Tamworth council work-from-home option judged 'unviable' after asbestos evacuation

That was the assessment behind a decision to spend $2,235,723 on rent and refurbishment costs, while the multi-storey Tamworth Regional Council building is remediated.

On Monday, council chief people officer Marie Resch would not say whether any staff who had worked in the building had made any health complaint as a result of asbestos.

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"I can't disclose any personal staff information. But what I can say is that we've had advice from a hygienist, and from experts in the field, to say the council have actually gone above and beyond and done extra precautions and testing, just to provide reassurance to all of our staff," she said.

According to a report which will go to council for approval on Tuesday, the cost of renting office space in seven commercial buildings, including the old Northern Daily Leader building, is expected to top a million dollars.

State government agency NSW Public Works has been contracted to manage the asbestos removal and refurbishment of the building.

Ms Resch said the big bill won't affect council's ability to maintain roads or force it to raise rates, because the cost will largely come out of a pair of contingency funds.

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She said there were a number of reasons for moving into new office space around town, rather than resorting to working from home to save on rents.

"It's going to be potentially two and a half to three years before we create a new location, and we felt that that was unviable," she said.

"The other reason is, commercially, very early on in the piece when we had to ask staff to work from home temporarily, we got extensive feedback from the business community that it was really hurting them. And after the last number of years, which would be quite difficult economically, we wanted to make sure we could do everything we could to mitigate any further damage to local businesses."

Tamworth deputy mayor Mark Rodda said the decision to keep council employees together as much as could be done, was a good one.

"I realise the COVID pandemic demonstrated that we could work from home," he said.

"But I think to extend that period of working from home for another two to three years, for the period of time Ray Walsh House is being remediated, would probably be a hard ask for the people that are placed in that position.

"I think there was concern about potentially losing professional staff to other local government areas that obviously weren't impacted by this situation, in better working environments."

Cr Rodda said he'd been advised the bill would have a limited impact on budgets but "ultimately it comes out of a pot of cash".

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"My hope would be that the state government would acknowledge that they were the last owner of that building before council purchased it some years ago," he said.

"It'd be my hope that the state government would come to the party in terms of cleaning up the asbestos mess."

Ms Resch confirmed that the trigger for evacuating the building of hundreds of council staff was the failure of the air conditioning.

Asbestos is highly toxic and can cause cancer among other health complaints, and has been banned from new builds for decades, but is still present in most buildings constructed before the 1980s.

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