My daughter is living with  Ella and some other local teenagers that moved down to Melbourne to look for work and to get ready for university.

I have spoke every day to my daughter since Ella disappeared  and she has been distraught as she has also been a long time friend and has worked with Ella in Bega.

My daughter and her friends were going out every day and night driving all over Melbourne looking for Ella.

It’s one of us parents’ biggest worries when our young ones head of into their first big adventure – we can only pray that all goes well and ends up well when things like this happen.  Ella will have the support of her friends and especially my daughter. We hope she recovers fully and can move on to happier times with loving care from all her friends and family.

Keep up your great work.

I write this in response to the nine elected councillors in thanks to the essence of what you have all outlined.

When both our president and myself had the pleasure of presenting to the Bega Valley Shire Council our objective in declaring our Local Government Area a Fossicking District, we were both very pleasantly surprised and flattered by the outwards response and enthusiasm that we both received in kind from our councillors.

We were faced by a hurdle that was challenging but the surprising thing was we were received by real people who cared for our local area. Real people who wish for a better place for us to enjoy with what the Bega Valley Shire has to offer.

We in the shire are blessed with some of the most ruggedly beautiful country in the world and having such a set of objectives given to our people on our elected committee is sure to be a real challenge.

We have so much to share and enjoy in our great outdoors. We want people to come here and go home with many memories of what we have to offer.We have a fantastic true set of people who will help us all to set out to achieve a class distinction.

I would like to thank you for allowing such an undertaking and the work that both you and we have all done to achieve a positive result that will encourage all of us to share in our rich heritage, outdoors and history that lay within our LGA for others to discover.

Go fossicking, it brings people together.

Bega Valley Shire councillors’ latest contribution to the community came last week in the form of a letter to the editor, replete with wonderfully ironic clichés such as “we are getting on with it” and “governing for the greater good”, along with self-serving assertions like “we put our hands up for the job” and “all current councillors have the community’s best interest at heart”.

The Bega Valley Shire Residents and Ratepayers Association rejects the claim by councillors that they are “representing the community”, given they only respond to submissions from developers or other “friends” of the Zingel Place regime, while routinely ignoring most everyone else.

That councillors would have the community believe that, with the exception of Greens’ Cr Cathy Griff, they are all “independent” is also both laughable.

While the BVSRRA does not dispute council’s claim that Cr Griff was the only candidate “endorsed” by a political party and elected at last September’s council election, the suggestion the rest have no political loyalties or affiliations is entirely false.

Claims that councillors don’t vote “on party political lines” or otherwise use council meetings as a platform to push their own interests are patently absurd, as has been repeatedly demonstrated by a number of councillors.