks:

a. Use the BMCS Groundwater booklet to gain publicity on critical issues. This is being done effectively and is ongoing, the booklet is on our website and is into its third printing.

b. Conduct a moratorium campaign opposing water bores, promoting metering and charging through the Independent Regulatory and Pricing Tribunal (IPART). We have seen an embargo placed on bores, a catalogue of bores developed and bore proposals successfully challenged. No IPART yet.

c. Promote BMCC Groundwater Community Forum and ongoing consultation with BMCC and State Government. Discussions are ongoing with BMCC, DNR and DWE.

d. Investigate swamp damage and remediation practices. We have engaged with BMCC and their Save the Swamps Campaign. Sydney is remediating Marmian Swamp. We have hosted David Keith in August to give a lecture on Swamps, formation and remediation, at our Monthly Meeting.

e. Oppose Sydney Metropolitan Water Plan (SMWP) on groundwater extraction at Kangaloon, Leonay and Wallacia. Our submission with the Save Water Alliance was successful in that the Minister has announced a halt to construction of groundwater bores in all three locations!

f. Pursue the declaration of hanging swamps as vulnerable under NSW State Legislation. This Objective is complete. BM Swamps are now vulnerable under State Law.

g. Launch the Drink Tapwater Campaign through all Blue Mountains schools. As at September 2008 all schools from Wentworth Falls to Mt Victoria have effectively been visited. Expansion to the Lower Mountains schools is in train.

h. Expand the Drink Tapwater Campaign to Councils and the broader community. This work involves approaches to Councils beyond the BM and interacting with NCC and the NSW Teachers Federation Environment Network. It is ongoing.

i. Evaluate modified SMWP, Macro Water and Macro Groundwater plans in the context of the Blue Mountains. Also ongoing.

Next Month: 3. The Blue Mountains Western Escarpment         Ron Withington

Last month we dealt with progress on Objective 2 of the 2008-09 Management Committee, Water Conservation
Although progress on most of the Objectives is effectively covered in reports in Hut News, the Committee feels an obligation to let members know in a more structured sense just how we are going when compared to our formalised aims.
This month, the focus shifts, not to Objective 3, the Blue Mountains Western Escarpment, as promised, but to objective 10, Communication. The specific tasks are:

a. Maintain the website.
The website has now been under the 'mastership' of a single officer for some three years, and is consolidated into a steady source of member information, reliably updated, and purged of outdated material. In particular it offers visitors the opportunity, should they so desire, to download Hut News in advance of the hard copy mail-out and with images in colour.
The coloour increment is of value as we are often dealing with photographs of the natural world that do not enjoy being rendered in grayscale.
It is from the website that Strobus, the robust publication by students, is also accessed.

b. Produce Hut News.
A wider coverage of Consoc initiatives has been implemented without adding to the size, and at a significantly cheaper overall cost.

c. Update the Consoc Display Case outside the Hut.
This case is scarcely noticeable because it is almost hidden by the cook's gas bottles. A good thing, because it is seriously out of date. Needs relocating with a complete overhaul of content, two jobs for which the subcommittee has not yet found time. (Volunteer?)

d. Continue to improve liaison and coverage with the local press.
There is ongoing representation made to the most senior staff of the Blue Mountains Gazette. We achieve satisfactory service for paid adverts, but there seems to be some rationing of feature articles, probably due to real estate advertisers being antagonistic to a conservation group. In brief, we prepare and submit much more material than members will see in print.

e. Produce a BMCS Poster to be placed on community walls in the Blue Mountains Libraries.
This is a task which must be undertaken for the new year.

f. Hold an Annual BMCS Banner Event.
This is not the Consoc Picnic for members being promoted in this issue of Hut News, it is a designated community event. A proposal for a BMCS expo at Everglades was negotiated during the last few months, but we were unable to come to finality with the management of a satisfactory time slot at this much-utilised facility. Back to the drawing board.

The Management Committee is always pleased to receive input from members on the ways we might improve our overall communication to the community.