Perth Voice Interactive

A TAXI driver was spotted doing a poo on a Leederville verge around 9.50am Tuesday.

A resident was walking her dog when she spotted the driver squatting on the Burke Street verge near the Britannia Park tennis courts, and it looked like he’d come prepared, with his own roll of toilet paper.

She says public toilets were just 30 metres away.

“He’s squatting down, and then I saw him wiping his bottom and I went… he is taking a dump right on the side of the road!” she told the Voice.

“You want to see the mess this guy left behind!

“It was so daring of him to do it, I can’t believe that he even chose to do that when there were toilets so close by.”

Toilet paper was strewn everywhere but when she called on the dirty driver to clean up the mess he simply hopped into his car and drove off.

The woman took photographic evidence, wrote down the cab number and reported it to Vincent city council, whose workers will presumbly have to scrape the human excrement from the leaves and grass.

“In all my years as mayor, I get many different issues raised with me, but this actually took the cake,” mayor John Carey told the Voice. “It shocked me. And I just don’t understand it. We’re doing everything we can to beautify our streets with more verges and trees yet someone has decided to treat our streets as a public toilet.

“Given the fact we’ve installed a new self-cleaning toilet in Leederville and there are other toilets nearby I cannot understand why someone would choose to do that, and then it’s left to Vincent staff to clean up.

“Do I as mayor have to send a message out: do not use our streets as a public toilet? I’ve referred it to our health team and they’ll be going directly to Swan Taxis.”

The council’s decided not to pursue the driver as the hassle’s not worth the $100 fine, but it is hoping Swan Taxis handles it internally.

by DAVID BELL

AN online register of men convicted of hiring street prostitutes may be scrapped just three years after its introduction.

For months the Vincent city council register — introduced during the reign of former mayor Alannah MacTiernan — has been empty: “There are no recorded convictions at this present time,”it reads.

The controversial register was introduced to drive the message home to men looking for some paid whoopee that if they kerb-crawled Stirling and Smith Streets they risked having their details posted on the internet.

Rowdiness, rudeness, gardens used as toilets and a pool co-opted as a douche-station for sex workers were amongst residents’ complaints. Young women living and working in the area were also harassed.

At this year’s Vincent AGM, former councillor Dudley Maier suggested the council take a look at whether the register was needed any more.

He’d opposed its introduction because it could identify the wrong person (especially with common names), and he told the Voice it wouldn’t have the intended deterrent factor because people didn’t have enough warning beforehand of the likely consequence.

The list is actually a bugger to find, buried in the council website’s sub menus: names are stored as an image so it’s unGoogle-able.

Mayor John Carey supported the list at the time but agrees a rethink is needed.

“I think it has become redundant now,” he says. “I think that the issue has certainly quietened down. If it is redundant now I’m happy for it to be removed… it’s served its purpose.”

by DAVID BELL

PERTH’S hidden bike-riding history’s being uncovered at the museum of Perth, and the exhibition shows cycling isn’t some fad that came riding in, covered in lycra, in the past few years.

“Cycling has been an important part of Perth’s transport mix for many years,” museum chair Reece Harley says. “The seven bikes in our exhibition each have a fascinating story and represent different types of cycling… for entertainment, for business and for racing.”

While it’s a common refrain from anti-bike drivers to yell “get off the road!” or argue in online comments that roads are for cars, Mr Harley says “the roads of central Perth were built before cars had been invented”.

Like many cities around the world Perth eventually got taken over by cars. But while some today reckon Perth could never be a cycling city again (marked by the phrase “Perth’s not Amsterdam”), Mr Harley says many European cities were relatively late to the game in becoming cycle-friendly.

“People assume that European cities have always been cycling meccas. That’s not the case. Many European cities were just as car-centric as Perth, however in the 1970s many of them changed their thinking in regards to transport and they’re now reaping the benefits.

“Many cities around the world are investing heavily in cycling infrastructure. The research shows that if you build it they will come… the more cyclists there are, the safer people feel to choose cycling as an option.”

Among the historical bikes on loan from the WA Historical Cycling Club is an 1874 penny farthing—which was warned to get off the road by more “modern” vehicles in the 1930s—right through to Steele Bishop’s bike that he rode to win the individual pursuit crown in the world championships in Switzerland in 1983.

The exhibition runs until March 27 at the museum, down Grand Lane in the CBD. Incidentally, that building itself used to be home to the WA League of Wheelmen, cycling’s governing body that boasted “hundreds of wheelmen throughout the colony” and which sought to “secure a fair and equitable administration of justice as regards the rights of cyclists on public roads”. Near a century on, their work remains unfinished.

by DAVID BELL

VINCENT city council is under pressure to dump allergenic London plane trees, with claims they’re bad for health and make Perth look like every other city that plants them.

