G’day, I’m Digby Rayward, and it’s my pleasure to present this week’s Council Connect.
There’s a lot going on, so I’ll try to be brief.
We had our Council Meeting on Wednesday night, and I’ll share with you a couple of things worth noting from that meeting. As you know, the whole meeting is recorded anyway, and it’s on the website so you can access all the details, the arguments, and the discussion. So, I’ll just highlight a couple of things. Firstly, the Financial Assistance Grants (FAG) and how they’re calculated. It’s not easy to grasp this concept, and the last time I presented council happenings, I tried to explain how the bucket of money from the federal Financial Assistance Grants is passed down from the feds to the state government, then distributed at the state level through the Grants Commission.
Now I know I probably lost half of you on that, if not 90% of you. But it’s good if you can understand. So what’s happened is that the NSW Grants Commission has finally realised that the money is not being distributed on the basis of Horizontal Fiscal Equalisation. Now, don’t get lost in the terminology. All it means is that councils with the greatest need and less ability to generate funds themselves, the small regional councils like us, need a bigger slice of the cake. The bigger councils get more in parking fines, I’ve mentioned this before, then we can even generate.
So they ran the new model, and we got the projected dollars. If it goes through, we look to get about an extra $2.2 million, which is very good. We could do with $10 million extra, but $2.2 million we’ll take. It’s only the draft, and councils have got to put a submission in by the 7th of October. As you can imagine, the bigger councils that have lost some dough are not happy, so they’re starting to squeal a bit. But let’s hope the grants commission stays true to the principle that those councils with the greatest need should get the greatest slice of the pie. So watch this space. We’ll be putting in a submission, of course, and away we go.
Moving on, state elections are coming up early next year, as you know, and our advocacy program is called Fair Funding for Dungog.
And I hope you’re all aware that we started to focus on a couple of things, but certainly reviewing the funding model for the roads classified as regional roads is important to us because we know our neighbouring council, Maitland, gets over $23,000 per kilometer for their 32 kilometers of road. Port Stephens gets about $19,000 per km for their 56 kms of road, and we only get $11,000 per km, half of what they’re getting, for our 122km’s of road. We did a Facebook video on this, and I thank the community for getting on board and supporting it. Our team tells me we’ve had over 30,000 hits on this video, and we’re getting some traction. At the council meeting on Wednesday, we noted a letter from Minister Aitchison saying, and I’ll quote, that the government is now considering funding arrangements beyond 2026-2027 financial year, and that’s currently underway.
Well, let me say we’re very pleased to have received that letter, and we will be writing back to thank the Minister.
But what we’re asking for is that the review be finalised before the state election in early 2027. We don’t want to be waiting years for a review that doesn’t go anywhere. So we will be pressing the Minister for an outcome. And I can only say I thank the community for getting behind our Fair Funding for Dungog campaign, and we’re certainly going to pursue a number of other matters vigorously as we get closer to that election.
Moving on to Council’s Delivery Program. This is a four-year program, and in our meeting on Wednesday, we held the June end-of-year review of where we’re up to. There were 81 actions included in the Operational Plan. 70% of those, that’s 57 out of 81, were completed by the 30th of June, compared with only 15% by the end of March. The remaining 24 actions will be carried forward or put on hold until we can progress them, given current resourcing or funding constraints. But overall, the picture is looking really good. I’m pleased the way Council’s moving in that direction.
Another very important document that’s out for Public Exhibition, with 28 days to comment, is the Draft Customer Experience Strategy. I encourage everyone to have a look at this document. It’s very welcome and long overdue, and I urge you to go and have a look at it. We’ve set a very high bar for ourselves in delivering this, and the vision statement you’ll see in the document is that every person who deals with Dungog Shire Council, whether they be a resident, a ratepayer, visitor, or colleague, feels heard, respected, well informed, and leaves the interaction with confidence in their Council. We certainly set a high bar, so please have a look at that and give any comments that you feel appropriate.
Also, at the council meeting, we held an election for Deputy Mayor. The Deputy Mayor position is vacated every 12 months, and I’m pleased to announce that Councillor Fred Paton has been elected Deputy Mayor. I also want to express my sincere thanks to Councilor Liam Lay, the previous Deputy Mayor, for the support he gave me and for his work during his term. Well done.
Look, finally, I’d like to emphasise that for Dungog to have any leverage in the upcoming state election, we need your support from the ratepayers. The couple of Facebook videos we’ve done have had extremely high numbers, which is very encouraging. And we’ll be doing some more of them. So get behind us and Fair Funding for Dungog. That’s the way we’re going.
So until next time, and it’s my turn, I’m happy to talk with you at any time. Cheers.
