Unique IDFN-0026Description***This function applies to all Councils***
For Councils other than Sydney City Council, absorbed by the City by 1949, see function FUN 29 for details.
The function of determining and providing the services required by the Council's administrative structure, for its efficient and effective operation as a municipal entity. This encompasses the range of services sometimes referred to as "corporate services", for which the service provider and consumer is the Council administration itself, and the officers and managers who comprise it.
Responsibilities lying within this function include: financial management, personnel and human resources management, records and archives administration, supply and tender management, information technology.
In deciding the limits of this function, some responsibilities which otherwise fall within this definition have been excluded and allocated to other functions. This has been done because, although "corporate services" in a strict sense, they have significant impacts outside the Council administration. An example is CF 6, Property management, which includes Council's own extensive building program.
Responsibility for this function is shared between administrative agencies of the Council, and the elected Council and its committees. In the period before about 1914, and especially in the first decades of the Council's existence, Committees, and the Mayor and Aldermen individually, played a relatively larger part in administrative matters. For example, at times they took a direct interest in the appointment of junior staff, introducing an element of patronage into the system (and also transferring to the administrative sphere something of the political competition within the elected Council). In more recent times, a stricter separation has developed between the political agencies (the elected Council and its Committees) which make strategic decisions and set overall policy and the administrative agencies, which operate, in principle, without political interference within this framework.CreationSydney Corporation Act 1842 ss 65, 66 etc.
Appointment of Town Clerk and other officers and payment of salaries. The first Town Clerk was appointed to head the administrative structure at a Council meeting on 16 November 1842.
Local Government Act 1993, esp Chapters 11 (Staffing) and 13 (Accountability).
This schedule refers only to the original legislation establishing the Council and to the legislation under which it currently operates. Council administration is in general terms subject to legisation (for example with respect to requirements for financial reporting) but in detail derives from decisions and policies made by the Council as an elected body, and from administrative decisions and policies made by the chief executive officer or through delegations of his or her authority. Such decisions and policies are made and changed continually and it is not feasible to trace them here.
For municipalities other than the City of Sydney (prior to 1949) : Municipalities Act 1858 s52 (power to appoint officers). Refer to the function CF 29.
