Logan, your Councillors are working so hard on the Council budget right now.
Recently, you may have seen or heard me going on about Council’s financial challenges – but it’s for good reason.
Council’s current operating surplus is only $1 million out of our $1 billion budget.
As I mentioned last week, it’s like a family with a total household income of $100,000 having just $100 in the bank at the end of the week all their bills, rent or mortgage and food was paid for.
$100 isn’t going to cut it if you need a filling at the dentist or pay your car insurance excess.
For Council, this is a huge challenge and means there’s currently a whole lot of effort going into finding efficiencies and savings in Council. It also means Councillors are knocking back proposals for funding new projects and reforming how rates are charged to make them fairer.
This weekend we hosted LEAF, which is has been going for 15 years. It’s a festival to celebrate and promote sustainability. LEAF brings people of all ages together to have some fun and learn about the environment.
For the first time this year I had folks stopping me to tell me how much they loved the event and asking Council not to cut it to save money like with did with Eats and Beats. It showed me that the community is thinking about the budget instead of just taking events like this for granted.
Unfortunately, there will be a rate rise to deal with increasing costs. But we’re doing everything we can to make sure it’s no higher than it needs to be.
For example, Councillors recently rejected a $8.3 million proposal to grow staff in the organisation. They’ve said no to $2.6 million for Creek Catchment Recovery and almost a million dollars for additional casual hours.
They’re knocked back $2.5 million for lighting upgrades and found another $300,000 in savings for delaying the production of a new corporate plan.
It’s never easy to say no to improved services but this year we had to.
Councillors saved ratepayers over $32 million of additional spending and services in this budget by being disciplined.
Without this work – the bottom line increase to Council rates was set to be enormous and unaffordable.
To get this back down to something people could afford we asked the staff to find savings and eliminate waste in each and every one of their branch budgets. Managers and their teams went line by line looking for operational savings.
Councillors wanted to see how those changes would impact services, and how much money it would save ratepayers before we would even look at a rates rise.
I’m looking forward to sharing more about this with you, when we hand down our Council budget on 25 June.
