Narromine Council has shelved a proposal for the introduction of a Crime Prevention Plan labelling it a state responsibility.
Subscribe now for unlimited access.
$0/
(min cost $0)
or signup to continue reading
After a spate of vandalism and criminal activity in the town earlier this year council was toying with the idea of introducing a Crime Prevention Plan (CPP).
The plan would involve police and community members working on methods to harbour the criminal activity and assist council when applying for state funding.
After reading how a CCP was established councillors decided at Wednesday night's meeting to leave the proposal for the time being.
In the Narromine Council Business Paper General Manager's Report it was outlined how extensive the plan would be.
Cr Sue McCutcheon believed the workload would be too much for council.
"Reading through that paper, I realised what a huge effort for that crime prevention plan and I do wonder if we do have the resources to do it and financial backing to do it," she said.
"(I wondered) whether we should just be working with the police for a while and we should go from there. Looking at all those pages and I thought goodness me, I just didn't know if we could do that along with all the other things, we've got so much going on at the moment," Cr McCutcheon added.
Cr George Mack moved the motion that the report should be noted.
"Mr Chairman I know that's a sort of do-nothing motion at the moment and I don't want to be negative about it because it's a very important issue in our community but at the end of the day it's the state's responsibility and if we're going to get funding it's got to be state provided and it has to be ongoing," he said.
"If we take responsibility we accept it forever.
"It's important that we proceed the way we have been in the past and have the meetings with the police.
"But at the end of the day the state are the ones who will have to front up with the money."
Cr Les Lambert suggested using the Alkane Resources Community Funding to start the project.
"If we had some seed money, community money that Alkane had given us, we can start the ball rolling as Cr McCutcheon said, it's a huge process, but it does have to start somewhere," he said.
This idea was not supported and Cr Mack's motion that the report should be noted was carried.
Mayor of Narromine, Cr Bill McAnally said the community's crime statistics did not represent what was happening.
"We can do all this kind of planning, at the end of the crime stats in our eyes are terrible, and it is terrible. But in the eyes of the people that give you money for that, it's not," he said.
"So you've got to disprove (the statistics) to them. It's very detailed and there's a lot of work there. I think the process should be started but at the end of the day, we don't want to be dumped with the load either."