GREATER Taree City Council is about to receive one of the most comprehensive finance and infrastructure health check-ups in its history.
The council has held its first planning session with Review Today, a consultant team engaged to conduct an asset condition and financial capability review of the organisation.
Chairman, Professor Percy Allan, led workshops between the Review Today team and council’s senior management last week as the first step towards creating an overall reflection of the council’s position and a model on which future plans can be created and shaped.
The council’s general manager Gerard Josè assures the review will create much more than a report – it will provide a planning tool that will give the council and community a model that can be adapted to its needs and priorities for the next 20 years.
The independent review will be based on technical reports and models, with the Review Today team appointed after an open expression of interest process.
Mr José said this process is planned to occur in a fairly short timeframe to assist council in urgently addressing its future priorities.
The community will be an integral part in any plans, so the council anticipates extensive public consultation can commence early next year.
Last week’s workshops involved technical information and were designed to inform staff of the type of information that would be needed by the consultancy team to ensure all findings are completely accurate.
Prof Allan told the Times during a break between workshops that it anticipated the council was working on a $172 million infrastructure shortfall, though he hoped the review would reveal a smaller figure.
He said a funding backlog was a problem common to many local councils and said it was important to look at future finances and priorities in order to develop strategies that are the most efficient in solving the current problems.
Prof Allan said a unified approach was necessary and the process would bring staff from engineering, accounts, budget and finance together to investigate the current asset management systems and identify appropriate solutions.
Prof Allan acknowledged that problems could not be solved overnight and so a plan for a longer period of time was essential, adding that assisting the council to improve its management systems and decision-making process would have benefits in the future.
He said only about 20 per cent of councils in New South Wales possessed adequate asset management systems and it was a credit to Greater Taree that it had actively sought to improve its operation.
He said it was a matter of weighing up the projects the council wanted to undertake against what was feasible and taking active steps to prevent the financial backlog from increasing.
Part of the process will be to bring the various interest groups together, Prof Allan highlighting the need for a consensus in moving forward.
A focus on highlighting the most urgent infrastructure issues is timely, given the problems now being faced by the Gosford City council through a fatal road collapse.
Prof Allan said Gosford, like many others, was a financially unsustainable council with a large infrastructure backlog and had underspent on it capital works program by 50 per cent because it did not have the money.
“Councils have got to make a judgement on which bad piece of infrastructure to fix,” Prof Allan said.
“If they make the wrong judgement and have to postpone urgent projects, these things can happen.”
He said councils without sufficient finances were “an accident waiting to happen” but added it was not necessarily the council’s fault as it is difficult to predict which asset has the most pressing need for repair.
He said Greater Taree was one of 36 councils with financial sustainability issues and these could not be solved without an injection of funds.
“Councils grapple every year with issues such as bridge replacement and unless there is a zero backlog, something will fail.”
He said he was not at all critical of the council as the problems were a legacy of many years but said community input was needed to find solutions as the people who live here are the best placed to provide the required knowledge.
Prof Allan said the problems had been exacerbated by the increased handover of infrastructure to councils from other levels of government and a lack of financial support for the lower tier of government.
Mr Josè said as an independent consultant, Review Today would not ‘sugar coat’ the council’s position and instead provide the meaningful information needed to facilitate positive change.
“The review will provide an open, robust and independent statement of perspective for us,” he said.
“It will be totally objective and independent.”