Council & Business
15 December, 2022
Councils call for more government support
A review of potential income streams for rural councils has found there’s no obvious solution to boost incomes, with Rural Councils Victoria calling for greater government support. The recently released report, Alternative Sources of Income for...
A review of potential income streams for rural councils has found there’s no obvious solution to boost incomes, with Rural Councils Victoria calling for greater government support.
The recently released report, Alternative Sources of Income for Local Government, found no single idea or group of ideas from across Australia or overseas can generate alternative revenue for small councils representing small communities.
Commissioned by Rural Councils Victoria, the review examined options across Australia and overseas, with key findings including that rural councils disproportionately rely on funding from government compared to metropolitan councils and the solution to the long term financial sustainability of councils likely requires improved access to national tax revenues.
According to the report, no “quick-win or cover-all solutions” were found for local government financial security and Rural Councils Victoria chair Mary-Ann Brown said this demonstrated an increased need for support from governments.
“The truth globally is that to ensure equitable access to the services small communities need and deserve, state and federal governments need to step up,” she said.
“This report highlights that while some opportunities for raising additional revenue exist, these are extremely limited, require levels of resourcing beyond the capacity of many rural councils, and will not resolve broader structural funding challenges.”
Central Goldfields Shire CEO Lucy Roffey said the report findings were not a surprise to her.
“We are categorised as a small rural council and we have a high reliance on both operating and capital grants,” she said.
“We can’t generate more income easily which is what this report is really about and secondly, with rate capping that also makes it challenging.”
Ms Roffey said the organisation is hamstrung in terms of income when compared to larger councils.
“Big metro councils make a lot of money out of parking fees and we often joke that some council’s parking fees are the same as our budget for the whole year,” she said.
“One of the suggestions the report makes is the possibility of more commercial use of buildings but most of our buildings are community use.
“Community groups that utilise those facilities can’t necessarily afford to pay more and may not be supportive of us turning that building into a commercial use building.”
The report identifies a number of options that council’s could utilise to increase their income, ranging from bulk buying and on-selling services to subdividing and rezoning council owned land.
“It might be reasonable to say we could look at land to sell but it’s not always in the best condition or it needs further development,” Ms Roffey said.
“This report identifies the subdivision of council land or rezoning of council land is high risk, high return and generally speaking the community don’t have an appetite for council to enter into high risk ventures — it’s terrific if it all goes well but if something goes wrong, there would be outrage from the community.
“High risk high return is probably not the place that local government needs to be in and a lot of the recommendations the report makes fall into that high risk category.”
Ms Roffey said flexible funding, like the Federal Government’s Local Roads and Community Infrastructure Program that was not attached to any one project, was an income stream that significantly benefitted the organisation.
“What we’re going to be doing over the next six to 12 months is completing works at our smaller outdoor swimming pools through that funding stream and funding for pools is something that ordinarily is hard to get,” she said.
“We also ran a program of working with small community halls and providing either repairs or upgraded facilities there.
“That fund has been a great help for us and we’ve been very successful in attracting grant funding over the last four or five years.
“The more external funding we can get to complete capital works, the more we can then spend on our own assets like roads.”