The Examiner's Council Chat | June 2025 - video Dailymotion

The Examiner

The Examiner's Joe Colbrook and Aaron Smith discuss local government news from north-east Tasmania for June 2025.

Transcript

00:00Hello and welcome to the sixth edition of the examiner's council chat podcast. It's the budget

00:05special. I'm City of Launceston council reporter Joe Colbrook and this is regional council reporter

00:12Aaron Smith. Now, budget documents are often fairly dry reading. However, when it came time

00:20for the Launceston council to pass their budget, things got a little bit heated and dare I say

00:25a little bit dramatic. As tabled, the budget included a 5.7% rates revenue increase. That was

00:35brought down from 6.7% as originally planned. However, during the meeting, councillor Susie

00:44Kai proposed an amendment which would bring that rates rise down to 4.9%. And that's where things

00:51got a little bit complex. Some of the councillors were complaining that they shouldn't be doing so

00:57much changing on the fly. You had words like political grandstanding and disrespectful being

01:04thrown around. And the long and short of it was that councillors passed things as planned, the rates

01:10increasing by 5.7% to 5.4088 cents per dollar of annual assessed land values. But there were some

01:20concerns for a time that if they pass the 4.9% rates increase, they would have to throw out the

01:27current budget and do it all again. And on that note, let's pass it over to me in the past to talk

01:32about how councils actually set their budgets. It's council budget season and it's very easy to get

01:39caught up in how much your rates are going up by, how much it's going to cost to get your bins collected.

01:44But you might not stop and think, what actually goes into preparing the council budget? Where do these

01:48numbers come from? Well, today, I'm here to tell you how. Unlike a household budget, where you might

01:54start with your expected income and work out how much you can spend, the council's budget is done

01:59a bit back to front. Nine months ahead of time, each of the council's departments are asked to submit

02:04their budget requests for the next financial year. And these can include things like running the

02:09aquatic centre, keeping cultural institutions like QVMAG open, and of course, maintaining the city's

02:15many parks. Once all these expected costs are added up, as well as some more easily predictable forms

02:21of income, things like interest payments on the council's cash savings and dividends paid on its

02:27investments, it then becomes time to work out how much needs to be gathered in rates and what those

02:33rates should be. Ignoring the millions of dollars that is expected to be spent on capital works projects,

02:39which is another budget entirely, the City of Launceston Council expects to return a deficit

02:44of $786,000 for the 2025-26 financial year. It's got nothing in debt and quite a bit of cash,

02:54so it means that unless it carries on running these deficits for several years or, say, decides to build

02:59a billion-dollar stadium down at Home Point, should councillors want to, they can return the organisation

03:05to surplus within a few years. Well, thank you for that, Pastor Joe. Now, Aaron, tell us how things

03:11are looking budgetary-wise around the regions, because I noticed that the actual, I guess, rates

03:17that Launceston are charging are slightly lower than some of the regional councils, but overall rates

03:24notices are likely to be higher in Launceston than elsewhere. Yeah, it really does depend on where

03:29you're looking at, because obviously each region does have its own financial difficulties.

03:33If you're looking at the median AAV, then in Meander Valley, that is just shy of $19,000,

03:40which is around the same mark as West Tamar, but less than Launceston. Breakaday has even less again,

03:46that's $15,800, so obviously half properties being under, half over that. The interesting story that we

03:52are seeing when it comes to regional councils in particular is waste management and BIM cost. So they

03:59are obviously more spread out, smaller populations and less access to waste facilities. That leads to,

04:06on average, a bit higher in terms of the costs. Breakaday in particular has a $265 just general

04:13waste infrastructure charge. But if you're keen on having a recycling bin and a waste bin,

04:18that's an extra $121 and $116 respectively. So that can contribute to over $500 in a general waste

04:26cost for a residence. But it's not necessarily the most representative of that region, because

04:32many residents don't have bin pick up. They drive to the tip. It's not as much of a maintained

04:38infrastructure as it might be in Launceston. Yeah, and obviously there's economies of scale too.

04:42Launceston being a bigger municipality in terms of population, it's probably cheaper in some ways

04:49to run the bin collection that, well, barely anyone uses elsewhere, right?

