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ENVIRONMENTAL NEWS AND VIEWS FROM BASS COAST

Enough to drive you wild

4/10/2018

2 Comments

 
Picture
​Cartoon by Natasha Williams-Novak
By Catherine Watson

PHILLIP Island wildlife carers Kaylene Mendola and Colleen Gilbee found plenty of support when the council confiscated their warning signs late last month.
​

The signs warned motorists to go slow to avoid injuring or killing the island’s native wildlife.
PictureThe council's impoundment letter
However, zealous council staff deemed the signs a hazard and “impounded” them. To add insult to injury, the council sent the volunteer carers a bill of $2470 - $130 per sign – to have the signs released from the pound.

According to Kaylene, they had made two attempts to find out what they needed to do to put out the signs and the council never returned the calls.

She posted: “In all the years we’ve been doing the rescues, they [council] have never helped with ongoing support for wildlife but are very happy to forward calls from members of the public that have found injured wildlife.”

Within a day more than 800 people had signed a Change.org petition calling on the council to let the signs remain and the council became the subject of statewide radio talkback outrage.

CEO Paul Buckley quickly moved to smooth troubled waters, telling ABC Radio Melbourne’s Jon Faine, 3AW’s Tony Jones and ABC Gippsland that the council had removed the signs due to safety concerns and VicRoads signage rules.
​
However, he promised all fees would be waived and the council would work with the rescue group to find the best places for their signs. He also paid tribute to their valuable work. 

2 Comments
ian samuel
5/10/2018 09:05:49 am

A case of Council Officers being caught between a "Rock and a hard place" by their zealousness.
Having issued notices to residents for SOB ( Save Our Beach ) signs to be removed or face penalties, the officers acted unwisely to impound the Wild Life warning signs rather than issue warnings and working with the volunteers to prevent wild life road kills.
We all need to support community concerns and to think before we act.

Reply
Meryl Tobin
5/10/2018 09:45:44 am

Mindboggling that it came to this. What happened to commonsense? Apart from wanting to protect what precious wildlife has still managed to survive despite unsustainable development of our environment, I also appreciate signs warning about the possible presence of wildlife for safety reasons for human roadusers. Congrats to Kaylene Mendola and Colleen Gilbee for their community-spirited environmentalism and thank you for looking out for both wildlife and people.

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