By Violet Li
Tom Kapitany, the owner of the Crystal World Exhibition Centre in Devon Meadows, will run for Cranbourne Gardens Ward in the coming Casey Council elections.
Mr Kapitany said the decision was made after years of problems with Casey Council.
“I’ve just found the council difficult to work with. Every time you work with the council, they’re very aggressive,” he said.
“I really had no interest in coming on the council, but I had dinners with some local people, and I just told them my problems, and they told me their problems. They said you should go on the council.
“This is like two years ago.”
Despite an initial lack of interest in a council position, Mr Kapitany believes changes must happen after an IBAC anti-corruption inquiry. He also took aim at the administrators and what he said was poor maintenance of nature strips, parks and roads.
“They (the administrators) subcontracted everything up from healthcare to landscaping to road maintenance,” he said.
“They (the administrators) are working for the ratepayers, but they don’t see that.”
As a rural landowner, Mr Kapitany’s top priority is to overhaul the Casey town planning division, a long-cherished wish highlighted by his well-known planning battle to display Rosie the Shark at his exhibition centre.
Mr Kapitany rescued Rosie, a two-tonne preserved great white shark, from the closed Wildlife Wonderland in Bass in 2019, and wished to build a permanent exhibition on his premises for educational purposes, which drew considerable opposition from the town planning officers.
He then brought the planning dispute to VCAT and won in 2022, after three years of negotiations and a total of $60,000 in legal bills.
According to Mr Kapitany, the conflicts continued after the VCAT.
“The council was not happy, so they put in a regulation. I had to get all my permits within two months. This was just after Covid. It was impossible to do it,” he recalled.
“I’ve been doing extension after extension, and every time I ask for an extension, it is $1500 to $2,000. They’re raking me financially.”
Mr Kapitany also cited that when he tried to build a granny flat for his parents, the council wouldn’t let him put kitchens inside, which later took him nearly 12 months to negotiate.
He said he went through numerous planning challenges, decision-making delays, and wrangling over bylaws.
“Everything just shows how inflexible the council is, how council officers use their own personal opinions to make judgments, rather than be practical and say what’s good for the community, what’s not good for the community,” he said.
“Everything in council is bureaucracy. There is no logic. There is no simple way of doing things.
“They put blocks in my way. I’ve had to find ways around the blocks that they create. It shouldn’t be so difficult.
“The council lacks decision-making. They won’t make decisions because they’re afraid to take risks or afraid to do things.”
Therefore, Mr Kapitany said if he was elected, he would strive to ensure the town planning division uses “common sense“ and makes decisions in the best interests of the residents of Cranbourne Gardens Ward, rather than blindly following bylaws.
He would work hard towards eliminating the waste of time and ratepayers’ money on “frivolous“ legal actions and VCAT fees.
Public consultation should also be re-introduced for proposed developments and planning, he said.
Mr Kapitany also pointed out he would help stop the rezoning of rural areas for housing developments.
He observed that the council were forcing the rural landholders to sell by overrating them, a practice he would try to cease.
“We’re a rural area. We love the rural environment. We love the land. We love the space around us, and we want to live here in our retirement,” he said.
“When you’re having to pay a $20,000 or $30,000 annual rate, how can you afford that as a retired person?”
In addition to running his exhibition centre, Mr Kapitany is a botanist, geologist, director of the National Dinosaur Museum in Canberra, and an international consultant for museums and universities in natural history and geosciences, especially in China, Mexico, the UK, the US, New Zealand and Indonesia.
“I spent a lot of time travelling around the world, doing all sorts of fun things. I work for governments around the world. I work with small communities,” Mr Kapitany said.
“I understand what communities need and how to develop things and I know how to solve problems.
“I have a very unique way of looking at things. I’m very much into lateral thinking.”
Living in Devon Meadows for more than three decades, Mr Kapitany said he understood what the community needed, what the landholders wanted, and what the farmers wanted.
“For example, the lack of footpaths, the lack of access to public transport for elderly people, like people across the road are quite being quite elderly and they will have to move because the facilities aren’t in place for them to live here in their retirement,” he said.
“I will make sure that the council workers know they don’t work for the council, they work for the ratepayers.
“My home will be my office. People come to my house, and I’ll make them tea or coffee. I’ll sit them there and talk about their problems. I’ll be on one-to-one with them. I’m not going to put myself above everybody else.”
