Our “Back to Basics” Group has been manning the pre-polling stations in our region this week and we have had the opportunity to talk to many ratepayers. One consistent theme is that no one understands council finances.
Chris Chan has spent dozens of hours pouring over financial statements and also the report from IPART and in this discussion he and Reuben Rose attempt to give a high level view of the council’s financial situation in 30 minutes. In brief - it’s bad! Our council’s financial position is dire and it is difficult to even find out the state of our council’s finances.
Fresh eyes are needed and strategic decisions made about rationalising areas of council expenditure to ensure that services are delivered for ratepayers.
VOTE 1 ABOVE THE LINE - GROUP F
Notes:
“An unplowed field produces food for the poor, but injustice sweeps it away.”
A reminder that even productive land and resources can be misused or destroyed by unfair practices.
Balancing the Budget:
SMRC Financial Statements 30 June 2023
TLDR: We bring in $22million from rates, but spend $33million on mates
Revenue from rates $32.5million*
Total Revenue is $140million ($82million from grants)
Employee costs $35mil
*This includes rubbish and water. The actual income from rates revenue alone is closer to $22million.
That's a deficit of at least $11million per year spent on salaries and associated costs
Publicly many candidates say that grants are other user charges are enough to cover the deficit.
Privately almost all conceded, it's a serious concern.
One of the candidates was upfront and said “It's a problem that we'll have to face down the road. We've structured it so that we can function now, and worry about it down the road.”
We obviously disagree, we think its in the community interest to be fiscally stable now, as compared to do a few years from now.
Being fiscally strapped means that we can't fix stuff in an emergency without having to beg for grants.
Bombala Pool example: Bob Stewart, mayor of Bombala, related a story about how before the merger in 2016, they had over $10mil in unrestricted cash reserves and could handle their own business (e.g. Pool repairs, roads, etc) – totally self sufficient. Now they're begging Cooma Council and the state for money.
332 Full Time Equivalent Employees = average $105,527
ABS Census Median household income for the Snowy Monaro $82,836
Customer Service and Communication:
TLDR: Lots to work on
IPART (Independent Pricing and Regulatory Tribunal) Executive Summary
“The council's engagement and consultation with the community on the proposed SV was not effective. In Particular: the information it provided to the community incorrectly said the proposed cumulative increase over 5years was 55.25% which is materially below its actual proposed increase of 68.87%.”
- how can the council expect us to get our numbers right, if they can't? It's not like im paid to look through the numbers.
In the paragraph above that IPART writes: “On balance, we decided the council had not done enough to show that its proposed permanent 5-year SV with a cumulative increase of 68.87% met the OLG Guidelines. Instead we granted it a permanent 4-year SV with a cumulative increase of 52.48%"
- Thank you IPART for not letting us get taxed even more!
“As noted above, Criterion 2 does not require the council to demonstrate community support for the proposed special variation. However, it does require the council to consider the results of community consultation in preparing its application. “
- in effect, councillors don't need the support of the community, they can increase the rates without any community support.
By the councils own metric, they're not doing well.
I think it's in their Annual Report, on a scale of 1-5, 1 being Very Dissatisfied and 5 being Very Satisfied, council was awarded a pretty shameful 3% Very Satisfied.
It's been this way three years in a row 2021, 2022, 2023
2022, if you didn't think 3% was bad enough, only 2% of respondents said they were Very Satisfied.
If you can imagine a bell curve, usually these reviews should be fairly distributed around the middle, with outliers on both Very Dissatisfied and Very Satisfied. But not in this case.
The clusters are heavily weighted on the Very dissatisfied to neutral, and then their positive rating falls off a cliff to 3%.
There's no good way to paint this, 87% of respondents, that's you, the rate payer, are either really unhappy or “meh”.
The most charitable 14% are probably council staff.
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