Let there be light in the post Rimmer era

The sky above Melbourne Town Hall is looking brighter following the announcement on August 1 that CEO Ben Rimmer is moving on.

New Lord Mayor Sally Capp brought an unprecedented freshness to the role when she bounced into the job on May 24 with a big smile on her face.

The smile is still there and it is likely to remain now that she has an opportunity to create a new culture at the City of Melbourne.

Even without the Robert Doyle saga (which is yet to conclude) and the election of Cr Capp, Mr Rimmer would have unlikely been reappointed to the role by councillors.

Mr Rimmer appears to possess an extreme amount of confidence in his own ability to run the show without reference to our elected representatives. He was simply unsuited to local government.

It remains to be seen whether the massive loss of senior staff and corporate knowledge during Mr Rimmer’s tenure can be repurposed as an opportunity for renewal. The key will be whether or not the legacy batch of Rimmer-appointed senior managers are actually talented enough for the roles they occupy.

The new City of Melbourne CEO should make it clear that staff are rewarded and promoted based on merit – and that the converse of this also applies.

But perhaps the biggest challenge for the new CEO is to unwind the city’s stifling culture of secrecy.

The windows need to be thrown up, curtains cast aside and the doors opened so that the now-bright sky above the Town Hall can filter into the dark, musty hallways and closed offices. After all, sunlight is the best disinfectant.

The City of Melbourne was by no means an open book when Mr Rimmer took the reigns in February, 2015. And former Lord Mayor Robert Doyle didn’t help things by insisting on an “orderly classroom”. But citizens have even less right to know what is going on these days.

The City of Melbourne’s default starting point is to withhold information. How it reached this point is a mystery – no doubt evolving over decades to the point where it now considers itself some sort of corporation and has lost sight of the fact that it is actually a local council.

On July 3, its Future Melbourne Committee had a single item to consider. At its July 17 meeting, it had two items from management to consider. The direction and tone of this desire to exclude councillors from decision-making comes from the top. The appointment of a new CEO is an opportunity to reset the paradigm.

Even when councillors are involved, the most recent state government report into the performance of Victorian councils shows that the City of Melbourne makes 28.85 per cent of its decisions in confidential session. That makes it the most secretive council in the state, if you discount the Shire of East Gippsland where officers have no delegated powers to make any decisions.

City of Melbourne councillors could do well by starting their search for a new CEO within the municipalities that respect and value their residents’ right to know.

The same state survey showed that two councils – the City of Greater Dandenong and Mt Alexander Shire – made ALL their 2016-17 decisions in public.

Obviously there is more to look for in a CEO than that. And the City of Melbourne is also a capital city council and has special needs, circumstances and challenges.

But Melbourne has a fantastic opportunity to stop the rot now. The current group of councillors are naturally cohesive and Lord Mayor Capp has no opponents in the chamber.

An ideal chief executive will firstly be steeped in the values of open and transparent government. Then they will have the character, nature and capacity to transform the City of Melbourne’s internal culture.

After that, they need to the best local government administrator in the state. Not much to ask for, is it?