July 13, 2014
The South Burnett Regional Council’s Budget deliberations hit a new snag last week when inspections revealed Murgon’s swimming pool requires major repairs.
South Burnett Mayor Wayne Kratzmann told southburnett.com.au that Council initially believed the pool required only fairly minor repairs, but a recent engineering inspection had revealed other major problems.
He said the kiosk needed replacing as well as repairs to the pool itself.
Mayor Kratzmann said the permanent closure of the pool was “not an option”.
But the Council faced the dilemma that while pool costs were rising, pool usage was dropping.
The General Complaints Process Policy covers official complaints that need to be referred by the CEO to the Department of Local Government.
Mayor Kratzmann said these types of complaints were rare but could tie up Council staff for days, and as Council had to pick up the tab for any official investigation, could also prove very expensive.
He said Council wanted to spell out clearly the process to proceed with these sort of complaints.
Mayor Kratzmann said there had been confusion in the public between these type of official complaints and what could be better viewed as “requests to Council” covering matters such as potholes, garbage collection and barking dogs.
“I urge people if you have a got an issue, come in an talk to us. Either come in to the front counter or talk to your Divisional representative,” he said.
“All their telephone numbers are listed on the Council website.
“If you’ve got a problem, talk to us and give us a chance to rectify it.”
“It doesn’t need to be a 100 per cent consensus, it’s not all-in or nothing,” he said.
“But we are offering an olive branch to people by offering to come in and do it, but if people don’t want it, Council will have to reassess it.
“It’s a blight on our community until the work is done.”
Mayor Kratzmann said in 2008 all the region’s water and sewerage schemes were in various states of repair, and depreciation of the assets was funded by the old Councils at various levels.
He said a move by the State Government to force Councils to fullly depreciate assets against replacement costs had coincided with the amalgamation.
“The councils were all doing some depreciation but not to the level necessary; Kingaroy probably (was doing depreciation) more than anyone else,” he said.
Mayor Kratzmann said if all the schemes had not been put into the one pool in 2008 and instead had been kept as separate schemes, residents in the smaller towns would have seen their water charges rise very steeply to cover the depreciation of their local asset.
As it was, all water bills rose across the region to cover the depreciation costs but at the same rate, spreading the load across the region.
This meant Kingaroy ratepayers had been, in effect, funding the depreciation of the assets in the other towns since 2008.
