Protect ratepayers from advertising

McDonald's fast food outlet will sponsor Woy Woy netball (Peninsula News, May 14).

Let us hope this won't result in multiple displays of the fast food logo on public land like the visual pollution of Coca Cola logos at the Peninsula Leisure Centre that displaced the Woy Woy Memorial Pool.

Gosford Council in 2006 subsidised the advertising of a foreign-owned company and caused it be delivered into the private homes of its ratepayers at council's expense, and in the absence of ratepayers consent entered them into a lottery in an effort to encourage them to pay their rates annually instead of quarterly.

I recommend that Gosford Council in future:

1. Does not indulge in unfair trading, or make misleading or deceptive statements to gain a financial advantage.

2. Protects the privacy of ratepayers and does not cause private commercial advertising material to be delivered into ratepayers' private homes at council's expense.

3. Does not enter ratepayers, in the absence of their specific consent, into a lottery that benefits the profit of a private business.

John Collins Woy Woy