Big amalgamated councils come at a huge cost to localities like The Grove.
I notice that former Pine Rivers Shire residents are starting to be very unhappy now they are amalgamated into the much bigger Moreton Bay Regional Council.
Residents of Upper Kedron Ferny Grove and Keperra have had to live with being an outlier of a super-sized council for years and from this side of the Kedron Brook it is easy to think that the residents of Arana Hills and Ferny Hills have no idea how lucky they’ve been until recently.
They pay a bit more in rates than people in BCC do but they always got a lot more for what they paid.
We haven’t been able to get the figures although we’ve asked but we’d be surprised if Upper Kedron Ferny Grove and Keperra got back $1 in $5 of what they pay in rates to Brisbane City Council. We’d love to be proven wrong!
Where does the rest go?
Well there are things like running CityCats on the Brisbane River fixing up the flood damage along Brisbane River running the costs of the CBDfixing up City Hall the City Cycles in West Endthe bikeway network that never makes it here busways tunnels to places nowhere near us visually weird foot bridges across the river… All things that are happening a long way from our quiet suburban area and things that most of us get little opportunity to use.
Here is another one I read about in The Courier Mail on Thursday 9th June:
When developers build big blocks of units they have to pay what is called an infrastructure charge. Trouble is that a cap on the charge has been put in place. It is great for the people who buy the units – keeps the price of them down. The problem is that the cap is about $10000 below the costs the council incurs to provide service infrastructure. Councils will not be able to find the funds for the roads guttering and other facilities new developments demand.
The State has shifted $825 million worth of development and other costs on to councils in 2011-12 and another $975 million the year after that. The State Government has effectively hamstrung councils from accessing all sources of revenue except for general rates or borrowing.
So who gets to pay? Well we aren’t building units out here in the suburbs that you’d notice but it is pretty certain that our rates will be going towards providing infratructure for them in inner city developments.
Existing Queensland ratepayers are going to be asked to pick up 40% of the cost of new developments.
The average southeast Queensland ratepayer is expected to pay an extra $600 on their rates by 2031 to subsidise first-home owners in new developments.
This doesn’t just look like a local and State governance issue acting like a lead weight on our ability to create local resilience here in the upper Kedron Brook valley.
It also looks like a population issue. It looks like the existing ratepayers are effectively funding 40% of the infrastructure costs of the never-ending flood of newcomers into the region. And we get told that population growth is good for us economically! Not on my figures it isn’t.