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00:00:00 Mayor Stewart: Good morning. Welcome to our special meeting. I declare the meeting open. I would like to acknowledge that we are meeting on the traditional lands of the Kabi Kabi people and I pay my respects to the elders past, present and emerging. We have one apology today and that is from Councillor Jurisevic. This morning we have two items on the agenda. The first item is item one, 2021-22 Noosa Council budget scene setting. I understand
00:01:00 there are presentations from the CEO and the Director of Corporate Services regarding this item. So I'd like to move that the operation of the standing orders or any relevant provision therefore be suspended to allow Council to receive presentations from the Chief Executive Officer and Director of Corporate Services in relation to agenda item one. I second it. Thank you, Councillor. All in favour? Carried unanimously. Thank you. We will now suspend standing orders. Speaker 5: I might kick off if you like. So, Councillors, here we are again. Another budget process kicking off and the idea behind suspending standing orders is to make this very informal. Often in the past we've had workshops or discussions about these things, but putting into a Council meeting today is a good opportunity for the community to see some of the issues that you have to consider as we go through budget and some of the challenges we have to face. So what I'll do is I'm going to take a look at some of the issues that you have to consider today. I'll kick off with a presentation looking at some of the big picture or contextual
00:02:00 issues. Michael will then follow with some of the information about our Council and particularly some benchmarking with other Councils and then also some information about where we're up to or where we're going with our COVID recovery plan in terms of the financials. So that's the three things we'll go through. Happy to take questions as we're very informal or comments as we go through. But the idea is to try and set it a scene as we kick off our budget process. So what I'll do, and for anyone watching at home, copies of the presentations will be attached to the minutes as well. You can have a look at them. So what I'll start off with is a bit of international context, what's happening around the world, how that impacts on Australia, how that impacts on our state and how that impacts on Noosa. Where do we develop our budget in that process, in that context I should say. So have a look at what's happening with the world impact and maybe I'm a bit of a nerd, but I love graphs that tell stories. And these were sourced from a lot of different places. This happened
00:03:00 on one from AMP. I've done some analysis on what's happening in the world with the impact of the economy, on the economy of COVID. And if you look back at these sort of comparisons, we haven't seen these sort of dips in economic activity probably since 1929, the Great Depression. Closest thing was the GFC in the 2000s. But you can see some of the bigger countries there are seeing economic activity dip by 20%. I mean that's just unheard of. You might see 2% or 3% when people start to worry about a recession. But when you're seeing consistent dips right across the European economies of 15 or thereabouts, it's pretty horrendous. Comparatively Australia's done well. Our economy has been fairly robust. And we've seen a lot of growth. And that brings me on to the next slide, which talks about why we've done well. And I love this one because what it shows is a lot of countries took different strategies
00:04:00 with COVID. Some tried to keep things open so they keep their economies going well. Others said, no, we'll deal with it as a health crisis first and we'll shut things down to look after the health. 12 months on, the countries that took the health approach, their economies are actually going better. So it's been quite interesting. If you're better off having things shut down and get your economy open sooner rather than having a big health issue and having a longer term impact. So you can see these countries up in the top corner, Vietnam, Taiwan, South Korea, I guess China sits in a category all of its own. I think there's three reasons they started the thing. Yeah, they were authoritarian and shut things down in a more directive way. But the economic impact on those countries is a lot less. So they're below the, you know, on the zero side or below zero, down to five or 6% economic losses of the economy, but still achieved a good health result. You get down to the bottom left-hand corner, Spain, United Kingdom, Italy, France, where they've had a really big COVID impact. And they've also had the
00:05:00 biggest economic impact because they've had multiple shutdowns. They've had to deal with things. So yeah, it probably gives us a bit of thought that if you manage the health crisis first, the economic stock looks after themselves a bit. Moving on what's happening. These are the latest figures that came off the World Health Organisation from yesterday, actually, in terms of what's happening. And it's a very sobering to think that almost this time last year, we were talking about pandemics and what that might look like. And if you fast forward 12 months, no one could have envisaged that 2.2 million deaths across the world, 100 million people with the cases. But what's probably reflective of what happened in the Spanish flu pandemic in 2019 is that we are still going up. The implications are still that the numbers are rising quite rapidly at the moment, particularly in Europe. That's the green element there I've highlighted.