At this year’s council AGM, planner Jake Schapper urged the council to stop planting the trees saying they’re bad for health, give no sense of place and are ecologically painful (fauna and insects don’t like them, and their sudden dump of autumn leaves and seed pods can clog up waterways).

Mr Schapper, whose mum Alannah MacTiernan was Vincent mayor for a couple of years, went as far as to suggest the council pull out any plane tree planted in the past two years and replace them.

This week Mary Gray, a highly decorated conservationist from the Urban Bushland Council WA, joined the call.

“This is Perth, Western Australia, it’s not a mediterranean climate,” Ms Gray said. “We have our own trees to be proud of.”

Ms Gray said there’s no real bushland left in Vincent’s domain so the problem shouldn’t be compounded by planting more “weeds”.

Mayor John Carey says the council’s in a tough position when it comes to picking which trees to plant and it proves to be a surprisingly controversial issue: “As mayor I’ve received conflicting advice from both the community and my own team. The debate as I understand it comes down to: in really urban town centres where you’re trying to get a large canopy, there are those who argue that some of the native trees don’t cut it.” Getting enough available stock’s also proved a sticking point in the past.

He says he’ll put it to the environmental committee to figure out what to do.

“I do want an answer on this. If we can find an available native ever-green that we can use right in the town centre, then personally that would be my preference.”

by DAVID BELL

THE playground at Pat O’Hara Reserve may be moved several hundred metres — costing $80,000 — because it’s plagued by vandalism and anti-social behaviour.

Bayswater council reckons the playground will be better near the Morley Sport and Recreation Centre and busy Wellington Road, where it’s better lit and busier.

It comes as rangers record 29 cases of graffiti, 13 of loitering, nine each of public drinking and vandalism and seven of anti-social behaviour in the past year in and around the playground. Police attended at least 11 incidents.

“Each incident or act of vandalism occurring in and around the playground area has resulted in equipment repairs and mechanical sand pit cleaning to remove glass and debris,” a council report states.

“Due to the amount of anti-social behaviour, on average the playground pit at Pat O’Hara Reserve is mechanically cleansed eight to 10 times per year at a cost of approximately $6000 annually. By comparison most other playground pits containing sand are generally hand raked and may require a mechanical cleanse once per year.”

by EMMIE DOWLING

BAYSWATER and Vincent councils are leading a rebellion against premier Colin Barnett’s development assessment panels, saying they strip too much power from democratically-elected councils.

Last week Bayswater councillor Dan Bull refused in writing to serve on one of the five-member panels, which have the authority to approve major projects: with three panellists appointed by the government and just two drawn from the locally elected council, he describes the bodies as inherently “anti-democratic”.

Decisions by DAPs have been criticised statewide as they’ve resulted in the approval of projects sometimes far bigger, taller and bulkier than planning rules normally allow, and sometimes over the express opposition of community members and the locally elected council.

This week, Vincent mayor John Carey and Cr Emma Cole will ask their council to pass a resolution stating Vincent, “advocates for the abolition of DAPs” on the basis they “are not democratic bodies representing ratepayers and accordingly do not reflect the aspirations or values of the community”.

The pair say “DAPs represent a significant erosion of planning powers by elected representatives who have been given a mandate by ratepayers to make these decisions”.

Former councillor and mayoral aspirant Dudley Maier believes DAPs are getting a bad rap. He says the real problem lies with Vincent’s policies and the staff who administer them.

Tighten

He’s trawled over 20 significant developments that went in front of DAPs over the past year and says 19 were exactly what Vincent staff had recommended. He says DAPs are bound by planning law and the council needs to to tighten up its own planning scheme.

We put that view to Mr Carey: “I fully acknowledge and understand that we’ve got to have better planning policies in place, and we’re going through significant reform to look at every planning policy.

“I’m very clear that many of our policies are not meeting the needs of the community.”

But he said even if every single policy was water-tight, there’d always be discretion and as a matter of principle that should be left to elected councillors and not appointed DAP members.

“The question is this: Who should be responsible, given there is always discretion by decision-makers?

Is it a majority of unelected officials who are not invested at all in our community, or is it elected councillors given a mandate by our ratepayers, with a long-term investment in our community?”

The motion goes to a vote on Tuesday.

by DAVID BELL

BREAKING: Stirling council may join Vincent and Bayswater in formally rejecting development assessment panels. Councillor Elizabeth Re will ask her colleagues to write to the WA government asking it to dump the panels because they’re undemocratic and too much about politics. Her request will be discussed at the next meeting on Tuesday, March 15.