GAWLER Council doesn’t justify its rates based on prudent spending, cutting waste, and targeted service delivery – it justifies our rates by using the blunt instruments of inflation and CPI.
Council is using the current rate of inflation and CPI to justify increasing our rates by seven per cent, yet when inflation and CPI were running at zero per cent, and even negative in several quarters, between 2020 and 2022, it chose to ignore that fact and still increased our rates by 2.5 to 3.5 per cent each year.
The cause of this massive rate rise cannot be blamed on inflation and CPI. The cause is a council that refuses to curb its spending, refuses to cut waste, refuses to live within its means, refuses to stop expanding its workforce, and refuses to focus on its core business.
For a so called ‘growth council’, council’s budget slips further into debt each year, with any potential financial gains from residential growth being totally consumed by ballooning staff numbers.
Council adds on average four extra staff per year, adding, with on-costs, around $400,000 to the annual wages bill. At an average rate of $2000, that means Gawler needs 200 new homes each year just to pay for those four new staff positions.
I calculate that at least 40 extra staff have been added since 2014 alone, costing more than $11m, and now adding $4m to the annual wages bill.
Then there is the massive waste and the refusal to cut spending in order to keep rates low at this time of massive financial stress for so many in our community.
As an example, this budget contains $260,000 in new spending on the Willaston Cemetery.
Those cemetery projects are decades in the making, are no doubt worth considering in better financial times, but are not essential and could be put on hold.
Cr Hennessy is Chair of the Friends of Willaston Cemetery group, and while she voted to cut the $20,000 approved for the Christmas Parade, she voted to block any cuts to this spend.
Putting that spend on hold would automatically cut that seven per cent rate rise down to six per cent.
We all have to cut our spending in order to balance our family budgets and get by, and our council must do the same.
There is no justification for a massive seven per cent rate rise. I urge everyone to tell our council that fact via the budget feedback portal and via the public open forum at council meetings
Ian Tooley, Gawler East
