Adelaide City councillor wants to abolish lavish dinners and alcohol in chamber
The City Council currently spends about $750 on dinner every meeting – an expense one member calls a disgraceful waste and wants ditched.
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Alcohol and dinners would be abolished under an Adelaide City councillor’s plan to end the “disgraceful waste of ratepayer money”.
Cr Alex Hyde will ask the council at its next meeting to remove set meals and drinks from the chamber entirely because not as many people were attending.
The council spends about $750 on dinner per meeting, not including alcohol, for its elected members and senior staff.
It would save about $30,000 per year.
He said the council should instead ask local businesses to supply a “light meal” — such as sandwiches — for them to eat before meetings.
Cr Hyde said there were generally 20 settings at the table, but only about 11 diners attended each week.
“The dinners currently are a disgraceful waste of ratepayer money,” he said.
“It is pretty clear that no one attends these dinners any more — and providing alcohol to councillors is completely outside of community expectations.”
He said there was alcohol in the elected members’ lounge, which should also be removed as a “cost-cutting measure”.
Currently, catering business Epicure supplies food prepared by what its website describes as “award-winning chefs”.
It is a two-course buffet service.
Cr Hyde said the council should open a tender for local businesses to provide light meals — which he thought would cost about $20 a person.
“It just makes more sense to be supporting ratepayers in the city, rather than paying for something people do not eat,” he said.
Under the existing protocol, councillors and members of the Council Assessment Panel are invited to have dinner and wine in the Queen Adelaide Room.
The council has been asked, by The Advertiser, how many bottles of wine, and what brand, were bought for each meeting. Its reply is awaited.
Deputy Lord Mayor Houssam Abiad is behind a push to support local businesses through his “micro-tender” proposal.
The ‘micro-tenders’, which are about providing opportunities to “boost sales”, would be placed on a website and open to CBD and North Adelaide businesses.
If they win the tender, they will supply the food for the meeting.
The council is currently developing policies about how the initiative would work.
“A perfect idea of a microtender is to have small to medium hospitality businesses to cater for the city,” Cr Abiad said.
“On Pirie St, for example, there are so many snack bars and cafes — we have great businesses with incredible produce so we might a well support them.”
The motion is expected to go before the council next Tuesday, September 24.
