Crs Dallas Tout and Georgie Davies have been elected Wagga Mayor and Deputy Mayor respectively, following a city council vote on Monday night. Photos: Jarryd Rowley.
Councillor Dallas Tout has been re-elected as Wagga Wagga Mayor by his fellow councillors for the third time, scoring a 7-2 split in voting over former deputy mayor Cr Amelia Parkins.
Cr Tout was first elected to Wagga Wagga City Council in 2012 and has served continuously since. He first received the nod as deputy mayor in 2014, serving for seven years before being elected mayor in 2022.
Despite his shortened first term due to COVID-19 restrictions, which saw WWCC put on hiatus for the majority of 2020 and 2021, Cr Tout has continued to remain a popular figure of the council, being re-elected as mayor two more times, in 2023 and 2024.
“I am fully passionate about communities. That’s all I care for,” Cr Tout said following the result of the election.
“I resigned from my job to undertake the role of mayor last time [I was elected] because I wanted to give the role my full attention.
“I really look forward to working with Cr Davies [newly elected Deputy Mayor] over the next 12 months. I would like to reiterate that the leadership still sits with the nine councillors, the mayor and deputy mayor are representational.
”There are a lot of procedural things we will obviously serve as figureheads of and policies we may need to overlook, but decisions are still made by the nine elected members.”
Serving alongside Cr Tout will be first-time Deputy Mayor Cr Georgie Davies.
Cr Georgie Davies will serve as Deputy Mayor of Wagga Wagga following a 6-3 vote by her fellow councillors.
Cr Davies was first elected to WWCC in 2021 and will serve as the successor to Cr Amelia Parkins, whom she beat 6-3 in a vote for the position.
“It’s a great honour, obviously, and I’m really humbled to be elected as Deputy Mayor,” Cr Davies said.
“I’m overwhelmed by the support from my fellow councillors. We work as a really good team, as we did last term, and I hope that will continue into this term.
“Mayor Dallas is really quite inspirational. He’s got community at heart, which is very important for a mayor. I think his only agenda is community. So it’s really exciting to be working alongside him.”
There was a short debate by councillors during the new council’s first ordinary meeting last night (Monday, 14 October) about the length of the term of the deputy mayor.
Discussion canvassed whether the term should be the same duration as the mayor’s (two years), with Crs Davies and Tout voting in favour of that amendment. Ultimately, the councillors voted in favour of a shorter, one-year period.
The pair highlighted many issues that need to be addressed by WWCC in the coming term; however, they agreed that in the short term, securing the lease of the Wagga Wagga Airport was the top priority.
“Probably the biggest priority is to really resolve the airport situation that is ongoing,” Cr Tout said.
“There’s a date set already for a meeting, so proceeding on that’s critical for the city. If we don’t resolve the tenure of the airport before the expiry of the lease, then that will not just impact the whole city, that will impact our LGA, it will impact the whole region.
“On top of that, we have the normal ongoing issues including improving our roads, the lake and the special activation precinct as well as the myriad other day-to-day stuff that comes along.”
The new council’s second meeting will be on Monday, 28 October.
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