04:53Yeah, and I'll bring up a point that was made when the council was looking at getting

04:57free waste vouchers at one stage, where they were told by one of the officers that, you know,

05:01nothing is free. And if we make this free, something else is being picked up. And no council

05:06that's kind of offering a cheaper charge is just getting away with it. They're charging more somewhere

05:11else. So maybe break a day has a higher bin cost, but they have a lesser cost somewhere else. It

05:16all kind of evens out at the end of the day. But while we are on break a day, I should cover a

05:21non-rates focused story and maybe a bit of a lighter read as it were. I'm sure most people have probably

05:25fallen asleep listening to this talk about rates. This is a very interesting one. They have recently

05:31moved to reclassify the St. Helens Aerodrome to resolve this kind of apparent error made more than three

05:37decades ago. So obviously it's a regulated airspace as an airstrip, albeit a small one.

05:43But it's been listed as public land ever since 1993 as part of the Local Government Act.

05:49So this document kind of defines public land as piers and jetties, parks, gardens, or just broadly

05:55any council owned property that provides health, recreation, amusement, or sporting facilities for

06:00the public. Obviously this site is not that. But it wasn't the only facility to kind of dubiously

06:06receive this distinction as most of break a day's depots, offices, waste centers, even quarries have

06:12also been labeled public land. And while delivering this at the June meeting, the general manager,

06:17John Brown, kind of speculated that the government may have just resolved to include all of its property

06:23generally on the public land list, rather than considering which sites actually fit it and which

06:28ones were kind of, you know, not really the most suitable for it. So removing something from there is

06:34not the easiest process. There isn't like a really clear set out way to do it. The council solicitor

06:40advised to kind of enter this 28 day advertising period, as if you're disposing of the public's

06:45interest in the land, because they have to kind of dispose of it to remove from the list. This allows

06:49time for representations from the community. But I don't really foresee anyone complaining about this.

06:55It's a bit of a kind of weird niche case. And functionally, even once it is removed, it isn't

07:00changing the operations of the site. It's more of this kind of, you know, a regulational oddity

07:04that it was ever on there in the first place. Yeah, yeah. And talking about public spaces and the

07:10like, there's been some changes to the council's proposed expansion of the Carr Villa Memorial Park.

07:17I mean, that's obviously Launceston's only operating cemetery. Basically, the plan was to expand

07:25the burial areas into two pockets of land which have previously been untouched. There's a slightly

07:33smaller one over on one side. And then the larger pocket of land is adjacent to the Carr Villa flora

07:40reserve. But at the moment, it essentially functions as an extension to the reserve. Important to note here

07:48is that that flora reserve is threatened species and also home to a very rare species of orchid.

07:57It's only found in a couple of places in Tasmania. So from a, I guess, conservation and ecological

08:03standpoint, quite value. You've also got quite a few people in the community that like being in the

08:09natural space and being in the open space. It's having been out there on the ground, it's actually

08:14quite pleasant to be in what is essentially the middle of suburbia, but you wouldn't know because

08:18you're behind the trees. Anyway, the expansion would essentially roll through what is currently

08:26habitat for these orchids, even though it was considered as part of the cemetery when it was

08:32given to the council more than a hundred years ago. But after some community action and community

08:38outcry, councillors have actually stricken that part of the expansion from their plans for the moment,

08:46they'll do a few more things, environmental assessments and that sort of thing. But for the

08:51time being, it means that Carr Villa's lifespan has been reduced from around about a hundred years

08:58to 50 years of burial. So still got a bit of time to fix and work it out, but also it's not just as

09:05simple as building a new cemetery somewhere else. I spoke with Eve Gibbons. She runs the Carr Villa

09:11Memorial Park and she told me that the costs of setting up a new cemetery while also catering to

09:18current agreements at Carr Villa would be on the order of $450 million. So quite a lot of money and

09:27effort. Absolutely. Well, that's all the time we have for. This is my last council podcast on that note,

09:32but hopefully you'll be seeing Joe this time next month, once again. Oh, you absolutely will.

09:37I'll see you then. And I'll see you on the TV.

The Examiner's Council Chat | June 2025

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