Former Albury mayor Henk van de Ven said Wagga and Armidale had made "myopic" and "short-sighted" decisions to withdraw from the joint effort to attract new residents from capital cities.

"I must at this point lambast our fellow councils in Wagga and Armidale for being so absolutely myopic and short-sighted to vote to discontinue their involvement with Evocities," Cr van de Ven said.

"I hope something sooner rather than later comes to fruition with regards to putting something in place.

"Having recently visited Melbourne and wondering how those [people] put up with the traffic on a day-to-day basis makes me wonder why we can't get traction in getting people to move to a regional city rather than living in that absolute joke."

Cr Conkey said that unlike Armidale's complete withdrawal, Wagga councillors had voted to defer for 12 months the city's financial contribution while the effectiveness of Evocities was put under review.

"We have sought some extra data concerning the Evocities and we haven't been provided with the data we requested up till now" he said.

"We fully support decentralisation policies and it is very important that if we are going to grow to 100,000 plus (population) we need a workforce.

"The metropolitan areas, especially the western part of Sydney, are growing, I believe, at an unsustainable rate as far as infrastructure is concerned."

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Cr Conkey said making an annual $80,000 commitment to Evocities for the next three years was "a lot of money".

"We are looking over the next 12 months at whether we could use that money in other areas to achieve our goal," he said.

The five cities remaining in the advertising program, which was launched in 2010, will spend the next few months coming up with an alternative model.

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