Meet Peter Smith, BRC's interim finance director

WATCH: Bathurst Regional Council's interim finance director, Peter Smith, talks about his role after joining the organisation in June 2025.

Transcript

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