Carol Altmann – The Terrier

Isn’t it fascinating how most of the W’bool City councillors take zero responsibility for whacking us with more rates, as if it all just happened around them?

Like a dog that destroys the couch, the councillors are anguished and tormented once the damage has been done, but did nothing to stop the damage in the first place.

Instead – they plead – the problems that have led to us paying 4.5% more in rates for the next two years were “inherited”.

Carol Altmann – The Terrier

Three interesting things and a question:

Titibit #1: If you were wondering why a series of red bars have suddenly started popping up on intersections around the CBD, here’s the answer: the introduction of a 30kph speed limit.

The new, slower speed limit was one of the many things bundled into the now $18 million upgrade of Liebig St but, as far as I can see, it hasn’t been mentioned or discussed widely since it was first raised as an idea for Liebig St in 2014.

From what I have found, Warrnambool is the only place in Victoria outside certain parts of Melbourne to introduce a 30kph zone and the idea, of course, is to slow the traffic down to make life safer for pedestrians. 

There is nothing wrong with that concept, but given the amount of traffic controls now in place in Liebig St – with more zebra crossings, roundabouts and speed humps than you can count – is it really necessary?

And is it necessary to extend it from Liebig St to other parts of the CBD where the limit is 50kph?

I haven’t seen any statistics on the number of pedestrian injuries around Kepler St/Raglan Pde, for example, or Banyan/Timor St, which are just two of the intersections now getting the red stripe treatment.

Driving at 30kph really is snail’s pace – it’s 10kph slower than for school zones – and I can’t see people sticking to it outside of the main street where the speed is already restricted by design.

Titbit #2: The draft Warrnambool City Council budget/s and its submission to the Essential Services Commission to ask for a 4.5% rate rise contains so many gems, I am not sure where to start, but I will list a few during this week, starting from today.

First, according to the ESC submission, Flagstaff Hill – my old hobby horse – and the Visitor Centre ran at a loss of $1.79 million in 2016-17 and $859,061 last financial year.

It is expected to run at a loss of around $750,000 each year for the next three years, which is $100k more than anticipated and getting close to double the losses of around 10 years ago.

This is eye watering.

By the way, it is worth mentioning that Colac Shire Council is raising its rates by a mere .5% this year. They were thinking of going for 2%, the same as last year, but that was knocked back by a majority of councillors. It is also worth mentioning, again, that out of 79 councils in Victoria, only two are applying to break the rate cap and we are one of them.

Titbit #3: Enormous public pressure and several thousand signatures on a petition saw council staff recommend recently that the two 115-year-old Moreton Bay figs at the corner of Banyan St and Raglan Parade be saved.

Yay! Sanity prevails.

But wait…

No, they are not saved, yet, because the councillors deferred making a decision so they could – once again with feeling – look at the whole Banyan St streetscape and – once again – try to find out how much it would cost to plant coastal banksias down the southern end because Infrastructure head Scott Cavanagh had no real idea.

Good grief, the people of southern Banyan St have been waiting for five years to get this sorted. Five years.

Worryingly, as part of the debate Cr David Owen – he who loves trees – described the two Moreton Bay figs as “freaks” because of their bad pruning and said should be removed.

Why, as has been said elsewhere, do councillors ignore most petitions unless they give them the answer they wanted in the first place?

And a question….

Speaking of petitions, how ironic that the WCC is part of a petition for better roads in our area.

Judging by the years of neglect in road funding so far, the council might find its own petition efforts are also ignored.

Unless…unless…we will actually make Wannon a marginal seat at the federal election on May 18.

Are we brave enough?

Over to you….

If you would like to see The Terrier keep digging up, sniffing out and chewing on local issues, please consider throwing something in the tip jar.

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Carol Altmann – The Terrier

Here’s a twist on the $75,000 given to Sharp Airlines by the cash-strapped Warrnambool City Council  – Sharp Airlines didn’t ask for the money.

No, it was offered to Sharp as part of a $300,000 package to try and keep the passenger service to Essendon flying beyond last January when it was due to close because of insufficient numbers.

So this money wasn’t a “bail out” for Sharp Airlines, but an unexpected bonus.

The package was put together by the State Government, which in turn asked for contributions from Warrnambool, Glenelg and Moyne councils – only Warrnambool and Glenelg said yes.

Warrnambool ratepayers didn’t know a thing about any of this until the local newspaper broke the story in early January, right smack bang in the middle of the council announcing it wanted to break the rate cap and lift rates by 4.5% because it was slowly going broke. No wonder they wanted to keep it quiet.

