AT ARMIDALE Dumaresq Council’s extraordinary council meeting held last week, councillors endorsed the Draft Budget for 2013-’14.
This document is now on public exhibition and comments from the public are welcome, with submissions closing 12 June.
“The Draft Budget 2013-’14 was based on a back to basics approach, focusing on core local government services and on asset renewals identified in the asset management plans,” said council’s general manager, Shane Burns.
ADC management has conducted a number of workshops with the newly elected council over a number of months, looking at cutting discretionary expenditure, cutting operational expenditure and raising revenue in favour of asset renewals.
“The draft budget is always a difficult exercise because it needs to balance community expectations with available funding and also needs to fund depreciation of assets,” Mr Burns said.
“The proposed Draft Budget 2013-’14 is fiscally responsible and will strengthen ADC’s financial position through resourcing cuts and a number of capital works now deferred.”
Mr Burns congratulates the newly-elected council in making some hard decisions on budget cuts, which has made a significant gain towards consolidating council’s operations, prior to looking at any necessary rate increases to achieve financial sustainability.
“The operating result on a consolidated basis shows a $958,000 deficit with a $121,051 cash deficit. The consolidated result, however, masks the fact that in general fund there is a $ 1.9m deficit which simply means that council is unable to fully fund the $8.4m depreciation expense. The implication of this is that general fund assets continue to deteriorate and the asset backlog gets larger, which is not sustainable. This is an issue which needs to be discussed with the community in due course.”
The cash deficit was a result of over $1.7m being spent at the airport on capital projects.
“The good news is that on a fund basis, water, sewer and waste look reasonable but the general fund remains the problem to be addressed,” Mr Burns concluded.
