By Jenel Hunt
The Southern Downs Regional Council budget for this financial year has been adopted, despite two councillors voting against it.
On Wednesday 24 July at a special meeting of the council, Mayor Melissa Hamilton described the $100 million budget as responsible and said new rate categories that were being introduced would bring more equity into the council’s rating system.
“We have not increased the base residential general minimum rate this year following submissions, and given the cost of living issues being faced by many residents,” she said.
“We have also made further changes to ensure that no residential rates payment will have more than a five per cent increase this year.”
She said 34 per cent of residential ratepayers would see no change, or even a decrease in their general rates.
With a full cost recovery model already in place and being introduced over several years for services including water, wastewater and waste, the charges had increased in those areas, with a leap of 9.25 per cent for water and increases of 3.5 per cent for both waste and wastewater.
“I believe this is a responsible budget which acknowledges the pressures our residents are under and which tries to deliver essential services while keeping rate rises low,” she said.
Cr Hamilton said the council had received 27 submissions during the community consultation phase, and 15 of the submissions had been related to the rates category review.
“A number of submissions requested that the rating review by local government rating specialists, AEC Group, be made public. The previous council engaged AEC Group on terms that made this review commercial-in-confidence. However, this new council has requested that staff ask AEC Group to publicly release a summary of this review. I hope that this will be achievable and I will continue to push for this.”
Revenue will include net general rates of 36 per cent, utility charges of 37 per cent, fees and charges of seven per cent and grants and contributions of 12 per cent.
Operational expenditure is expected to reach $100 million. Capital expenditure is expected to be $48.7 million.
All councillors spoke to the budget. Crs Ross Bartley and Russell Wantling spoke against the budget and voted against it.
The other councillors were in favour, although Cr Cynthia McDonald called for an external audit to ‘chart over the next six months to ensure that we have the right people in the right places, on the right pay.’ She said it would be helpful to benchmark the SDRC against other organisations.
Part of the budget is to include a position for a new executive assistant and Cr McDonald pointed out that at present there were two administrative assistants who worked between the CEO, the mayor and eight councillors – 10 people in all – while each director had an executive assistant.
Cr Morwenna Harslett said it was her hope that the person in the new position would help find new income streams to ease the financial burden on the council.
Cr Joel Richters said that after community submissions had been received, the review time had been used to make some changes to the budget, including reducing the rating rise cap from 10 per cent to five per cent for residential categories.
He said although the decision extended the life of potential increases, it provided real relief to people right now.
“There’s always going to be winners and losers in the budget. There’s no way around that. I think the budget that we have today is the best outcome that we could achieve,” he said.
He also supported the new executive assistant’s position, saying the previous council had ‘utterly failed to prepare us for our strategic path forward’.
“When we came to council there were absolutely no proposals that we could take to government that was ready to go, that could provide us with the income streams that we needed to provide support to our residents.”
Key changes to revenue
• Change to differential general rate categories
• Water access and consumption charges increased by 9.25 per cent
• Waste management charge increased from $100 to $160 per rateable property
• Sewerage charge increased by 3.5 per cent
• Waste collection charge increased by 3.5 per cent
• Average general rate increase of 2.4 per cent
