AT THE Bass Coast Shire Council meeting this Wednesday, there are a couple of very important items on the agenda, one of them is the draft budget for 2025-26, proposing total expenditure $122 million, and the other is a review of the shire’s Revenue and Rating Plan.
The neighbouring South Gippsland Shire Council will be going through a similar process in the weeks ahead.
Obviously, how the Bass Coast Council proposes to spend the $81.5 million it collects from the community in total rates and charges is crucial and it’s up to our elected representatives to go through the budget with a fine-tooth comb and see where savings might be made and changes identified to get a better outcome.
Fortunately, you will see the word “efficiency” mentioned several times in the budget papers including as one of the key guiding principles, as follows: “Service levels to be maintained with the aim to use fewer resources with an emphasis on innovation and efficiency”.
It would be good to see those efficiencies quantified in a public document.
But, of equal importance this year is the review of the shire’s Revenue and Rating Plan, which only comes around every four years after a council election.
A key feature of the plan is how the council distributes the burden of rates between the various classes of property; general (residential), industrial, commercial, farming, vacant land and one or two other categories.
By using “differential rates”, for example by charging the owners of farming land 80 per cent of the general rate, the shire can adjust up or down the share of the $61.6 million it expects to collect from the farmers.
Disappointingly, however, prior to offering the farmers and others a very limited opportunity over the next month to comment on whether the farm rate should be lower, the shire has already proposed that no changes be made.
They’ve also left precious little time to consider changing the farm rate to 70 per cent of the general rate or lower, in line with earlier statements by the Victorian Farmers Federation, that speculative increases in farm values, especially in sought-after areas like Bass Coast, have unfairly shifted more of the burden of rates on to local farmers over several years.
It’s a complex issue and giving the community less than a month, between April 17 and May 14, to mount a case and have it considered by council, ahead of a deadline of an absolute deadline of June 30, 2025 is frankly not good enough.
If the farmers are being expected to pay more of the $61.6 million, relative to other ratepayers, than they have in the past because their farm values have increased at a faster rate than other classes of property, there may well be a case for adjusting the farm differential and the council owes it to the community to give it long and careful consideration.
Such fundamentals, if not set right, can have unwanted consequences.
