Leaving Pakenham

AFTER living at Pakenham South and Pakenham all of my 70 years, and my wife living in Toomuc Valley and Pakenham for all her life, we finally made a decision to move out of the place.
The town of Pakenham has gone from a nice little country town to the most disgusting place I have lived in.
There are a few things the ratepayers would like to know I am sure, as to what percentage the CEO gets out of the rate revenue, and to why they need 300 employees in their new offices that we hear are too small already, and that you cannot get anyone to leave their nice air-conditioned office because they might get cold or wet.
Doing a lot of travelling around Victoria, NSW, South Australia and driving back from Darwin through the Northern Territory and South Australia, most of the truck stops and little towns are cleaner than the town of Pakenham.
The councillors are all talk leading up to an election, but after they get into council they go quiet, and very little is heard from them after that.
All talk before an election, dead silence after, except when they go and borrow another $20 million, making this shire the deepest in debt in Victoria.
And what can we see for it – some oversheeting of Pakenham streets, that is so thin you can still see the original bitumen through it.
Who is supervising this, if anybody – if somebody is they want to learn a bit about roadworks, which cannot be done from inside an office.
I also wonder how much of this money is being used by councillors to do more university courses at the ratepayers’ expense.
They (the council) will try to take credit for new construction on the Pakenham Kooweerup Road, but if you look into it you will find out that is a VicRoads road.
They have also done some new road construction on Ballarto road as well, and are that confident in the new road they still have an 80km/h speed limit on it, which nobody obeys.
After our last trip away we left on 31 October, returning on15 November. When we left the nature strip in The Avenue was well over 300mm high, when we returned it was higher – it had not been cut in all that time. If your nature strip was that high you would be getting a letter from council telling you to mow it – one set of rules for council and another set for the ratepayer.
Nice small town to a disgusting place, thanks councillors..
Daryl Rogers,
Pakenham NO MORE.