An understandably bitter Mr Drapack was speaking yesterday after suffering a major setback to his business plans earlier in the week when Lithgow Council voted unanimously to reject a development application for a block of town houses in Park Avenue, Portland.

In voting this way the Councillors overturned a recommendation of their planning officers who believed the project should go ahead.

Mr Drapack said it was the second time the Councillors had rejected their officers’ recommendation on this issue.

“You have to wonder why they spend a lot of money to employ highly trained professionals to examine these applications then take no notice of them,” he said.

“The Councillors must believe they are better qualified than their officers to make these decisions.

“How many elected Councillors have professional expertise?”

Mr Drapack said the Councillors had taken notice of emotional arguments rather than the substantive issues.

“It seems that if someone gets hysterical around here they get their way with Council,” he said.

“The Council sets guidelines for development and all of the guidelines were met in this case.

“There were a lot of fabricated objections and the objectors got away with it.”

Mr Drapack believes the decision had been made before Monday night’s meeting.

He said he had worked with Councils in Adelaide, Melbourne and Sydney on much bigger projects and had never previously encountered a unanimous decision like this.

“There’s something very funny going on,” he said.

He said the Councillors had been ‘brainwashed and were mouthing the same baseless arguments as the protesters without thinking for themselves’.

“Only one house in Park Avenue, at number seven, would have been affected in any way and we took steps to address that,” he said.

“How can anyone go to this Council with any sort of confidence?”

Borrowing a line from Shakespeare he expressed the opinion that ‘there is something rotten in the State of Lithgow’.

Mr Drapack said he would be seeking legal advice to determine his future course of action which could involve an appeal to the Land and Environment Court.