By Chris Thomson | posted on June 28, 2018
BUNNINGS shoppers harbouring a beef about the productivity of elected officials need to beware they do not complain to the wrong city councillor.
The Weekender does not issue the warning lightly, following a chance encounter between a riled-up ratepayer and a hyper-informed city councillor at the hardware outlet on Albany Highway recently.
At a council meeting on Tuesday night, Ray Hammond told his elected colleagues, city staff, three people in the public gallery, two journalists and a mysterious young man taking camera footage that he recently found himself on the wrong end of a tongue lashing.
“I was pulled up in there at Bunnings by someone bagging Council,” Cr Hammond recounted.
He said the ratepayer started haranguing him about purported lack of time spent by some councillors on civic affairs.
Unbeknown to Cr Hammond’s tormentor, the city councillor was primed to deliver a smack-down.
He told the meeting that days before the Bunnings rebuke he had cause to complete a statutory declaration reporting on every piece of council work he had done that took more than 10 minutes.
Cr Hammond’s tally for one month came in at 52 hours and 24 minutes.
“I was able to whack the person around the ears about this and it made me feel really good,” he said.
Sniggers ensued from Cr Hammond’s colleagues and at least one member of Albany’s Fourth Estate.
