It’s a 3% rate rise for the Huon

Huon Valley Guessing Games At its meeting this Wednesday (June 26), Huon Valley Council will strike a general rate of 0.077148 cents in the dollar for financial year 2013-14. The rate is based on the “assessed annual value” (AAV) of a property (its annual rental potential).

The new rate represents a rise of a tad more than 3% on the FY2011-12 general rate of 0.0749005 cents.

Council largely contained the rate increase via an April meeting decision to cut heavily on spending (more than $350,000 — see http://oldtt.pixelkey.biz/index.php?/article/its-whats-left-unsaid/).

In April, council decided 7-2 (Greens councillors Liz Smith and Rosalie Woodruff dissenting) to slash and burn in the community, youth, natural-resource management” (NRM) and cultural areas, totally ignoring the possibility of cuts in other areas. Council also demolished the “arts and heritage” portfolio: heritage has been abandoned and arts absorbed into Deputy Mayor Mike Wilson’s “tourism” portfolio.

Council, said Mayor Robert Armstrong (in media releases and on the airwaves), was determined not borrow to balance its budget. Such assertions hardly fit easily with an elected officer who still doesn’t appear to think it was of much consequence that he presided over the loss of $4 million of council’s cash reserves in 2008 and 2009. (Council argues the loss is still subject to legal negotiations, so the public mustn’t know anything about what progress is being made to claw back at least a few cents of its gambling losses.)

At the April meeting, both Greens councillors argued that council should consider savings in all areas of expenditure. Their pleas fell on deaf ears. Council’s lone independent councillor, Peter Pepper, didn’t go along with the Greens’ view, either, but he did suggest that next year council should look much closer at all areas of council activity to find savings.

Council’s cuts came as a cruel blow to loads of hard work by Woodruff in overseeing the establishment of a coherent and constructive “arts and heritage strategy and action plan” for the Huon. Ironically, it was the mayor who launched the strategy and plan late last year with and upbeat speech. Now, with “arts” likely to get short shrift within the “tourism” portfolio, “heritage”, in the mayor’s words, can look after itself.

Before the May meeting, council found support for a policy of balancing its books by telephoning internationally renowned Tasmania-born economist Saul Eslake.

Let’s forget for the moment that asking any one economist for an opinion is usually about as useful as trying to hook a whale with a bent pin. But let’s just assume that Eslake’s advice to council — that it’s better not to “run an operating deficit” — just happened to be the best. Council made a meal of that opinion, spruiking it all over the place, including a front-page lead story on the Huon Valley News that was run with no suggestion anywhere that the story was a council media release.

Come the May meeting, when Woodruff was appealing to council to cast a wider net for spending cuts, Wilson mocked her by comparing her economic credentials with those of the eminent Eslake. Wilson must have known that he was blatantly begging the question. Woodruff was not arguing that the books should not be balanced; and she was not arguing that cuts shouldn’t be made. What she was arguing was that a sensible council would cast an eye over the total spectrum of council spending — not just the softer areas — to achieve the savings necessary for a balanced budget.

Mayor Armstrong has for months been taking every opportunity, through print and electronic media, to fearmonger about threats to council’s income stream.

Especially dubious have been his repeated assertions that council faces huge cuts in rate revenue from forestry titleholders in FY2013-14 through transfers of titles into forestry reserves as a consequence of the forestry agreement legislation passed by State Parliament a few weeks back.

Even if council does eventually lose a lump of forestry-title income, it certainly won’t happen in FY2013-14 because no title transfers are scheduled until at least the second half of next year, when it will be FY2014-15.

On Wednesday evening, Mayor Armstrong will again be able to brag about keeping the Huon Valley rate rise well below that of neighbouring Kingborough. I doubt he will give much prominence in the budget media releases written for him to the cuts in council’s social and cultural services that have been made to keep the rate rise down.

CYGNET BUS SHELTER: The vexed problem of finding somewhere to spend DIER funding to upgrade Cygnet’s main bus stop location in compliance with the Disability Discrimination Act 1992 (DDA) is up for a decision on Wednesday (19.005/13). The staff report warns council that DIER has advised that it will not acquit final funding for the total grant until each project is “one hundred per cent complete”. (The other two, at Geeveston and Huonville, are finished.)

Cygnet’s share of the grant is $30,141.84. The staff report continues: “It may be required, if we do not meet the requirements outlined in the grant, that the funds received to date, $64,742, may have to be returned.”

Council has two sites in mind: one on the main thoroughfare, adjoining the existing Mary Street car park; the other in the car park under construction behind the Town Hall.

The staff recommendation — on the grounds of “close proximity to local shops, school and amenities” — is that a “DDA bus shelter be installed [in] Mary Street”.

The odds are that an alternative motion will be put up in favour of the new car park (or that an amendment will be made to the staff recommendation that will do the same thing).

Last year, when council’s initial design for the new car park went out for consultation, it incorporated a bus shelter. Objections, mostly from public-transport users, to the bus shelter being put there led to council taking the shelter out of the design.

Talk around Cygnet in recent weeks has been that the bus shelter will end up in the new car park; and now it’s hard to imagine the mayor and his men missing out on a second chance to put it where they wanted it in the first place.

If that’s how it turns out — and with buses, motor homes other long vehicles using the new car park — the less-than-six-metres-wide two-way (and only) entrance, already kerbed-and-guttered, is beginning to look narrower than ever. It is a “bit tight”, acknowledged acting GM Simone Watson last week. — Bob Hawkins