BAYSWATER CEO Francesca Lefante will step down about a year before her contract ends, leaving the city on September 30 with an undisclosed settlement. The details are confidential, but councillors Dan Bull, Stephanie Coates, Brent Fleeton, Terry Kenyon, Barry McKenna, Alan Radford, John Rifici and Michelle Sutherland were in favour of a deed of settlement…

PERTH city council’s planning committee has deferred heritage listing a hotel part-owned by lord mayor Lisa Scaffidi following an appeal from her husband who only wants parts of the building protected. The committee on Tuesday night heard the former Grand Central Hotel on Wellington Street was an alcohol-free “coffee palace” built during the gold rush…

HIS maiden speech still echoing in federal Parliament, Perth MP Tim Hammond has been promoted by his boss, Opposition leader Bill Shorten. The former lawyer is now shadow minister for consumer affairs, picking up the portfolio from Labor senator Sam Dastyari, who’s disappeared to the back benches after being exposed asking the Chinese government-back company…

STATE Liberal MP Eleni Evangel seems to have the support of Lisa Scaffidi, with an East Perth property owned by the lord mayor and her husband Joe sporting a large banner promoting the Perth incumbent. The property at 32 Edward Street is owned by LisaJoe Investments and had featured a Jeremy Quinn banner from his…

VINCENT council has added a slew of documents to be made available to the public online. The move is a small victory for councillor Ros Harley, whose mission for transparency was sparked by her own problems obtaining information from the administration, although she says it’s far from over. In 2013 Cr Harley made what she…

ONLINE pop-science page IFLscience has been dealt a blow by Perth’s sponsorship committee, which knocked back a three-day science festival as under-prepared and overly ambitious. The committee baulked at handing over $250,000 because it would place the IFLscience festival above longstanding events such as the Fringe Festival and the Christmas Pageant. Tachyon IFLscience (originally “I…

A PROPOSED nine-storey hotel on the corner of Barrack and Wellington streets got the thumbs-up from Perth’s planning committee on Tuesday night. The committee decided the 77-room hotel, which will cost $15 million, made better use of the space by extending further into the laneway behind it. The new hotel will retain the facade of…

THE Perth Girls School in East Perth should be re-opened to attract families to inner-city Perth says Reece Harley. Mr Harley, who’s a Perth councillor but pushing the idea as chair of the Museum of Perth, says Barnett government plans to sell the site for a hotel development are short-sighted, given there’s a heap of…

FIFTEEN years ago Dudley Maier cycled around his neighbourhood noticing the gardens were mostly water-guzzling jungles of old English plants. Back then Vincent council seemed to be endorsing it — even amid the millennial drought — with it’s top garden awards often going to the thirstiest examples. “I thought ‘why don’t we try to encourage…

MORE of Halliday Park’s mature trees might have to be pulled out. An arborist has found three trees, between 10 – 12 metres tall, are ailing and need close monitoring. They sit in the bright red “unacceptable” range of the Quantified Tree Risk Assessment system, which looks at how likely they are to pose a…