00:06:00 And of course, the Americas, which picks up the US, Mexico, Brazil, and so on. Peru is another hotspot. So this is going to run right through 2021. And people who are thinking that we've got through 2020, that was a year of the pandemic, that's not the case. Year 2021 is another year of the pandemic. It's a bit depressing, but that's the reality. And we look around the world about what's going on. So what are some of the impacts of the international trends that might move its way down to Australia and to Noosa? We can pretty safely say that there's not going to be any significant overseas visitors in our tourism sector this year. Maybe New Zealand, depending on what happens there, but I can't see any of the... And normally international tourists are our highest spending tourists as well, make up about 15% of the market. They're not coming back in 2021 in any numbers. The other thing that's happening is that there will be a lot of countries are saying, we need to change our economic profile to reduce what we call sovereign risk.
00:07:00 So there'll be a lot of money being pumped into manufacturing in Australia. And we've been trying to reduce problems with supply chains, particularly with China, what's happening there. There's obviously a trade war on at the moment between China and a few other countries, including Australia. And some of the decisions there will trickle down into our local economy and to our local activities. I can give you one example of that, where one of our projects is now currently directly affected by what's happening with the China trade war with Australia. You're probably aware of the Euro Ringtail project, where we've been doing the pine harvesting out there. That project was about a year ahead of its timeframe. China has changed the rules about what it accepts or won't accept Australian pine at the moment. So that's been... The pine forestation out there has had to be put on hold for six months until they work out where they're going to get alternative markets. So it's still ahead of time, but that has been affected by a decision made in China. It's had its ripple effect right the way through here. But of course, the lack of international travel opportunities for outward bound Australians
00:08:00 is also an opportunity for Noosa. That really does mesh in with our tourism strategy of high end, the value, not volume. People who would always go overseas and spend a lot of money, hopefully will do that in Noosa. So coming back from the international level down to the national level, just sometimes good to understand where governments are at in the political cycle. Unlike council and the state government, the Commonwealth government is still on a variable political cycle. They don't have fixed terms. The earliest they can hold their election is September this year. And there's certainly some speculation that will be the case as they'll go to the polls while they've got the feel good after all the stimulus, the economic stimulus, and probably soon after another positive budget in June or thereabouts. So that might present a lobbying opportunity for us. We're sitting in a pretty good space at the moment with our federal member who has a fair bit of sway. Used as a system down there pretty well. Lou's been very good for us. Certainly
00:09:00 the success we've had from Commonwealth funding as a council has been enormous over the last couple of years. I think I've counted right, we've got nine bridges that have been funded going back a couple of years and at Ford a couple of years, Digital Hub, Peregian Beach Community and so on. So I call it the rivers of gold. It's not going to last forever. And I'm going to come to a slide later on that's going to talk about the risk and the opportunities associated with that as well. What hasn't changed? Oh, sorry, I'll go to this one first. So what's happening across other councils nationally? I'm watching with a bit of interest what's happening in New South Wales at the moment. They've been through, they were sort of where we were in the, around the 2010, bedded down some amalgamations. And now they've got some de-amalgamations that have started to rise. They head Snowy Valleys. A few others in councils down there are going through some studies to look at whether they should be de-amalgamated. So most of what we went through in 2014. They've got some moral support.
