Tamworth resident Alan Joyce writes with some observations on the Tamworth Regional Council’s draft Operations Plan.
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THE council plan as exhibited lists more than $10 million being allocated to AELEC (P2104), entertainment facilities (C2502), Evocities (P4101), the country music festival (P2102) and regional economic development (P1105), for a net cost of nearly $6 million, funded by the general fund.
This is an unsustainable cost that must be addressed by the application of full commercial user-pays charges, and a business levy, to specifically fund country music festival activities.
All legitimate charitable use of all facilities must be capped, and tendered for once a year, in the donations budget process.
The plan makes no capital fund allocations towards ongoing projects, such as the industrial land development near the airport, the SES/RFS depot at Westdale, the velodrome, AELEC or the sporting precinct, to name but a few.
These adopted Tamworth Regional Council projects amount to council commitments in excess of $15-20 million in cost.
The plan gives no clear indication how the $57 million of capital works is to be funded.
Obviously, grants, loans and reserve funds can be used for water and wastewater, airport and landfill projects, but there is no indication of loans being requested for the general fund activities.
In the recent past, TRC has adopted a practice of drawing down internal loans from reserves to pay for unbudgeted capital works.
This must cease.
The only thing that this practice does is conceal the real financial picture from being seen.
All of the outstanding “loans” funds should be repaid to the source fund, plus interest, this financial year and replaced with external loans.
Until this is done, the real financial position of TRC is masked by a deception of “smoke and mirrors”, and basic infrastructure work is postponed in favour of more “glamorous” projects.
TRC must immediately publish a full, detailed list of existing Internal loans.
A sound step towards financial responsibility would be to shelve the Fitzroy St project for a future council’s consideration, shaving $4.5 million from the budget of unfunded capital works.
Regular financial reporting must continue on a three-monthly basis, but must be presented in a legible format.
As TRC is fully aware, the reports attached to council business papers are totally physically/optically undecipherable, due to poor print reproduction, and to date, repeated requests for the supply of readable documents have been totally ignored.