Pat Kelly discusses just exactly what is wrong with local councils:
We were informed the other week by Dick Gross that "Local government in NSW is notoriously hopeless. It has a bad name with the local community and a poorer name with interested observers in other states."
Well that certainly attracted my attention. I have my own views on the woes (and roles) of Local Government and was interested to learn what Mr Gross had to say on the subject. The writer urged us to "Let's look at the facts" and that seemed like a promising place to start.
We learn that "Local government struggles for money all over Australia. Local governments don't go broke. When a municipality is financially embarrassed it still pays its bills. It just does not repair assets." So far so good. I guess that applies to all organisations. Further it seems that "it [is] estimated that the deficiency in capital spending (infrastructure renewal gap) for all council purposes is between $400 million and $600 million a year. This represents an annual deficiency of between $2 million and $4 million per council or between $60 and $90 per head of resident population in NSW."
Mr Gross then joins "the Productivity Commision" in bemoaning the rate cap. A quick look at the bottom of the page reveals that Mr Gross is "a former Municipal Association of Victoria president and mayor of Port Phillip." Ho Hum.
So the problem isn't that councils don't seem to be able to restrict their activities to the things they can afford to do and to do the things that are expected as part of their core functions. The problem is that they don't get enough money to do all the things that they want to do.
A quick look at my local council website reveals the council promoting its involvement in the following activities.
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