Council Staff: mentality and tactics

The following description of the mentality and tactics of Council Staff is based on my interactions with senior Staff and does not necessarily apply to the people under them, who are in many instances just ordinary people who happen to work for the Council.

When dealing with senior Staff you should keep in mind the following quote by Churchill.

Senior Council Staff will expend limitless amounts of time and resources trying to find ways to avoid fixing problems; only after they scrape the absolute bottom of the barrel will they try to do the right thing.

Our Local Mayor tells residents that our Council has staffing problems because private enterprise and other Councils poach the Staff, but strangely none of the senior Staff are ever poached.

Gaslighting

If you have a problem with the Council, sure, the problem might be you. Perhaps you just have unrealistic expectations, or you are a serial complainant with nothing better to do, but even if you aren’t, the Staff will gaslight you into thinking that you are, especially if you are a female resident.

White-anting

If you take your complaint to one of the Councillors, the Staff will do everything they can to make the Councillors believe that you are unreasonable, threatening and unhinged.

This white-anting always happens behind your back, and the Councillors rarely bring these allegations back to you, so you never have the opportunity to defend your actions; just assume that it is happening, because it most certainly is.

Mis and mal-information

One of the most frustrating problems when dealing with Council Staff is that they often no idea what they are doing and can get away with saying anything without it being challenged.

Often the mis and mal-information that they spread happens behind your back, so you have no idea that it exists.

This mis and mal-information usually makes no sense, and is sometimes internally contradictory, but there just isn’t a mechanism to challenge it.

As hard as it might seem to accept, there often isn’t any concept within the Council that Staff can say anything wrong because what the Staff say has no currency at all; even if you prove them demonstrably wrong nobody cares.

They want you to take legal action

The Staff want you to take legal action because as soon as you do they don’t need to deal with you and it is costing you money each and every time your lawyer deals with them.

The Council doesn’t have access to competent internal legal advice and once you take legal action against them they can hand the problem over to their insurer.

In the long run it doesn’t matter how much it costs everybody, or what legal precedents end up being set, all they care about is that it is no longer their personal burden to deal with.

Repeating Mistakes

Rest assured that whatever Council problem you have is being experienced by others, has been experienced by others for decades, and will be experienced by others for decades to come.

If you manage to get traction with the resolution of your problem the many numerous attempts of Council to avoid fixing the problem with actually make the problem worse, and increase its scope.

Falsus in uno, falsus in omnibus

If you went to a lawyer and they gave you completely wrong advice, you’d probably go to another lawyer next time. Perhaps you are unsure that the advice was wrong, so you might go back another time, but at some point in time you’d realise that you can’t keep using that lawyer.

Council’s don’t operate like that. No matter how many times you prove a senior Staff member wrong there is no way to suggest that perhaps they don’t know what they are talking about because they are the person responsible for that area and they are never going to leave or be fired.

Each and every time that person makes a claim you have to disprove it on the basis that it is right to start with because the person saying it is Council’s subject matter expert.

Scapegoating

The Council will always start by blaming you for their own mistakes, and if they don’t get any traction with that, they will look for somebody else to pass the problem onto.

They have absolutely no moral problem with finding someone else to foist their mistakes onto.

Kicking the can down the road

The mentality of Council Staff is that any every problem will somehow fix itself if left to fester for long enough; you might die, they might die, and even if you don’t they will make it to their next leave and then retirement.

The best case scenario for them is that you get sick and tired of dealing with them and give up, or snap and give them the excuse to call you unreasonable so they can blacklist you.

Policy is either the word of God, or nothing more than a suggestion

Council Policy is created by Council Staff and put before the Councillors, who are meant to read, debate and pass the Policy. In reality few Councillors read the Policy they pass and therefore have no knowledge of the Policies that exist.

These Policies are usually not run past Council’s own internal legal counsel, they are often poorly written, ambiguous and based on various fallacies.

Council Staff are often completely unaware of their own Policies, even when they relate to their own area of operation, and the Policies are only ever referenced when the Council are looking for a way to shut down a resident complaint.

Any ambiguity in the Policy will be used against the resident, and where no ambiguity exists ambiguity will be created with no consideration of fairness, reasonableness, or future negative implications to the Council.

If a reason can be found under Policy to deny you resolution, the Staff will act like the Policy is the word of God, but if the Policy is to your benefit, the Policy is nothing other than a suggestion by the Councillors to the Staff.

It is not uncommon for Policy to be passed with no expectation it will ever be followed; it is only passed so that it can be claimed there is a Policy to cover that area. If a problem comes up, the Staff can say we have a Policy for that, and that’s often enough to keep the Councillor’s happy.

Staff are always busy wasting their time

If you meet with Senior Staff for a scheduled meeting, they never have a written agenda, rarely take notes, never create action items nor publish minutes.

If your problem has gone on long enough the Staff will agree to a meeting, sometimes with the Mayor or CEO, and that meeting is nothing more than them giving you one hour of their valuable time in which nothing you say makes any difference at all.

No matter how ridiculous and rude the staff are to you the CEO or Mayor will just pretend like it is all normal and you have absolutely no way to reference what was said to you in future correspondence.

Even if you create your own agenda ahead of time, send it to them and ask them to add their own items to the agenda, they will go along with the process and then refuse to acknowledge the agenda has any status during your meeting.

The Staff still work like it is 1980

Never assume that the Staff operate in an environment that has any of the features of the contemporary business world.

At best road maintenance is recorded on a spreadsheet but million dollar projects might also just be tracked in somebody’s head.

Don’t assume that people read their emails or that there are GPS trackers on the Council trucks to ensure they aren’t used on the weekends for non-Council work.

Corruption is so ubiquitous it isn’t corruption

There is no real insentive for Council staff not to be corrupt because Councils are inherently corrupt.

The Council will use satellite images to see if you have built something illegally, but any allegation of corruption against a Council employee would never result in the use of any technology such as satellite images. Even if you had video of a Council manager on the street counting money handed to her in a brown paper bag, the CEO wouldn’t want to see that video because it would be considered a breach of Staff privacy.

The silent treatment

If you ask Council staff a question that they don’t want to answer, they will just pretend you didn’t ask the question at all, and not just in emails, but on phone calls and even Council meetings.

Their hope is that you just move and keep talking, on but if you don’t they will just freeze and their will be silence for as long as it takes for you to move on.

Tone Policing

Consider the following quote…

“Could somebody please come and cut down this 10m tree that is about to fall on the roadway because it could injure somebody”

To any normal person it is a polite requesat, but to Council staff who expect to be completely unnaboutable, it is a threatening demand because you are “making a demand on their time” and listing a “consequence”.

Moral Relativism

While your polite request might be categorised as a threatening demand, when Council says the following it is just a polite request.

“Please pay your rates to avoid interest and debt collection costs”.