00:10:00 They've rung up to get some advice, put it that way. So a bit of fun to watch. The other one that's happening, and there's a lot of information in new councils about some of the challenges in some of the other states, local governments, is where rate rises are set centrally, not by the council. You don't, they have a system called rate capping where rates are maxed out at a certain level of maybe two and a half percent. And if a council wants to go beyond that, they've got to make a submission to the state government about why they can put their rates up by higher than that. And that's putting a lot of pressure on those councils to, you know, they're cutting maintenance or things like that to try and make their books balance. So they've got a few problems coming up there. The Commonwealth stuff still, I think it's going to be funded, they're focused on some of the big licks of money going into city deals and the Building Better Regions funding. We've done very well out of the Building Better Regions funding, but the city deal that's in, based on South East Queensland's been going in circles for a year or two at the
00:11:00 moment. Hasn't really got anywhere. And we should see what happens or how they tie that into what happens with the Olympic feed down there as well. This week, the local government association, the Australian Local Government Association made a submission to the federal government on the upcoming federal budget. So they do that every year. About three months ahead of when the budget's adopted, put in their wish list, so to speak. So the big three things out of their wish list that they put in this year that affect us are, they're trying to get the Commonwealth government to agree to allocating 1% of government revenue to local government. At the moment, it's about 0.4%. So we get about 2.2 million in the FACS grant, roughly with the rate, $2.2 million a year off the federal government through the financial assistance grant. So if this campaign was successful, we'd end up with about another two and a half, $2.2 million of money that we can use for other activities. So it's a pretty big campaign
00:12:00 they've been running for a while. They've been at it for three years, haven't had success yet. I don't think they're going to get success this year. Where they're more likely to get success, which might be useful to us, is they're asking the federal government also to put in a lot more money into roads to recovery. So again, we get money through that each year. They're trying to double that out into the future years. And they're also looking at putting more money into disaster resilience funding. So looking at infrastructure that can be fixed up, drainage and things like that, for helping recover from future disasters or rewarding future disasters. So that's where the money's likely to come, and that might be opportunities for us there as well. But the bottom line, and what hasn't changed, and you've seen me talk about this before, is that for every $100 that's collected in taxation across Australia, this Commonwealth government collects $83. If you put all the states together, all the money they collect through stamp duty and payroll tax and those sorts of things, they're collecting $14. And
00:13:00 if you put all 600-odd councils together across Australia and added up all the rates and charges they get, we'd collect $3. These figures haven't changed in the last four years, five years from the ABS that I've been looking at them. But if you look back over the last 20 years, the Commonwealth has become more dominant and the state less dominant in terms of what their funding is, which is why there's always a big argument between the Commonwealth and the state about the GST split between the states and why there's arguments between the Commonwealth and local governments about what the financial assistance grants are, how that money flows down vertically. It's a big, big argument every year. Okay, so let's have a look at what's happening with some of the other levels of government. So this slide here compares Australian government debt from 2019, their actual and their forecasts. So if you just go to the screen over here, councillors, you'll see that this black line
00:14:00 is when they made that forecast. And these are all of the budget balances. In other words, they did years and years of deficits. And now what they were saying back in 2019 is, oh, we've been through the deficits. Things are going to cook up. We'll get back into surplus. Along came COVID. They've had to change the scale on the graph because it wouldn't fit. So this little historic debt levels here is the equivalent of that. And this is what's happening now. So instead of going down 3%, it's down 10% of GDP as your debt levels. And it's bigger than anything we've seen ever before in our history, that level of GDP debt, budget balances. So we're going to see future generations having to pay this off for years. Any thoughts of surplus? Mayor Stewart: Twice as worse as when the GFC- Speaker 5: Correct. Yeah. Twice as bad as GFC in that one year and then come back. So what Michael will talk about later about our COVID recovery plan.
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00:15:00 And these guys have got huge work ahead of them to try and get through that. It's enormous. So how does that translate into the states? So this is all the states across Australia. They're cumulative balances. You look at whether they're in deficit or surplus. Again, 2019, leading up to that, years and years of historical cumulative deficits for state governments. In the lead up to the GFC that was saving money, GFC came along years and years of deficits and they were trying to get back into break even or maybe a little bit of deficit there. What's happened when COVID came along, what's changed is heading back down. So the long term debt structure of both the Commonwealth and the state government to be able to pay for this is pretty horrendous. And just to put this in context, if I look at both the previous slide, you can see all those green lines that are under the line, that's deficit budgets, and all the state
00:16:00 ones that are under there. In our seven years as a council, we've had one under that line. That's only because of COVID. Every one of our budgets has been above the line. Okay. So what else is happening across the nation? And what's the impact of the pandemic on house prices and where that's going? If you break this graph down, it's a really good core logic. It's a really interesting website if you want to follow what's happening with house prices and regions and information around that. The smaller the capital city, the better they've gone. People are leaving the major cities, Sydney and Melbourne, they're the bottom two. The prices, the demand is not as high there and they're probably overpriced beforehand anyway. And people are heading into the smaller regions. And when you break it down out of the capital cities, you look at the change in dwelling values. It's across all the combined capitals. And then you compare that to the regional areas of Australia.
