Surf Coast Shire is a Local Government Area in Victoria, Australia. It is located in the southern part of the state, near Geelong. It includes the towns of Aireys Inlet, Anglesea, Lorne, Moriac, Torquay and Winchelsea. It has an area of 1,553 square kilometres. It had a population of 24,124 in 2006. The mayor is Dean Webster a farmer from Torquay.
The shire was formed in 1994, as part of the local government amalgamations that occurred under then-Premier Jeff Kennett. Most of the former Winchelsea Shire, the Barrabool Shire, and the Torquay section of the former City of South Barwon, which was, at that point, part of the City of Greater Geelong, was merged into the new shire. Its first elections were held in 1995.
It is currently one of only a handful of municipalities in Victoria to be unsubdivided. As a result, the entire municipality votes to elect the nine councillors. This was preceded by a ward system where three councillors were elected from Torquay, three from Anglesea and one from Lorne, Winchelsea, Moriac and Aireys Inlet respectively, which was abolished before the 2004 council elections. A position of Deputy Mayor briefly existed from 2004 to 2005, but was abolished for the 2005 mayoral election.
The operation of the shire has been controversial in recent years. In the late 1990s, it set up a business arm, SurfLink, in an attempt to supplement its funding. The effort failed, and the business closed some years afterwards. There were inconsistencies in the accounting, and a large sum of money was missing. However, two state government inquiries failed to come to any conclusions. In addition to the SurfLink saga, the shire is also deeply in debt, which they have only recently begun to address.
Read more about Surf Coast Shire: 2008 Council Election Voting, Current Council, Mayors
Famous quotes containing the words surf and/or coast:
“There was so much of the Indian accent resounding through his English, so much of the “bow-arrow tang” as my neighbor calls it.... It was a wild and refreshing sound, like that of the wind among the pines, or the booming of the surf on the shore.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)
“It cannot but affect our philosophy favorably to be reminded of these shoals of migratory fishes, of salmon, shad, alewives, marsh-bankers, and others, which penetrate up the innumerable rivers of our coast in the spring, even to the interior lakes, their scales gleaming in the sun; and again, of the fry which in still greater numbers wend their way downward to the sea.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)