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Forster-Tuncurry. The region has a

very strong attraction for retirees with

the result that demographically the

population of Great Lakes Council

is the third oldest in Australia.

Great Lakes Council has been doing

an exemplary job in maintaining the

infrastructureandfacilities in its territory

despite the resource constraints that it

faces. Director Engineering Services,

Ron Hartley says, “The Council has had

a very strong focus for probably the

last eight years on asset management.

We made a really conscious decision

that we wanted to address the issue

of bridges and roads as fast as we

could. We went through a process

whereby we did a review and identified

the areas where we could get some

more money to help with our assets.

“We are at the limit of our borrowings

and the only way that we could increase

our rates was to go through a lengthy

process with the State Government.

The third option for us was to

generate our own revenue and there

were limited opportunities for that.

“So we went for a rate increase and

got about half of what we wanted.

We also went through a service level

review process with the Council and the

community where we looked at what

businesses or services we should be in.

Council did a review of our services and

we actually got out of a few businesses

and got back in some others. Any

money that we saved through

efficiencies was put into improving

our systems, particularly information,

communications and technology.

“The

State

Government

also

introduced the Local Infrastructure

Renewal Scheme (LIRS) which

subsidised Council loan borrowings for

asset renewal so Council was able to

borrow quite extensively at low interest

rates. This enabled Council to bring

forward a lot of infrastructure renewal

that was going to be done over a 10

Ron Hartley