00:17:00 It's almost twice as high. All the growth is in the regions, not in the capital cities. And that's different to what it's been in the past. It's been a really big turnaround. If you just look at the annual change, just to the left, where I've got that arrow, 1.7 if you look at all the combined capital cities, it's up to nearly 8% increase in the regions. So what we're seeing in Noosa in terms of affordable housing and demand, that's been replicated in regions right across the nation. And the major cities, the numbers are going down. Deputy Mayor Stockwell: And median value would be $200,000, wouldn't it? Speaker 5: Probably. I've got a slide coming up in terms of average rentals compared to state averages for Noosa as well. What's happening with employment around the place? This is the ANZ job ads from, I think this was published earlier this week. And job ads is a lead indicator of where unemployment is going to go, because people start advertising and then their jobs are filled. A lot of economists look at this one. And again, you can see the build up to the GFC.
00:18:00 The GFC hit here. People stopped advertising, came back down. COVID hit. Boom. The volume went up. The volume of jobs being advertised as soon as COVID hit just dropped like a stone. Never seen anything like it. But it's come back really strongly. It's actually ahead of where jobs were being advertised just before COVID hit. So it's a really good lead indicator of what might happen. The funny thing is if you, and I'll do this one. You turn that graph upside down and then see how that compares to the unemployment rate. You can see why it's a lead indicator. So unemployment, again, took off. The right hand axis is unemployment rates. Sorry, left hand. It took off after COVID hit. Jumped a couple of percent in a matter of weeks. And it's now started to work its way down. And it's following the job ads. People are still advertising jobs. So the recovery across the nationwide is much stronger than the government would have
00:19:00 predicted, probably in June last year. So it's a really good lead indicator. So I suggest in Australia we're having a V-shaped recovery, whereas the U.K. is more likely to be a U.K. That's exactly what it is. The V-shape is very strong in Australia. All of the countries where they've had both the health issue and the economic issue, it's more of a U-shaped recovery. Interest rates, Reserve Bank met this week on, I think it was Tuesday, and kept interest rates at 0.1%. That's incredible. Again, look back over history, and we've never had interest rates that low in Australia ever. In some places overseas, it's actually negative. I don't know that our Reserve Bank will get there, but we'll have to wait and see. So money is cheap at the moment. Right up until you have to pay it back. So where's all the money coming from? Effectively, the Reserve Bank's underwriting the Commonwealth Stimulus Package.
00:20:00 I have trouble getting my head around some of the economic theory of this about quantitative easing and things like that, but essentially, it's like playing a game of Monopoly, where you'll go to the banker and a player, and every time you need more money, you go to the bank and grab it. And you can then play the game. You can play cheating at Monopoly. Effectively, you have to pay more money. That's how the system works. And whether that's going to have an impact on inflation a few years down the track, but it's a really interesting model that's going out. Speaker 6: Okay. Speaker 5: What's happening? Again, a lot of people talking about COVID and what will happen at a national level with COVID and what impact that will have on us at a local level. The reality is, even though COVID vaccine issues are starting to roll out, this vaccine will not mean COVID ends with a bang. There is no date where we say, well, we got rid of COVID, that's it, we can all go back to normal. That's not going to happen in 2021. We look at the phases and the rollouts, that's going to take most of this year to push things through.
