Out here in Ryde, there's a hole in the ground that just won't go away. Since 2021, when the old Civic Centre building came down, the site at 1 Devlin Street has sat vacant, a massive excavation that serves as a daily reminder of what the council calls bungled management. This week, council staff have raised the stakes again with serious probity concerns about how the redevelopment is being handled.
According to reporting from the Sydney Morning Herald, Ryde Council has asked all councillors to report any discussions they have had with developers regarding the civic centre project. The move comes after staff received information suggesting backroom conversations may have occurred outside official channels. It's the kind of governance problem that makes residents shake their heads; when your own council can't trust its elected members to keep development negotiations on the books, something's gone badly wrong.
The building was demolished in 2021 by the council's previous administration with a plan to build something new in its place. A combination of incompetence and mishandling of funding sources led the community not only to lose a building of local historical significance, but left nothing to replace it. The company tasked with building something new, walked off the job, and the community was never told why.
The civic centre itself is worth understanding. Designed in the Post-War International Style and opened in 1964, the building had been extended in 1972 to include the Civic Hall as an event and function space. By modern standards it wasn't pretty, but refurbishment options over its final years were estimated to cost between $10 million and $15 million, which could have solved the present predicament, but these options were kept hidden from the public and local community.
The probity directive this week shows how far governance has deteriorated at Ryde. The council previously referred itself to ICAC over the handling of the earlier civic centre project. Now, years later, as the council tries to attract new tenders for the site, staff are essentially checking whether their own councillors have been cutting deals privately with potential developers.
What we're seeing here is both a financial and governance failure. The site has generated no revenue for nearly half a decade while the council's credibility has taken a beating. Some argue that any oversight mechanism, even a probity check, is a sign of good governance now. Others counter that a properly functioning council shouldn't need to police its own councillors like this. The reality is somewhere in between; yes, probity checks matter, but so does the culture that makes them necessary in the first place.
The council says it is pushing ahead to do something about the site. The procurement approach was amended to a single stage open Request for Tenders process, and the council is now inviting tenders for a long-term lease of the former civic centre site. Whether that leads anywhere will depend largely on whether the new oversight works and, more importantly, whether the council can restore public confidence that decisions are being made in the open.