THE community rallied together for the inaugural Mother’s Day Classic fun run in Katherine on May 10 to raise money to fight breast cancer – yet Katherine Town Council slogged organisers with a $98 fee for using Ryan Park as the finish line.
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One of the organisers, who spoke on the condition of anonymity, told the Katherine Times that a request for the rental fee to be waived in light of the event being a recognised national fundraiser was flatly rejected by the council.
“I was deeply disappointed, as I was organising the event for the Katherine community and would have expected the council to come on board and waiver the fees for a charity event,” the organiser said.
By the time the final fundraising amount was calculated, the council fees constituted about 15 per cent of the total raised.
Organisers had to pay $47 to rent Ryan Park, $7.90 for power and a $44 key deposit for power and water.
In addition, they had to foot the bill for a refundable $500 facility deposit.
Council chief executive officer Robert Jennings said the fee structure for renting council assets had been developed in a three-tier format: commercial organisations paid the most, followed by community organisations, then not-for-profits.
“So under that structure, not-for-profits automatically get the lowest fees, and for that particular lease, the not-for-profit would normally be $94, community groups $125 and then a commercial organisation gets a fee of $1852,” Mr Jennings explained when asked to justify why the council had declined to waive the rental fee for a charity event.
“But we then reduced that even further, and that seemed reasonable.
“It’s hard, because naturally people want their particular event to be reduced, and I understand that, but we need to try and get some money back, and essentially if we say here is the fee and we give them a discount, the community is paying for that discount.”
Mr Jennings added that fees were charged at the discretion of the CEO, and that consistency was required for fairness.
“I try to play it as evenly as I can, but we could potentially get more guidelines around that and look at what’s possible,” he said.