00:21:00 And even then, there might be variations or mutant strains or things like that. And of course, overseas countries haven't got that same rollout. So we might feel safe, but we're not going to get back to normal. It's going to be another difficult year. A lot of people said in the old 2020, that was the year of COVID, well, 2021 is going to be as well. We have to live with it. Okay. So that's more at the national level. Let's get down a bit of Queensland. I guess from a council perspective, I'm not seeing any appetite at the state government level for what we call major local government reform. We've now got a unique scenario where we've got two local government ministers. The Deputy Premier, Stephen Miles, is what I call the head local government minister. And he's the one that's got a lot else on his plate. And the word I'm getting back is that there's no major reform from his perspective that they're looking at. There'll be a few minor tweaks and things like that, but nothing big coming. Nikki Boyd, who is the assistant minister, will be out sort of pressing the flesh, meeting
00:22:00 all the councils, come to opens and things like that. That's how that system will work. Certainly, the state government's got its own financial problems. It's really difficult to put a finger on its financial position. They didn't release their budget until after the election, which was an interesting scenario. And they put a lot of their debt onto their non-government organisations. So, you know, the water corporations and things like that hold a lot of the big debt that effectively the ratepayers, sorry, the taxpayers are still going to have to pay back. But ultimately, if you look at the current load in terms of stimulus, economic stimulus at the moment, most of it's coming out of the Commonwealth, not out of the states. Words for Queensland looks like it's going to continue for us, the night in the cover. We don't have the numbers for that. This was the program we were able to do all the public toilets and the community halls and things like that. Our best guess, it's been about two thirds of what we had last year, but that number hasn't been announced yet.
00:23:00 And the other thing the state's getting really good at and continuing is to keep pushing things down to local government by not dealing with it. So they create a problem. Councils then feel pressures to step into the scenario. Affordable housing is the best example of that, where for 20, 30 years, Queensland Housing Commission and housing authorities would provide state housing and they would fund that. That stopped doing that to a large extent, become a problem, forcing other agencies to try and step in and solve the problem. So it's real issues for how we react to that type of issue, type of thing. Okay, what else is happening? Obviously, we don't have a state election, so there's not a lot of leverage we can do going in compared to the feds. We've certainly got a couple of big issues sorted. The Six Mile Bridge, which is a state issue, the funding's locked in and that's a good result for our community. Sandy's done well with that. Obviously, the first part of Beckmans Road, the roundabout on Noosa Cooroy Road and Beckmans
00:24:00 Road has been funded as well and that design's underway. We'll project manage that. But the big missing link for us, of course, is the balance of funding for Beckmans Road and that continues to be a bit of a bugbear for us to try and get that funding. Deputy Mayor Stockwell: Can I have a question? Shoot. Is the word, other than local government, political standard sign? Speaker 5: Yeah, it's a cartoon there. I can't avoid having a bit of a show of politicians about behaviour. Sorry about that. What's happening in Queensland economy? This is, again, it's really difficult to get through. I went through the Queensland treasury websites in terms of their financial statements or their information packs and it's much more difficult to ascertain. This is probably the closest I've got where you look at Queensland had a really boom so the darker colour here is Queensland compared to the Australian average of economic growth and activity. And so during the 2000s, the housing boom overlapped with the mining boom and things
00:25:00 were, you know, big investment. GFC came along and Cyclone Yasi and some of those big expenditure issues and knocked Queensland around pretty strongly. And then in the early 2000s, some of the really big projects, LNG up at Gladstone and things like that, they were multi-billion dollar projects and made a lot of investment. But the COVID pandemic has basically killed it. And personally, I think the projections by the state government are overly optimistic in terms of how Queensland will bounce back. I think it's going to take a while. Obviously, we're a tourism town and other issues as well, but it's not that big investment out there that I can see at the moment. I think Queensland, at the moment, we're listed fifth out of the states. They do a concept as an annual, on a quarterly basis, do a state of the states report. And we're currently listed fifth out of the eight states, including territories, in terms of financial or economic performance. Tasmania is number one. Go figure. Yeah. Across a whole range of indicators that look at economic growth and performance.
00:26:00 The smaller ones are doing better. Deputy Mayor Stockwell: How much less debt would be in a nation right now if they had a resource rent tax? Yeah. Speaker 5: So what's their impact on local government? Obviously, states are under more financial pressure than anyone. They're getting squeezed. They'll still put out small state government grants, but the big licks of money that we can get will still be coming out of the Commonwealth. So that's the bridge renewals. We've got to grab those while we can. We're going to have to replace bridges eventually. Might as well get 50% of the money. Building better regions. Some of the roads to recovery stuff that's going to come out will be good. And as I said, we are confident that we'll get the work for Queensland continued this year, and probably for the next four years, but at a reduced amount. And one of our big challenges, and what we did well in the last budget, was when we got those types of funding programs, we used it to renew existing assets. The toilets, the community halls, smaller pathway, things like that.
