By Logan mayor Jon Raven
If you’ve just received your July rates notice, you might be wondering what happens to your hard-earned money once it reaches council.
So, this week seems like a good time to chat about how we manage the city’s finances on your behalf.
Like every Logan household, council needs to make every dollar count.
Each year, we receive income from a range of sources including your rates, grants from the state and federal governments and infrastructure contributions from developers.
Legally, we can only use that funding for specific purposes, which means it can’t be spent on just anything.
But while those projects are being planned, we don’t let your money sit idle.
Instead, we invest it, so it can work even harder for our community.
In May alone, those investments generated around $2 million in interest.
That’s $2 million extra every month that goes towards the local services and infrastructure you rely on.
At the same time, we’re borrowing smarter.
Last financial year, we had approval to borrow $174 million. But through careful management, we only needed to borrow $95 million.
Reducing our borrowing costs saved us around $4.5 million in repayments last financial year.
And now, those efforts have paid off in the form of a recent credit rating upgrade from the Queensland Treasury Corporation.
This means we get better interest rates when we borrow and better returns when we invest on behalf of the community.
I know finance and figures are not always the most exciting topic, but this work has saved you money.
The $24 million in earned interest and the $4.5 million in avoided interest payments last year means that each rates notice you receive this year is at least $50 cheaper than it would’ve been without those investments.
This is just one of the ways that council is working smarter to stretch your dollar further.
