WATCH: Bathurst Regional Council's interim finance director, Peter Smith, talks about his role after joining the organisation in June 2025.
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00:00What do you look for when you come into a council on a short-term basis? What are you
00:05trying to do in that short period of time? You're trying to tighten up a budget trying to make sure
00:13that things are in place to improve the financial position and if there is issues in regard to
00:23some things like your cash positions in the negative. Well then there's a need to do some
00:29things on the short term. So council's got some ideas about what they would do in terms of the
00:34short-term issues that they need to address which is excellent. I think that's a good step forward
00:42and also looking at next year's budget which only starts in a few weeks time so there'll be some
00:47ways that the budget can be once it's adopted but it hasn't been adopted but once the budget's
00:53adopted I think there'll be a need for that work to start on ways to make sure that the council's
01:00always on track. There's some things that the council's been doing historically like land sales
01:05so there's a lot of work going into hopefully getting some more land sales through the books
01:09because of the current conditions are such that it's not always going to happen at the moment so
01:14there's those sorts of things as well there's also the issue of the fact that there's perhaps
01:19you need to look at some issues with productivity and there's also the need for maybe to look at some
01:24revenue raising issues so there could be some things in regards to the way that council rates etc so
01:32there could be a need for some sort of a plan to if there is an increase in rates for instance that
01:39that fits in with what's the longer term projections so to get financially sustainable is also a longer term thing
01:46and if you can get to the next several years in a healthy position and you know what that looks like
01:52and you're able to use that picture or that information or that high level data to be able to
02:03create an environment where there's some buying by all the staff etc and others then you can make
02:09sure that the position is always on track and you can work on ways in the interim to be able to
02:16improve some of the efficiencies and maybe a bit of innovation comes into it as well