00:27:00 So when that comes up again, that's what we should be looking at in this budget as well. So the focus, where we can, is to look at renewing our assets, not building new ones. Councillor Wilkie: You're not hinting at an asset purchase there, are you? Speaker 5: Well, Gympie is a really good example of where this can go wrong. So they receive big funding for the Rattler. They receive big funding for their aquatic centre, their equestrian centre, and so on. And that's causing them huge financial grief at the moment about how they maintain those assets. So even though free money is available, and you think I'll grab that and build something new, the future ratepayers have to pay for it. So the whole of life costs. That's the opportunity and the risk for this funding river's goal that's around at the moment. And no, we're not going to buy the Rattler. So the other stuff that's happening, obviously, financial sustainability, if you look at it as a sector, people like Michael and I, this would be our number one issue about how a local government's second to the financial.
00:28:00 We're pretty good. But if you look at some of the small rurals and the Indigenous Councils, and the local councils, the debt levels across some of the bigger growth councils where they happen to borrow to build infrastructure for growth, I wouldn't put a number on it, but probably upwards of 25, 30 councils have really serious financial sustainability issues across Queensland. We're not one of those. Maybe a higher model. What do you reckon? Numbers? I think that we're close to that. Half. Yeah. That's 77 councils. So probably half would be under serious, serious financial risk at the moment. Three weeks ago, as part of the normal process, Clare and myself and Michael sat down, QDC does their annual, I'm sorry, five-yearly, three-yearly review of each council, having a look at what's their financial health. So they're doing a report. We're expecting that to be pretty positive. But we'll wait and get their assessment for in a couple of months.
00:29:00 Yeah. Yeah. So currently we're sound, which is good, and we expect to keep that rating. So what's happening down at the local level? There's no doubt that unemployment in Noosa has risen. This is up to mid last year. The December employment figures aren't yet out. They do that on that basis. Jumped. Still below the Queensland average, which is good. Yeah. This next one is some economic modelling that was done by ID, who do a lot of our work for us, for our economic development team. And it's actually on our own website. And this looks at what's the impact of the COVID shutdown, what happened with JobKeeper and Jobs. And it's a bit hard to see on the board, so I'll just talk it through. Essentially, the biggest area impacted in the shutdown was accommodation and food services, tourism sector. Probably no surprises. So the green dot down the bottom is the number of jobs that was lost in that quarter.
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00:30:00 So 1,700 or thereabouts. Yep. 1,750. And the yellow dot is how many jobs would have been lost without JobKeeper. So the effect of JobKeeper was to reduce the total number of jobs lost. And at one stage, we had about 4,500 people in Noosa who were getting JobKeeper. And one of the big unknowns is what will happen come March when JobKeeper is, I assume, going to be phased out. I'll assume the government will do that. Or alternatively, they'll phase out the broad application of it and put it onto certain targeted sectors. That's the other option they might do. So it's been a pretty tough sector to be in. And I'll get some intel about when I break down the tourism sector in a bit more detail. What else is happening? This is the one I always put up. It's called the SEPA index. SEPA stands for the Socio-Economic Disadvantage, Socio-Economic Index for Areas.
00:31:00 So that says, OK, if you've got 10,000 people in an area and you compare them to Queensland and break it up into five parts, so if you look at what's the bottom 20% of Queensland look like socio-economic, what's the top 20% look like, how would we compare to the averages? So we have very few people who would be considered in the bottom 20% of the socio-economic profile across Queensland. Only about 5% or 6%. Conversely, if you look at the top 20% of socio-economic profile in Queensland, we'd have about 12% of our population would be in that category. We're middle. We've got 31% would be in the middle, what's called typical middle Australia, if I can use that term. A few above and a few below. But the perception out there is that in Noosa we are a very well-to-do community. The reality is it's quite different. The reality is we do have some people who really struggle.
