Welcome to the Mayor's column for May 2015.
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It is the time of the year where we spend a lot of time and effort on our budget deliberations. The budget for 2015-16 has been the hardest yet to try and balance our affairs.
The problem that we are confronting is basically not having enough income to provide the services that we and the community would like. Unfortunately we will have to have a rate rise which no one, including myself, is happy about, but it is essential right now for our survival.
The State and Federal Governments have reduced their allocation of money for grants and the roads allocation for our shire alone has taken a $1,000,000 hit. The Financial Assistance Grants (FAGs) have been frozen, so that means less money to Local Government.
So, what do we do? We have to start arguing with our State and Federal pollies for a fairer distribution of your tax dollar. At the moment we get less than three cents out of every tax dollar that you pay. The formula just doesn't work for us. Two cents for Local Government, 16 cents for State and 81 cents for the Federal Government - it doesn't add up.
With our total budget being around $33,000,000 and 15.9 percent of that is coming from rates and charges, we rely on the rest from government grants, and financial assistance. As you can see, the loss of $1,000,000 from roads and the freeze on Financial Assistance Grants impacts our viability very seriously.
As we are a service organisation and not a money making organisation, it becomes very difficult to provide the services that we desire within the budget that we have. All our services are being closely scrutinised and there will have to be some cuts. Services that are handed onto us from State Government will have to be handed back or outsourced to private enterprise.
It will be very interesting and certainly challenging in the next couple of years. There are a lot of very positive things happening in our shire but our financial situation is not one of them.
The fight has to start immediately and we need to be very clear with our Government colleges on where we sit.
I believe that we are up to the challenge but it won't be easy or short term. It will be constant, vigorous and a combined team effort is required.
We take very seriously our budget deliberations. We are not one of the big city councils that has excess finance, a point we will be making very clear to the Minister at the first available opportunity.
Remember - "You don't drown by falling in the water. You drown by staying there."