In my opinion, State Government red tape on Councils is adding little to no value to your life but certainly adding to your Council rates. At the same time, cost shifting from State Government also increases your Council rates each year.
While most of your rate rise is due to CPI, this financial year cost shifting added 0.12% to your Council rates. Given we often have lengthy debates over adding 0.01% when it comes to new services, 0.12% is sizeable. 0.09% of that cost shifting was due to the State Government having frozen the library grant funding for 5 years.
Cost shifting issues like this are easy to quantify on your rates, most are not. For example, last year the Local Nuisance and Litter Control Act 2016 was updated to allow Councils to ‘assist’ residents with light nuisance complaints. This is wonderful news if you are annoyed at your neighbour’s lights as you now have someone to go and complain to. However, someone at Council now must have both the capacity and the training to be able to deal with these issues. Another example is the transition to the State Government’s Planning and Design Code in 2021, where fees set by the State Government do not match the costs borne by Councils to assess development applications and perform compliance checks.
While Council might have done a beautiful job re-surfacing your road recently, utility companies such as SA Water can come along and dig it up whenever they like, even if Council tries to co-ordinate these asset renewal works with the utility companies. While SA Water is responsible for re-patching what they have dug up, the first point of road failure for that bitumen is typically where their excavations have occurred. Future potholes are a Council responsibility and can lead to the road asset having to be replaced earlier than scheduled.
There are also substantial issues with State Government red tape on Councils wasting your money. For example, if Council is repairing a footpath on a main road, we are required to have two people standing around ‘supervising’ the work. For footpaths on local roads managed by Council, we don’t.
Don’t even get me started on Community Land Management Plans (CLMPs) which have taken up a significant time this term of Council and add little to no value in my opinion. I could nearly write an entire article dedicated to this red tape tsunami alone with significant resourcing and legal costs borne by Council to meet these requirements set by State Government.
In a 2019 review, the South Australian Productivity Commission couldn’t get to the bottom of just how much cost shifting and unnecessary re-tape added to your Council rates. It is a complex issue and one that requires a local government-wide response.