Pinnacle Integrity has been hired by Dubbo Regional Council to act as an independent investigator.
Subscribe now for unlimited access.
$0/
(min cost $0)
or signup to continue reading
The company was confirmed as the choice to lead the investigation at an extraordinary meeting on Tuesday night. It is expected to cost council $38,000, plus expenses.
On its website, the company describes itself as integrity management specialists who can resolve "workplace conduct, conflicts of interest, bullying, harassment and all forms of serious misconduct".
Council's director organisational performance Dean Frost said the company was "raring to go". He said Pinnacle Integrity was confident they could meet the "relatively challenging" deadline of having everything completed by the July council meeting.
ALSO MAKING NEWS:
- Dream holidays turned into nightmares as clients begin legal action
- Nagol Park bull is grand champion of Dubbo Shorthorn National Show
- Butchered sheep carcasses stripped of valuable meat discovered, police investigating
- Experts warn against bowel cancer complacency as alarming Central West figures revealed
Mayor Stephen Lawrence said the investigation was completely separate from any code of conduct complaints that had been made about council.
He said the role of the investigator was not to see if the code had been breached, but how council had handled the complaints process.
"In short, it's to investigate all code of conduct matters that have been dealt with in the term of council. It's to look at those as we would expect very closely and very carefully to determine whether our complaint processes have worked as they should over the term of council," Cr Lawrence said.
There have been 22 complaints in the current term of council that have been dealt with via the chief executive officer's delegation.
The investigation will also consider if council has followed its regulatory and legal compliance.
"Is the organisation as a whole acting in accordance with the law? Is it acting in accordance with the regulatory constraints that are imposed by the various levels of government? That's something we should be keenly interested in," the mayor said.
Cr Lawrence said members of the community, as well as Dubbo MP Dugald Saunders, had acknowledged there had not always been confidence in council's complaint-handling process.
"This process will well and truly inquire into the reality of the situation and bring back to us a report that can assure us one way or another about the integrity of those processes over the term of council," he said.
I think people will understand why that's an important thing."
Orlander Ruming
Deputy editor at the Daily Liberal, covering council, politics, human interest stories, community news and everything in between.
Deputy editor at the Daily Liberal, covering council, politics, human interest stories, community news and everything in between.
