Aside from the crises of pandemic, he inherited a council executive management in disarray. A Victorian Ombudsman report into the City of Ballarat had alleged improper conduct on the part of the CEO Justine Linley and the city's long-serving director of infrastructure and environment Terry Demeo.

Both were soon gone, along with the rest of the council's highly-paid directors and other senior staff, as interim CEO Janet Dore cut a firebreak to the past administration.

Daniel Moloney gave an extensive interview to The Courier.

"I was the only person in Town Hall; I was trying to find some stationery and had to nick down to Woollies to get some pens, basically," Daniel Moloney says.

"I was working remotely with an interim CEO trying to have online meetings with councillors and new councillors. We were going through a recruitment process that ultimately led to us hiring Evan King. When he walked in the door on the 15^th of February I knew at that point I had an ally who could help us get things back on track.

"The first few months were pretty difficult; I think the whole councillor group just breathed a sigh of relief once Evan started, because we could get past the turmoil and settle into a calm, productive approach to managing our issues."

Cr Moloney says he sought a second term as mayor in order to achieve the goals disrupted by the turmoil of that time and of the pandemic, which saw Ballarat undergo six lockdowns. He says while the council did achieve progress on some projects, there was no guidebook on what to do, what rules to follow, in an unprecedented health crisis.

"All levels of government, including ours, were trying to make the best of a pretty awful situation," he says.

"We're looking forward to a point when we can actually be more strategic again, rather than just jump to whatever the restrictions of the day require us to do. When you're running more than 80 different community services, need to have planned a, b, c, and d for every one of them, and adapt to the restrictions of the day, it's draining on staff.

"So it's good to be able to have our entire organisation hopefully back at a point where we can more reasonably predict what's about to happen. If you can't even predict how an event's going to unfold next week, that makes a level of tension across the organisation that can be difficult to manage.

"That's why it was so important to have someone like Evan in the (CEO) role, because he brings that calming influence; he's able to say, 'we need to have multiple versions of the plan, but that's okay. We'll still get by.' And all the drama is just stripped out."

Cr Moloney says the past year has enabled council to put in place processes to better manage projects, and to better articulate why projects council is lobbying for are important to the future of the city. He hopes 2022 will deliver on council planning. So what are the most important projects?

"There's a few projects that have consistently failed in our lobbying, and I think they've failed because we haven't been able to articulate to state and federal governments the business case data behind it, Cr Moloney says.

"Dyson Drive duplication is one. We probably didn't have contemporary traffic stats or design plans to be able to walk up to the state government and say, 'This is an important road that's worthy of duplication'. And even then, when you do present there's over 10,000 vehicles a day using it, that barely raises an eyebrow compared to some of the streets and roads in Melbourne, for instance.

"So making an economic case which can actually show, on one hand, it's about moving people from A to B, but it can also unlock land opportunities between the two highways, the Glenelg and Western Highways, which could be used as either Circular Economy precincts or innovation precincts or even just commercial development. It's not just all about housing, it's articulating how a road can also be an economic driver."

What about the outer reaches of the shire? How is Ballarat going to cope overall with increasing population and pressure to spread? How are we facing our infill challenges?

"Start with the last bit first: the issue of infill development. I don't think it's been seriously addressed for some time. It's an aspirational goal of achieving a 50/50 infill versus greenfield development; I don't think we've come anywhere near that.

"Our first really clear signal to the community, developers, and to our planners, that we're serious about infill development was by approving Lyons St North. But that's just one element, and until you have a couple of test cases which demonstrate there's a market for it, that people want to live in a city again, that those type of apartments and townhouses are bought, then it's still a bit of a slow burn.

"Our growth plan at the moments is clearly to the west and then eventually moves to the north, the other side of Mount Rowan. I would like to see us actually have a few more serious infill development projects underway before we start looking at Mount Rowan.

"Otherwise it becomes a situation of greenfield dominance, because it's where cheap land and cheap developments can take place. But it's still a limited stock of housing. And we haven't really made much progress on diversifying the housing stock.

