Our business actions

When looking at ways to improve the financial sustainability of the council, we first and foremost had to look internally at our own practices:

• We met with all staff and asked them to reduce all ‘discretionary expenditure.’ The ‘bottom up’ approach was an amazing success, taking $100,000 off our operational expenditure per month.
• We formed a new council committee titled the ‘Revenue Task Force,’ chaired by the mayor. Over the last year we recycled many underutilised assets, gaining $1,128,100 in revenue (with a further $800,000 about to eventuate). Not only has an unrestricted $2 million been gathered, but there is also a significant reduction in maintenance costs, and an increase in rateable premises.
• We built a matrix that tracked all actions by every single staff member to determine the exact expenditure in the Water, Sewer and Waste Funds. Some of the direct costs were correctly allocated (via time and plant sheets), approximately $1.2 million in costs were incorrectly attributed – inadvertently being subsidised by the General Fund. The correct allocation of indirect costs as a ‘charge’ to Water, Sewer and Waste Funds made an incredible difference to being able to maintain our assets paid for by General Rates.
• We investigated all our energy costs and discovered there was opportunities to reduce expenditure on power bills. We reviewed our tariff categories and identified locations where installation of on-site solar generation would provide a good payback. Currently we have applied for a grant to implement this project.
• We entered a collaborative effort with two JOs (RAMJO and HunterJO) for establishing a new Power Purchase Agreement, which is expected to save between $60,000 and $70,000 per year.
• We did a complete review of our depreciation. This was a huge project which turned out to be one of the most rewarding. We discovered that we’d over allocated $4,500,000 against our depreciation for roads assets.
• We also looked at what additional skills some of our staff have and how we can better utilise them versus bringing in expertise from outside the organisation.
• We looked very carefully at our ‘Yellow Fleet,’ increasing utilisation overall, and retiring plant that was not cost effective.
• Largely through natural attrition we reduced permanent staffing levels from 216.7 to 191.5 FTEs.

All these actions reduced operational costs without compromising services. Our Operating Performance Ratio has now improved by a massive 84% (-31% to -5%). There has been a lot of planning, conversations and fact checking undertaken to make sure these decisions and their outcomes have the best results for our community.