{"id":32693,"date":"2013-05-10T00:15:16","date_gmt":"2013-05-09T14:15:16","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/southburnett.com.au\/news2\/?p=32693"},"modified":"2020-12-18T14:48:41","modified_gmt":"2020-12-18T04:48:41","slug":"council-debates-200-roads-levy","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/southburnett.com.au\/news2\/2013\/05\/10\/council-debates-200-roads-levy\/","title":{"rendered":"Council Debates $200 Roads Levy"},"content":{"rendered":"
\"Traffic<\/a>
Traffic hazard or wallet hazard ahead? The loss of $2 million in grants and five years of cost increases has left the South Burnett Regional Council with a budget black hole<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

May 10, 2013<\/strong><\/p>\n

South Burnett ratepayers could soon be paying an extra $200 a year on their annual rates bill to fund a $3 million shortfall in Council’s road maintenance budget.<\/p>\n

This is on top of the $100 to $150 extra annual payment which has been suggested would be necessary to upgrade the region’s ageing water and sewerage infrastructure.<\/p>\n

And these two levies would be in addition to a forecast 5.9 per cent general rate rise detailed in last year’s Budget.<\/p>\n

The idea for a roads levy has come out of discussions between councillors and senior staff over the past few weeks as the council begins planning its 2013-14 Budget, due to be handed down in July.<\/p>\n

Mayor Wayne Kratzmann told southburnett.com.au<\/strong> today that councillors felt they had little choice other than to introduce a levy in the range of $200 a year.<\/p>\n

“Before the 2008 amalgamation the four old councils spent a combined $6 million a year on road maintenance,” he said.<\/p>\n

“But now – five years later – that same work costs $9 million. And without introducing a levy we simply don’t have the funds.”<\/p>\n

The Mayor said the key road maintenance cost components – wages and materials – have been rising by an average 8 per cent a year.<\/p>\n

“Really, we should have been increasing that original $6 million road maintenance budget by $480,000 a year from 2008 onwards.<\/p>\n

“The previous council didn’t do that because it was receiving State and Federal Government grants to cover these things.<\/p>\n

“But this year we lost around $2 million in grants funding.”<\/p>\n

The Mayor said the sudden loss of grants had left the Council facing a budget black hole if it wanted to keep maintaining the region’s roads to the same standard.<\/p>\n

“We’ve now reached the position that if it wasn’t for this year’s floods there’d be no road maintenance going on anywhere in the region right now,” he said.<\/strong><\/p>\n

“We would have simply run out of money.”<\/p>\n

Cr Kratzmann \u00a0said he knew the Roads Levy wouldn’t be popular, especially among people who owned multiple properties as it would be levied on a per-property basis.<\/p>\n

However he wanted to give ratepayers forewarning as well as put the idea into the public arena for discussion.<\/p>\n

“On the positive side, 100 per cent of this levy would go into road maintenance work. There wouldn’t be any extra payroll or administrative costs – every single cent would be used for roadworks,” he said.<\/p>\n

He said the extra funds would create some work opportunities for local contractors.<\/p>\n

And over the longer term, the Council’s focus since the 2011 floods on repairing roads to a higher standard to ensure they were more resistant to future floods meant residents would get better roads.<\/p>\n

“In this year’s floods we saw that roads in the southern part of the Shire – where Council had carried out the bulk of repairs from the 2011 floods – did much, much better this time around than roads in the northern end,” he said.<\/p>\n

“That was because we learned some good lessons from the first floods, then built those lessons into the repairs.<\/p>\n

“Ultimately we want to do that to all the region’s roads. But in order to do it we need to carry out a regular, full roads maintenance schedule. And that has to be paid for somehow.”<\/p>\n

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