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On the Wednesday following the NSW election, CC Council Administrator Rik Hart said he had always been clear that the amalgamation of the Wyong and Gosford Councils had been under-funded by the former NSW Government.
By Jacquelene Pearson
When asked about the candid comments Mr Hart had made to ABC Central Coast’s Breakfast show following the defeat of the NSW Coalition Government that was responsible for the merger of the former councils, Mr Hart told The Point: “I’ve always been clear about that, absolutely when you look at the issues here and think about mergers and acquisitions in the private sector in the past, the amount of homework that goes into those transactions is enormous but here they just said we will bung these two together and give them a bit of money, I think it was $10 million.”
The Point interviewed Mr Hart following the March council meeting and focused on the operational plan for 2023-24 which he resolved to place on public exhibition until May 1.
We asked the administrator whether he believed the proposed capital works program of $202.4 million for the 2023-24 financial year would lead to an infrastructure backlog given Council’s asset portfolio has a total replacement value of $12.1 billion.
“No it doesn’t because a lot of the assets that are accounted in there includes land and everything else so the land technically speaking doesn’t require a lot of looking after, land doesn’t depreciate, it appreciates,” Mr Hart said.
“If you look in the financial reporting we actually show by fund the percentage that we are achieving and the only one that is not achieving replacement expenditure is water and that is largesly because the agreement with IPART is we spend a lot more on water,” he said.
According to Mr Hart of the $37.9 million allocated for new capital works part of that is $9 million to be spent on Mardi water treatment plant.
He said one of the main impediments to the future financial sustainability of Central Coast Council was that it continued to be regulated under two systems. It was allowed to increase its water and sewer charges in line with inflation but general rates are pegged at 3.8 per cent which is significantly lower than current headline inflation rates.
“Other councils all operate under our Local Government Act,” he said, adding that he continued to advocate for the Central Coast Council’s water authority business to come under the Local Government Act and not under the Water Management Act.
“I have been advocating and there is a project going on within the government which clearly has stalled at this point of time but I think talking with David Harris [now a senior cabinet minister in the Minns NSW Labor Government] and Liesl Tesch [re-elected Member for Gosford] what needs to change, and I am going back to the public inquiry which said this needs to be resolved, CCC water and sewer being managed differently. It needs to come under the Local Government Act, still with IPART but not under the Water Management Act.
“We all need time to prepare for that, and it will come at the expiry of the current four year IPART period,” he said.
Mr Hart said he was confident another of the major projects included in the draft operational plan, the Gosford Regional Library, would be completed by the end of 2024 for a total budget of around $21 million.
Only one tenderer was under consideration for the construction of the library and Mr Hart explained that CEO, David Farmer, would negotiate with that tender “using the technique of value management. They will be attempting to see if they can eliminate some of the risks that the tenderer has entered into their tender price. We will sit down and try to mitigate some of those risks so the tenderer is able to reduce their price,” he said.
In terms of the need for the council to improve its processing times for development applications, Mr Hart said some funding had been received from NSW planning “to enable us to effectively get some more planners on board and the Greater Cities Commission is of course looking at giving us some funding … but we are importantly right now processing more DAs than we are receiving so very slowly we are reducing that backlog and we are still nowhere near the full complement of planners and so on that we need to be.”
The former NSW Government, according to Mr Hart, had also “grossly misunderstood or miscalculated the requirement to put together a consolidated LEP.
“They put in place the planning portal which was supposed to be a good system but as we know it is not working. They grossly underestimated the impacts of putting these two systems together and in terms of staff it wasn’t possible to get former Gosford staff and get them to work on the Wyong LEP – these are the changes no one thought about and with a whole raft of development coming through the organisation wasn’t able to cope.”
Mr Hart said substantial numbers of senior planning staff took advantage of voluntary redundancies to seek more highly-paid opportunities in the private sector.
In terms of the council’s housing strategy, Mr Hart said: “We are concentrating things along major transport groups and this state government has been elected on a platform of doing a lot more for social and affordable housing.
“For example, they are talking about making more public land available for social and affordable housing. I have already called for staff to identify land that may be appropriate.”
The administrator said there may be land the council wishes to give away for domestic violence accommodation or social housing projects.
The draft operational plan can be examined via yourvoiceourcoast and submissions close on May 1.
