Politics
Why one council is in debt …
Brenda Rosser
It would be great if the Mercury newspaper did some simple research to find out why Tasmania’s councils are suffering financially. In one half hour this is what I found out about the Waratah-Wynyard Council: “The large scale conversion to plantation forestry of former dairy and beef farming properties in some rural areas of the municipal area has exacerbated Council’s financial difficulty in maintaining some roads that will receive minimal future use by non-forestry related traffic and from which very limited general rate income will be derived. In some instance these roads include costly bridge structures…” [To date the funding has come from the federal government under the ‘Roads to Recovery’ program but this source has now dried up.] “For some time, the population was declining at a greater rate than the overall Tasmanian population.” http://www.dpac.tas.gov.au/divisions/lgo/information/board/Reports/GR%20Waratah-Wynyard%202004.pdf
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