INTERVIEW WITH MAYOR OF CASEY

The ABC's Ross Booth interviewed City of Casey Mayor Janet Halsal during the half time break in the televised match of the day at Casey Fields today. Thanks to Alpha33 for providing this transcript:

Ross Booth: With the Melbourne Football Club having a temporary base at the Junction Oval, it's been very difficult for them and they've approached you and you're going to accommodate them. What are you going to do?

Janet Halsal: Well, we're certainly looking forward to the Melbourne Football Club coming out hopefully by November to establish some training (facilities) here, some pre season training and also a regular spot in Casey each week throughout the season and we're also very much looking forward to the community benefit programmes that we know they're going to deliver for us.

Ross Booth: They're going to spend a lot of money here. All up $2.1m and you're contributing $1.2m. Is that right?

Janet Halsal: Yes, that's right. We're contributing $1.2m and that money will go to extending the facilities that are already here so that Melbourne Football Club will have gymnasium facilities and office and administration space.

Ross Booth: You're doing this because the City of Casey one of the fastest growing communities in Victoria or in fact the fastest growing in Victoria?

Janet Halsal: Yes, we're the fastest growing municipality in Victoria. We have 235,000 residents, we have 38,000 school aged kids and a lot of them are very keen on football and we're very keen to have the Melbourne Football Club come out and share their experiences with our young people and look forward to them delivering their community benefit programme through our junior and senior football clubs, through our primary schools and in partnership with our businesses.

NOTE: It was also mentioned by the commentary team that an additional $600k will spent on providing terracing on the outer side of the ground. The feedback was generally very positive.

sounds good.

i like the sounds of having a connection to a community. if we're doing all the auskick clinics and stuff with the youngsters out there, surely some of them will be influenced to become young demon supporters...

Also we'll finnally have one quality ground to train on instead of moving from ground to ground all summer. It will be much less distracting and will benefit our pre-season greatly.

Any word on whether we are going to affiliation with Casey Scorpians?

Any word on whether we are going to affiliation with Casey Scorpians?

There wasn't during the interview, but that's not surprising given that those sort of footy matters wouldn't have anything to do with the Council.

We may not see any announcements til after the finals. The scorps are well placed, despite their close loss today and probably focused on that..I would be.

We may not see any announcements til after the finals. The scorps are well placed, despite their close loss today and probably focused on that..I would be.

And hopefully it will happen that way. Sandringham's announcement of the end of its alignment with Melbourne was IMO premature. They should have kept it under their hats until it was appropriate for a joint announcement.