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Business View Australia - July 2015 63
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
& PUBLIC WORKS