"One of the the greatest disappointments I've had in my five years as a councillor is the struggle to make progress for Miners Rest. It has struggled to attract the commercial investment I think the area really deserves. Plenty of other parts of the city, especially the west, continue to attract a lot of commercial development.

"Miners Rest is seeing housing development interest. But I'm still surprised that there hasn't been a take-up of commercial premises: cafes, restaurants, doctors' clinics, pharmacies - those type of things the residents told us they want and are all part of the township plan."

"And the great disappointment is that we spent, (former councillor) Grant Tillett in particular, spent three years working really hard with local communities to get that township plan in shape and eventually agreed to. And then a directive from DELWP meant it couldn't be formally endorsed.

"After we pushed it through the council chamber, on that first attempt, and got it approved, along after that, and then DELWP, have a directive, they want us to have a city-wide housing strategy. That makes some sense, it's not it's not an unreasonable request to do a city-wide housing strategy, rather than just township plans. But it takes ages; it could take a couple of years before that's formally done. And in the meantime, Miners Rest have waited since I think 1996 for a township plan, finally had one - and it hasn't been endorsed.

"There's a couple things like that, which still feel like unfinished business."

Like the railway gates saga, perhaps?

"Oh my god. I said to people, once that train went through there, there'll be at least a year before something's done on that. And people said to me, 'No, you're crazy, it can't possibly sit that long,' and it turned out it's taken a lot longer than that.

"It's embarrassing. I'm surprised at the lethargic progress on that project, how lethargic the rail authorities have been on this one. I don't think anyone at the rail authority should be blaming the pandemic for the delays. There's plenty of work that's been able to continue on during the pandemic, we've done quite a lot of projects ourselves.

"I think that to probably go for another summer experiencing them closed is beyond belief. We're trying to get a city activated again in the New Year and Christmas, and one of our major thoroughfares is still closed off. It just beggars belief."

Today is Cup Day, it's a public holiday in Ballarat. Will it likely stay being being a public holiday for the future?

"All I can say with real certainty is the case for this four-year council term, so there's still a couple more years to go. At the start of every four-year term, we'll set that public holiday and now it's been set, I suspect it will probably stay at Melbourne Cup day until there's a better alternative.

"What I mean by that is the Ballarat Show has shifted its thinking: initially it was either going to not go ahead due to COVID - that's been the case - or that they were going to remove the Friday activities in the first place and just have maybe a Friday night fireworks and family entertainment in the evening, and focus on the Saturday and Sunday.

"So that negates the need for a Friday public holiday anyway, to support the show. We have to support the Agricultural Society generally in their move out towards the Mount Rowan area, and we'd love to work with them unlocking the central parcel of land on Howitt Street. Businesses have lobbied pretty strongly for a long time to get that public holiday aligned with the Melbourne public holiday."

Does the City of Ballarat have a role to play in supporting those businesses which are doing the right thing in terms of enforcing the government's mandate and checking vaccinations?

"I'm not really aware of any businesses that are doing the wrong thing in the first place. If there are, they haven't been brought to my attention. We've got a role to help businesses recover. And our role is to be proportional to the financial capability versus the other two tiers of government. So we've got a million dollars that has been put aside to help support the recovery. We think only about $250,000 of that will be taken up by businesses as grants, and we have that set aside.

"The other $750,000 will dedicate to a whole range of activations over summer period, particularly toward the the arts sector, which has done it especially tough. And that has a double benefit in activating the arts and in turn to people going out to see live, especially outdoor live, performances, hopefully then visit the businesses around them as well. So it's kind of a double benefit. I think council has a role in that regard.

"I think that the entire four-year term we'll still have a requirement to continue to help businesses, probably for most of the four years of this council term. I don't COVID is just going to be a case of impacts for year one and two. There'll be residual impacts ongoing for a couple of years. And we'll need to tailor support accordingly.

"We are there to help provide information and probably link businesses in with grants and other areas of support, for instance, and we do that all the time."

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