Chamber welcomes audit

Peninsula Chamber of Commerce president Mr Matthew Wales has welcomed Gosford Council's Management Structure Audit produced by consultants KPMG.
He welcomed findings that the organisation needed to be more pro-active rather than reactionary.
"On issues such as commercial development, the council spends a great amount of time just trying to keep up with the pace of development without taking a long term strategic view of the needs of our business centres."
Mr Wales said that this would require a cultural change in the way that the council thought and did business.
"It will be pointless if council merely shuffles a few departments around unless it makes serious attempts to encourage a change in attitude of the management in control of those departments."
"The challenge for council is to put in place the right set of conditions to allow its management to take a longer term view of the city's needs.
"It must have a vision that is beyond just a few words at the beginning of promotional material.
"The comments that have been received by the consultants employed by council during the public consultation process clearly indicate that the general population expect a lot more from the organisation than is currently being delivered.
"The Chamber of Commerce met with the consultants KPMG on several occasions during the public consultation process to express its concerns regarding the current culture within the organisation," Mr Wales said.
"The business and development community are one of the council’s most important customers and therefore demand a high level of service from the organisation.
"Unfortunately, the level of service and the difficulties in gaining information and development approvals has fallen well short of what is needed to expedite sustainable growth in our business community," he said.
"Gosford Council has hundreds of highly qualified and dedicated staff.
"On the whole, they do an excellent job under very difficult circumstances.
"It is a real challenge to keep a population of 165,000 people happy all at once.
"The unfortunate reality is that Gosford Council has grown from a small regional council to a large city organisation and the management structures have struggled to keep up," he said.