Politics & Council
15 May, 2024
Perspective: Working in a budget
By Cr LINDA JUNGWIRTH READING your weekly editions of the Loddon Herald lately, you’ll have noticed articles voicing concerns from our CEO Lincoln Fitzgerald and Mayor Gavan Holt, regarding council’s long- term financial sustainability. It’s...
By Cr LINDA JUNGWIRTH
READING your weekly editions of the Loddon Herald lately, you’ll have noticed articles voicing concerns from our CEO Lincoln Fitzgerald and Mayor Gavan Holt, regarding council’s long- term financial sustainability.
It’s a subject often discussed at our forums in which we consider issues relating to council.
As your local group of councillors tasked with making decisions on behalf of the whole shire, there is nothing we want more than to provide you with amazing services, beautiful towns, incredible spaces to enjoy and exciting events. However, we work within a budget, a budget which is not as generous as we would like. We have to balance projects we undertake with our fiscal responsibility. We need to consider the needs of our community today as well as ensuring our decisions support communities many years down the track.
When looking at social media, I see it’s easy to hate council without giving much thought to our purpose or constraints. More often than not, complaints relate to roads and drainage issues. It’s reasonable that these cause frustration as we all pay rates and want to see benefits in return.
Council and staff work very hard to maintain our massive road network and, in my opinion, do a great job. Weather events over the past couple of years have created extra challenges in keeping our road network in good condition. While it’s easy to be frustrated, a better solution is to work with council, after all, Council and the community share the same vision and aspirations.
A wonderful shire with a vibrant community. The official community vision is Creating a Community where everyone is welcome and has the opportunity to live, work and thrive.
Our draft budget for 2024-2025 is currently available for public comment until May 27. I invite you to look at the draft to better understand the balancing act we have before us. I feel it is a good and sensible budget and would like to hear the thoughts of the community regarding the budget we are due to adopt in June. You can comment by going to Loddon Shire Council website and searching ‘draft budget’.
When I meet with community groups, often their first request is how to receive funds from council to support their efforts. Groups can apply for council grants for events, community grants requiring a co-contribution and through the community planning process. I encourage committees and idea makers to continue to apply for these grants. Beyond these funding sources, there are external grants available to enable the implementation of many worthwhile projects. By making use of these, the community allow council’s existing funds to go further.
Back to our roads and weather events – I strongly feel we need to be rebuilding damaged roads to a better standard in preparation for future events. Currently, while state and federal governments allow a degree of betterment, they do not adequately support local governments financially to enable a true level of resilience. It’s disheartening to rebuild roads while wondering when we’ll need to repeat the repairs due to future weather events. True betterment would be a sensible use of resources and free up future staff time to concentrate on other council issues. We continue to advocate to both levels of government for adequate support. Loddon Shire Council is supported in their adaptation advocacy by the Central Victorian Greenhouse Alliance of which we are a member along with 13 neighbouring councils. Their advocacy on behalf of the group of councils is important to us.
More and more we find councils needing to step into spaces formerly supported by other levels of government.
As finances are withdrawn, Council step up to ensure our community do not lose important services and assets. Council has increased financial support to retain these important community needs.
These constraints I have been discussing do not leave a lot of room for rapid advancement of projects we have identified as priorities. We have clearly stated in our council plan that we prioritise increasing our population.
Given the current challenges with housing, now would be the perfect time to increase population by offering differing types of housing; housing for elderly, families and social housing to address some of the terrible statistics we see regarding increasing homelessness. I look forward to working with my fellow councillors on these issues.
I am optimistic (but not confident) that the current Federal inquiry into local government sustainability may result in a stronger financial outlook, allowing us to achieve more for our communities.
Cr Jungwirth is Loddon Shire’s Tarnagulla Ward representative