Mayoral Minute - January 2025

Published on 30 January 2025

I can’t believe it’s January, a whole new year.

I’d like to congratulate all of our Australia Day Award winners and welcome our new citizens. All of the award winners were very well received by the community.

Our Citizen of the Year was Sue Wicks. Our Young Citizen of the Year is Ashlea Lavell, Senior Citizen of the Year is Keith Ballard, Senior Sportspeople of the Year are Sunny Raitava and Allan Hazle, Junior Sportspeople are Jean Lavell and Yasmin Wyld-Hill, and the Community Event of the Year is the Great Northern Rodeo Series.

The Arts and Cultural Award recipient is Shaylee McGregor, and we had a number of Spirit of Mount Isa Award recipients. All of these people contribute greatly to our community, so thank you to all of them: John Davies, Kate Fischer, Lee Allice, Phoebe Ryder, Zara Kuskopf, Jay Morris, and Dave Bartolo.

On that day we also had more than 20 new citizens.

A big thank you to Penny and Councillor Kim Coghlan for taking an active part in organising that event, it was very successful and we’ve received great feedback. It’s these events that bring unity and community spirit to our town.

Our next event is this weekend with the Sign On Expo, and the weekend after that we have our Welcome to Mount Isa event.

We also have the launch of our Future Ready Economy Roadmap coming up on February 21, so most of the executive officers have been extremely busy finalising that document and getting these events prepared.

I’d like to farewell our Director of Corporate Services, Chileya Luangala, who’s been with us for more than three years. I’d like to wish her and her family all the best for the future, and I’d like to thank Chileya for the work she’s done at Council. So thank you very much, director.

We’ll be moving into confidential early in the agenda today to discuss the rodeo creditors’ meeting that’s happening today at 11am.

I hope today sees an end to this saga, as there are no winners here, other than an out-of-town company that has used this misfortune of others to help themselves.

I’ve read the report thoroughly and many accounts of events are different to my own, however I’ll let it go, as the more this is talked about, the more reputational damage occurs to our beloved event.

I feel bad for the State Government, who tried to do the right thing by our town in our hour of need; our Council, who got involved to help creditors, even though it was not our responsibility – and we, in fact, ourselves were a creditor – the creditors; our event; and our town, that has received much unwanted negative publicity in order to detract attention from the real story: the money being accrued daily by the administrators.

The breakdown on page 25 of the creditors’ report outlines that the administrator, his legal team, and consultants will take approximately $728,000 of the funding provided, which is disappointing for creditors to say the least.

Let’s hope that this is wound up ASAP, to limit any further charges.

I’d like to thank Council’s Wellness Committee for putting on that whole-of-staff breakfast this morning. I know it was really well received by staff, and I think it’s great for staff’s mental health to get around and chat with other people in the organisation and have some good social bonding while they’re at work.