RATE rises are always a touchy subject, but I do want to push back on the idea that rate increases are happening for no good reason or because Gawler council is refusing to live within its means.
When discussions about council’s finances come around, there is often a comparison to the “household budget”, but to be clear, councils do not deal in the same set of goods as a household.
Inflation affects all of us, of course, but not everything has risen by identical amounts.
As new homebuilders would know, construction costs have spiked significantly in recent years.
As a constantly growing council, Gawler needs to invest in plenty of this type of spending: for example, we are currently working through a significant backlog in new footpaths for streets without them.
Many people have pointed out the waste in our expensive heritage wall restoration at Pioneer Park, and I agree.
However, this wasteful spending is not coming from the current council, who are simply putting in the sadly necessary work on a well-loved and historic asset with several complicating factors (like being built on top of a cemetery).
The waste here is that prior councils, perhaps looking to show that they can keep the rates low, did not invest in preventative maintenance and reviews of our heritage assets.
That spending would have involved some short-term pain, but it would have been exponentially cheaper in the long term than the situation we’ve found ourselves in now.
This council could skimp on the wall renewal, but then we would repeat those same mistakes that got us here, making it an expensive problem for a future Gawler council instead.
The wall is only one of many potential landmines around our town; this just happened to be the one that went off last year.
The council cannot continue to live on the edge like this, staying forever near the edge of collapse to avoid increasing the rates.
To use that classic comparison to a household budget, it is sometimes cheaper in the long term to buy a new car now than to continue racking up constant maintenance bills on a malfunctioning car until you are forced to buy a new one.
We need to invest in our future, which, unfortunately, also involves that short-term increase in the rates that none of us enjoy.
These views are my own.
Cody Davies, Gawler councillor