The WCC wouldn’t say at the time how much it had given Sharp, but ironically the $75,000 figure was revealed privately to a focus group of ratepayers who were invited by the council to discuss the need for a rate rise.

As one of those ratepayers told me later, they were shocked to learn that the council could have said no.

Sharp Airlines, as a business, doesn’t need rescuing.  It operates other routes from other airports quite successfully, but the Warrnambool to Melbourne passenger route was not proving  profitable since its relaunch in 2015.

Like any business, the airline made a decision that after four years of making a loss, it was time to pull the pin, but if the State Government was offering a package to help turn things around, Sharp would happily try.

Sharp Airlines CEO Malcolm Sharp is refreshingly up front about all of this.

“We have never asked for and have never before received any government assistance, but we certainly appreciate the support,” he says.

Mr Sharp says passenger numbers have improved slightly since January, but a final decision will be made in the next six to eight weeks. The key is whether more business passengers get on board.

What the Sharp Airlines deal has done, however, is expose a much bigger problem with the airport which, unbelievably, runs at a loss that is picked up by – you guessed it – Warrnambool ratepayers.

So we have an airline receiving council money that it didn’t ask for, while that same council runs the airport at a loss. No wonder the budget is stuffed.

This loss is despite a $4.3 million upgrade of the airport just three years ago that included $750,000 of WCC money and was supposed to see the airport zoom into the future with more hangars being built, more flights, more businesses setting up….

Three years on, WCC ratepayers are still having to meet the average shortfall in income of around $200,000 a year.

Does this sound familiar to you? If you have been following the Flagstaff Hill $3 million sound-and-light-show debacle, it should.

A big upgrade, all bells and whistles, media photos, high-vis vests and handshakes….and then ratepayers keep footing the bill.

Despite running at a loss, the WCC still has virtually no user-pays fees for the airport.

While we are being whacked for parking, pet registrations and green waste, Midfield Meats International, for example, pays about $50 a week or $2600 a year to rent space for an airport hangar (the hangars themselves are privately built and owned).

There are also no aeroplane parking fees or landing fees, despite around 15,000 takeoffs and landings at the airport each year.

If the WCC charged, say, $50 a pop per landing and takeoff, there is a neat $750,000 a year … which just happens to be how much it hopes to raise through breaking the rate cap.

Head. Wall. Bang.

As it is, WCC is one of only two of the 79 councils right across Victoria to apply for permission to bust the rate cap. We can only hope the Essential Services Commission sees right through this and says no.

If you would like to see The Terrier keep digging up, sniffing out and chewing on local issues, please consider throwing something in the tip jar.

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Carol Altmann – The Terrier

This is a budgetary fairytale based on fact. The numbers are real, the names are not.

Once upon a time, in the town of WooBoo, there was a town leader, Snow White, who was paid more than $310,000 a year to work for the seven dwarfs who had been elected by the people of WooBoo to look after WooBoo and help it prosper.

Exciting things were happening in WooBoo under Snow White’s leadership.

There was a big, money-losing festival for children, there was a maritime museum with few boats but a new $3 million sound-and-light show that promised to lure carloads of tourists, there were parties at the racecourse, new public toilets, new parking meters, pretty roundabouts and still lots of money left over for the WooBoo Council to spend on consultants, credit cards, conferences and staff development.

Most of the seven dwarfs were ecstatic, except for Grumpy. Every council has a Grumpy, and Grumpy was seen as a troublemaker.

“Can we afford all this?” Grumpy would ask. “Does this all add up? Why don’t some of these figures make sense?”

“Of course we can,” said Doc and Happy in unison. Unlike some of the other dwarfs, they had represented the Town of WooBoo for many years and had grown fond of Snow White and her team of highly paid helpers.

Mayor Sneezy was equally as enthusiastic: “WooBoo is aspirational, sophisticated and cosmopolitan and I wish people would stop being so negative!”

The spending went on. Sometimes it was on necessary but boring things, like $5.5 million for a drainage system to avoid parts of WooBoo flooding.

And sometimes it was for sparkly things, and the biggest of all was the $15 million upgrade of the main street of WooBoo, with shiny new pavements, new trees, new lights, drinking fountains, more flowers and planter boxes and a much narrower road with so many pedestrian crossings that WooBoo drivers could no longer take their eyes off the road for a second.

The people of WooBoo were happy to see their tired main street being given the full Ritz treatment, even if they privately wondered what was going to happen to the other town streets with their peeling buildings and broken footpaths.

Don’t worry, they were told, celebrate the rise of wonderful Justice Von Liebig St!

