Ray Walsh House remediation

Background

Council’s administrative headquarters, Ray Walsh House, was vacated in 2022 after the failure of the air conditioning system servicing three of the five floors of the building.

The presence of friable asbestos was found in Vermiculite fire protection sprayed on all structural steel floor members. This meant that the replacement of the air conditioning system was not possible without first removing the asbestos-containing material.

As an employer, Council’s key responsibility under the law is to provide a safe workplace. With the safety and wellbeing of staff foremost, there was a staged relocation of workers from the premises. The priority was determined according to the level of known potential risk to the health of staff.

Since that time, Council staff have been working closely with NSW Public Works to investigate and develop options for the potential remediation and redevelopment of the building.

What's next?

At the 28 May 2024 Ordinary Meeting, Councillors resolved not to remediate the building for reoccupation by Council staff and Council operations.

They also agreed to investigate options to improve accommodation for staff over the medium term of up to 10 years and have requested that the General Manager develop an options paper about the future disposal of Ray Walsh House for further consideration by Council. 

It will take some time for the options report to be completed and it will be a decision to be made by the new Council elected in September 2024. The options paper will be subject to broad community consultation. 

Councillors also agreed to make all documents associated with the Ray Walsh House remediation available for public scrutiny.

Since the end of May, Council staff have been going through Council’s records and collating the documents for publication. Some of the documents contain commercial-in-confidence information or information from third parties and those sections have been redacted to allow Council to legally share them with our community in the interests of transparency and accountability. As of Monday 22 July 2024 they have been published on this page

In the meantime, Councillors agreed it is important to explore accommodation options to reconsolidate staff because the current six locations result in a disjointed and inefficient spread of staff. It is considered that one larger space would be a positive move.

Document contents

Please understand that in line with the Government Information (Public Access) Act 2009 (Section 14 Table 3 (a), (b) & (c) - Business interests of agencies and other persons), some information in the documents has been hidden from view or redacted before their publication. The redaction prevents:

• (a) commercial-in-confidence provisions of a government contract from being revealed;
• (b) the competitive commercial value of any information to any person from being diminished; and
• (c) any person's legitimate business, commercial, professional or financial interests from being prejudiced.

Some documents have been completely redacted. Where this occurs it is to comply with the Copyright Act 1968. Under the Act, because the contents of those documents are not the intellectual property of Tamworth Regional Council and it is not permitted to publish them. However, members of the community who wish to see the documents subject to Copyright can view them by appointment. Please contact our customer service team by calling 6767 5555 to make an appointment, should you wish to view these documents.