Tea Gardens Slipway Association Inc.
2019 Annual General Meeting
President’s Report
10 November 2019

Ladies and gentlemen; welcome to the Tea Gardens Slipway Association Incorporated, 2019 Annual General Meeting. NSW Fair Trading requires the Association to hold its AGM within six months of the Association’s 30 June 2019 end of financial year.

As President of the Tea Gardens Slipway Association Incorporated for the past 12 months, I have a responsibility to report to you on the Association’s business activities during that period. As you would appreciate, we hold regular management committee meetings throughout the year. They are a requirement of this Association’s Constitution and are conducted in accordance with the requirements of the Associations Incorporation Act of 2009 and the amendments to that Act which became law on 1 September 2016.

Since our last AGM, there has been significant progress made on our project to improve our environmental compliance, but in saying that, I believe we still have a long way to go. The state government departments we have been dealing with to get this project approved are Mid Coast Council, Mid Coast Council Water division, Crown Lands, the Environment Protection Authority and Marine Parks.

To give you a little background, the Association submitted it Development Application to Council in early 2017. Due to the commercial nature of our operations, council forwarded details of our application to the various government departments previously mentioned. This helped flush-out the various inputs from these departments as to their particular requirements to be satisfied.

As time rolled on whereby we were dealing with each department’s requirements in isolation from the others, it became clear to me that it was time to get everyone in the same room so as we all could get on the same page. This happened in early May of this year.

Unfortunately, the meeting resulted in an Order placed on Council by Crown Lands, as they perceived the slipway should “cease unsafe activities” due to the potential to cause pollution. As a result, we were forced to shut down the facility as we could not comply with the requirements of the Order. While the closure caused inconvenience to some members, our biggest concern was that we had lost our ability to respond to a vessel in distress and thereby offer protection to our river. This community no longer had a marine emergency response facility at its disposal.

You should appreciate that the management committee viewed this situation as totally unacceptable and through the help of not only the membership of this association, but others outside the association, including the general public and the media, we were able to have the Order successfully reviewed which allowed us to resume operations about six weeks later. The response by the citizens of our towns was overwhelming.

Further, it became apparent to me, that we would not be able to manage this project without outside help. The help we needed was someone with the resources and experience to steer us through the myriad of government requirements that had to be satisfied. I was introduced to Mr Bob Lander of Tattersall and Lander, and met with him one rainy Saturday morning, the day after the meeting with the various government departments. Bob immediately recognised the importance of our community project and since getting onboard, has made an enormous difference to advancing our cause.

After many surveys and plans drawn up by Bob’s company, soil testing and a complete Environmental Site Assessment by RCA Australia, a completed heritage report on the site and the hundreds of pages of documentation that has been produced, we finally received an approved DA and stamped plans on 24 September 2019.

Where to from here? You could be forgiven for thinking we now get started on the construction phase of the project. Unfortunately there is still a lot to do before we get to that point. Bob Lander and I have been working through the requirements of the DA and many other issues related to obtaining a Construction Certificate. I expect we still have many months before we will start on the constructions phase.

Now that we have approved plans, we are also chasing quotes from various contractors to perform the construction works. This is necessary on two counts:
1. To get a handle on the construction costs so as we can determine if the whole project is feasible, and 2. We need this information in our attempts to seek government funding for the project.

Bob and I are also working on the funding application to the third round of Boating Now funding through Maritime Infrastructure Delivery Office, which is part of Roads and Maritime Services. There is only $18 million available to be spent across the whole state and therefore it may still prove difficult to get a big slice of those funds.

Members know that we have installed some modifications at the slipway to better collect our waste water and avoid pollution of the Myall River as an interim measure. The drainage pit and bund wall are doing their job as designed. We have had some reliability issues with the pump we installed to transfer our waste water. We hope we are over those at the moment, but time will tell. But all of this resulted in other issues to be resolved.

While we can successfully capture and store our waste water, we have had trouble in meeting the trade waste water requirements so as the waste water contractor can take it away and dispose of it lawfully. We received a one-off approval for disposal last week and I met as late as last Friday with a representative of Mid Coast Council Water division in seeking solutions while we are in this interim position.

Our biggest problem is salt. Salt causes the Total Dissolved Solids in the waste water to increase and there are limits as to what the reception facilities can handle. I can talk more about this during our question and answer period after the closure of this meeting.

So where to from here? In the immediate future, more things will change; there will be more requirements for members to adhere to and things will likely get harder until we finalise this upgrade. The challenge we have is that we are a user group facility, not a commercial facility. Therefore our ability to control and manage what happens at the slipway is totally in the hands of the membership. If one member does not adhere to the requirements of this association, we will likely be shut down, forever. Once you earn the label of “not to be trusted” by the authorities, it is extremely difficult to regain that trust with them.

The various documentation that I have written was not to help me fill in my day, but it is there to help members understand their legal and moral obligations to this association. Please don’t think they are a load of crap, but I will always be happy to receive any member’s version of any of the documents that have been produced to date.

Apart from the emergency slippings that have been accomplished throughout the year, we have not had any notable incidents at the slipway to report.

Our membership numbers continues to be stable at around 80 to 85 members.

I can report to you that the slipway was utilised for only 41% of the available time in the past 12 months, as compared with 55% the previous year and 47% the year before that. While this year’s statistic was likely affected by the period we were shut down, it is still clear to me that we are nowhere near any booking inconvenience capacity. This reinforces the changes we made in our new Constitution at our Special General Meeting on 14 July this year. I can report that our new Constitution was registered with NSW Fair Trading on 15 August 2019.

While there is a management committee in place, and they are charged with the responsibility to manage the affairs of the Association, it is up to every member of this Association to police the activities of all other members. This is in the interest of our membership and the Association as a whole. Providing what assistance you are able, helps manage a strong and operationally compliant organisation.

The current committee, who will step down from their positions today, have all donated their personal time to ensure the slipway is well managed, well maintained and operationally compliant. Members need to realise that it is not just the time attending committee meetings, but there is often a huge amount of time outside of meetings that they willingly donate. I wish to thank each of the committee members for their efforts and support throughout the past 12 months and wish them every success should they stand for re-election today.

The notice for this AGM, called on members to indicate their interest in serving on the association’s management committee. The secretary received only one response from a member who has not served on the committee before. It is healthy for there to be some small turnover of committee members as it can bring fresh ideas. Conversely, it would not be advantageous to have a large turnover. Nearly all the members of the management committee have served for many years, some for decades. I would ask that members keep this in mind for next year’s AGM.

Again I would like to thank Mr Gordon Grainger who is the spokesperson for the Myall River Action Group for helping me with contacts to various politicians and government heads, relating to moving our project forward and thereby ensuring the appropriate level of focus.

Also I would like to thank Ben Hanson of Tea Gardens Hotel who makes this room available to us to conduct this meeting and the various management committee meetings throughout the year. The pub could charge for the use of this room, but they don’t in our case. You could help return the favour by staying for lunch as we have this room available.

Finally, I thank you all for attending today and I am happy to answer any questions relating to my annual report to the membership.

Paul Bendy

President