Meanwhile, in the MelBoo office of the chief money watcher, the Victorian Auditor-General, a little red light was flashing.

It had been flashing quietly every year since 2014-15 and it warned a “high risk” situation was developing. This high risk was that the Town of WooBoo did not have enough money of its own to fund its operations, once it removed all the one-off gifts and grants from Grandma and Grandpa Government.

In particular, the Auditor General found WooBoo might have trouble paying to repair and replace things once they wore out, like footpaths and playgrounds and bridges.

The red light blinked, but in the town chambers of WooBoo the party went on until, one day in late 2018, it stopped.

By then, Grandma Government had put her foot down and capped rates so councils could not just keep asking ratepayers for more. Instead, annual rate rises would be capped at between 2% and 2.5%.

By then, the money-losing WooBoo children’s festival had been axed abruptly. By then, it was becoming clear that the carloads of tourists were not going to the maritime museum.

The seven dwarfs had to absorb some hard truths.

One of these was that the WooBoo capital works budget for 2017-18 had blown out by a whopping $6 million from $17.6 million to $24.6 million.

A big part of this was dressing up Justice Von Liebig St, the cost of which had grown from $15 million to around $19 million, including $8 million that would need to come from the citizens of WooBoo.

The big drainage project had also been in trouble, with the first contractor going broke and the final cost still not known until it is all finished.

On top of this, recycling fees had skyrocketed, the cost of keeping a pet had shot up, parking in WooBoo was more expensive, rates would still rise, and there was still not enough money for all the old roads, pavements and playgrounds to be repaired.

Things were suddenly not so good.

Grumpy thumped the table and yelled “I told you so!” and this time Mayor Sneezy agreed with him.

Happy and Doc, being astute in the art of public relations, told the people of WooBoo that they were committed to tackling a crisis that they had “inherited” and the only way to do this was to ask the people what they thought, ignore that, and then seek to bust the rate cap anyway.

The three other dwarfs, who were still trying to get their heads around it all, nodded in agreement.

And so, dear reader, hi-ho, hi-ho, off to the Essential Services Commission we go.

And what of Snow White?

Ah, she sensibly retired early to her castle by the seaside, from where she watches the hard-working people of WooBoo rise up and prepare to march past the empty grounds of the maritime museum, and down the glittering, gridlocked avenue of Justice Von Liebig St, named, as it so happens, for the German industrial chemist who invented fertiliser to replace cow dung.

The End.

[For those who want to go deeper, you can find the Auditor-General’s red light here on the WCC’s adjusted underlying result, page 79. The WCC 2018-19 budget is here. You can find the capital works details at item 4.5.1 on page 45.]

By Adam Kempton

Lawyer, former Liberal MLA for Warrnambool, provocateur, West Highland Terrier

1. Unfair burden: Rates are in essence a regressive tax. That means they affect people with lower incomes greater than high income earners . If you are a pensioner and the rate cost to you increases by one dollar, then the impact on you is greater than the millionaire whose rate increases by one dollar. This means the rate increase imposes a disproportionate tax penalty on low income people.

Does the council want to be a council for the rich?

This, in essence, is stealing from the poor to give to the rich.

2. There has been no increase in pensions or wages for many years, so why should council increase its revenue way ahead of the community?

3. Local council ( and other tiers of govt ) more or less have a guaranteed flow of revenue ( taxes/rates) , unlike other people and sectors of the economy.

4. The new Chief Executive needs to be given a go in finding savings in reforming council so no increase is necessary.

5. The results of the community consultation poll, which strongly opposed the rate increase, were discarded.

6. There is a federal election in May. The council does not know the positive or negative impacts of a change in Federal Government on its rate/revenue position.

7. It will be a massive embarrassment if the Minister or Essential Services Commission – to which the council applies for the increase – rejects your application for the increase.

8. The rate increase sends a bad signal to the community that says the council will always take the soft and easy approach by increasing its revenue, rather than seeking to find efficiencies.

9. Opposing a rate increase signals the council is applying the same principles that the private sector and households impose upon themselves in the same situation.

10. Is there, or has there been, a long-term (say 10 years ) strategy in which this rate increase would fit?

11. What consideration has this proposed rate rise being given in the context of the massive infrastructure proposed spend for this area? And what consideration has been given in the event that infrastructure spend does not occur?

12. What account has been taken of the economic downward pressure on the area through the milk price and cost pressure in the important dairy economy? This has serious effects right through all sectors of the local economy.

The Terrier is taking a closer look at how we went from budget stability to a budget emergency. It is a slog through some pretty dry data, but worth it. Stay tuned for updates.