A decent chicken schnitzel and a few games of bowls, followed by $20 T-Bone steak and bingo night might constitute a usual laid-back Tuesday at Armidale City Bowling Club but proceedings are likely to be quite disrupted today in the midst of a public hearing and forum to discuss NSW local council amalgamations.

Today it’s the turn of mayors and general managers from Bellingen, Uralla, Guyra, Clarence Valley, Nambucca, Gwydir, Tamworth and Namoi, alongside academics from the University of New England, to pile into the fray and the heat is most definitely on: for local councils and the government alike.

Previous public hearings (part of a NSW Parliamentary inquiry into Local Government) have been fiery, with Greens MP David Shoebridge hitting back at NSW Local Government Minister Paul Toole’s assertion at yesterday’s public hearing in Wagga that councils and communities were fighting amalgamations because they are driven by “self-interest”.

“Rather than producing credible evidence to support the government’s forced amalgamation agenda, the Local Government Minister has taken to insulting local councils,” Mr Shoebridge said.

“The Minister has again refused to rule out forced amalgamations despite no credible evidence, community support or parliamentary majority to achieve it.

“Confusion and arrogance are a potent mix that is undermining confidence in the Coalition’s Fit for the Future agenda for local government.”

News broke at the weekend that NSW Local Government Minister Paul Toole was secretly developing an option sack the state’s 152 councils lock stock and barrel, appoint administrators and push through amalgamations. The accusation – later denied by Mr Toole’s office which said he had “no such plan” – led to Local Government NSW threatening “civil disobedience”.

The ruckus over merger options comes as reports surface that the Baird government is taking the pulse of its backbenchers and circulated a draft list of possible council mergers to Coalition MPs to ask them to return to their constituencies and gauge the potential for an electoral backlash.

Councils are certainly not out of the woods yet. Last week, a leaked briefing from the Office of Local Government (OLG) suggested that NSW Premier Mike Baird plans to tinker with the Local Government Act to make it easier to force council mergers using “a new structural framework for local government” ahead of the September 2016 local government elections.

The government hotly denied it had entertained such impure thoughts, insisting it was more interested in “independent and sustainable councils” and things like two-year mayoral terms, postal voting and ongoing professional development programs for councillors.

If the Act remains unchanged, the government would need to go through the Boundaries Commission or to the Chief Executive of OLG to force mergers and confront the trauma of more rounds of public inquiries and submissions, something it will be especially keen to avoid, given the proximity of the September elections.

Other options include trying to shoehorn the mergers through parliament but the government faces an uphill battle with the Shooters and Fishers Party and the Christian Democrats, as well as Labor and the Greens, all stating their opposition to the cause.

NSW councils submitted their Fit for the Future applications in June and the Independent Pricing and Regulatory Tribunal (IPART) will make recommendations on which councils should merge and which should stand alone in October. Only five of the state’s 152 councils – they’re all metropolitan – have volunteered to amalgamate, with most vociferously opposing the move.

Under Fit for the Future, councils must show that they have the scale, good governance and financial sustainability to operate alone, a test a substantial number are expected to fail.

The government aims to reduce Sydney’s 41 to less than half that amount and The Independent Local Government Review Panel recommended earlier this year that 105 of NSW’s 152 councils merge and that eight councils in the state’s far west should form a Far West organisation.