00:32:00 We have a lot of people below the average. We have a lot of people around the average. We have some well above it. So that perception that Noosa is a high-income, high socio-economic area is not the case. And this is what we use when we try and get funding, and we have to break down some of those perceptions with funding agencies. Deputy Mayor Stockwell: So one in four, just over one in four people could be considered disadvantaged. Correct. Speaker 5: That's right. But if you ask most people who would be pending on funding in Canberra, they'd say, Noosa, all you buggers are all well off. What do you need money for? Deputy Mayor Stockwell: That's right. So we're actually below the state average in the stocking. Yes, that's correct. Speaker 5: And this sort of plays out, this is based on the 216 ABS census data, that our average incomes, your total family incomes or household incomes, is below the Sunshine Coast average and below the state average. That's a bit of a surprise to a lot of people as well. And we do have some who are very, at each extreme.
00:33:00 If you look at the averages, that's the issue for us. Come back to rising rents. This is a really interesting one. This is up to the December quarter. This is only up to 31 December last year, where you can have a look at the comparison between an average three-bedroom home rental in Queensland, I've got the exact figure here somewhere. It's $375. That's across the whole of Queensland. In Noosa at the moment, it's $515. That depends on where you are. So that was December 31st. That's December 31st. 2020. There'd be other experiences out there that would say it's a lot higher than that. Deputy Mayor Stockwell: It's $300 a room. Room. Mayor Stewart: Yeah. Department of Housing then suggested the other day in a meeting it was up to about $800. The average. Speaker 5: Yeah. They said, I went to a meeting with some staff the other day. They gave some personal stories of their rent dropping 25% when their tenancies are coming up from their staff who are renting it.
00:34:00 So it's a pretty significant issue, and this is one, again, that the state has stepped down a lot of that housing accommodation, and because of the gap there, pressure on Speaker 4: local governments to step into that space. Speaker 5: So local economic conditions. I'm going to describe it as patchy, and that's going to sound a bit odd. If you talk to some people in our community, I'll give you some examples in a moment. We've got people who've had a record year, which is really strange in a post-COVID environment, and we've also had people who've had a record low year at both ends. It's really what COVID's done is stretched out the spectrum. So if you're in the caravan industry, if you're in the bike industry, if you're in the bottle wine shop sales industry, if you're running an online business, our digital hub is booming. The people who are running digital businesses, that's booming. So there's some real winners out of what's happened with COVID. Conversely, and I'll come to some specific examples later, if you're running an airline
00:35:00 transfer business, people taking people back and from airports, well, you've probably had the worst year you've ever had. In the tourism sector, I've been talking to Mel Anderson just about what intel they're getting. They're running some specific surveys about some of their sub-sectors and what's happening there. So again, if you're in the accommodation sector, you've probably had a boom year, particularly if you were in the core high-profile areas. Come back from that to Noosaville, more recently been good, but if you're going back to mid-year when you were dependent on the long-term New Zealand market or the long-term Melbourne market, you were really struggling. So it's been even patchy within accommodation. The main areas that are struggling though, the three sub-sectors, one is the experience sector, people who are taking tours. So people who come from Brisbane don't need a tour, they're now living in these. So a lot of the tour operators, the experience operators have really struggled. The hostel market, the backpacker market has disappeared, the international backpacker,
00:36:00 so they're struggling a bit. And the third one that's an interesting one is the body corporate management rights, where some people are moving into their units rather than renting them out, coming out of Sydney or Melbourne, and the rental pool is getting smaller. So some real challenges in some of those sub-sectors in what's happening, but the bottom line is across the region, you've heard me talk about this when we get to our financial report, people are still paying their bills. Our rate of arrears are at or even below, or no different to previous years, and we're not seeing any major problems coming with payment of rates, and if we saw issues across the total economy, that's one area that might be a bit of a lead indicator, but overall not too bad. I'm just about to wrap up, so taking all that, what's it mean? The international COVID issues are going to play out for at least another year. Don't expect, well, you've got a bit of a bubble in Noosa and in Queensland and Australia.
00:37:00 In a world context, things are going to go for another year or two. And the international economic ripple effects are going to take years. We saw what happened with the GFC, with the level of the economic shock with the Great Depression in the 1930s. It's going to be a while to recover, but we're in a good position, but our dominant theme for 2021 is still going to be COVID. COVID was not a 2020 issue, it's a multiple year issue for us. And the economic structural changes will change as well. Some of the supply line stuff might impact on us, getting materials for projects, things like that. We had an issue with the, took longer than we would have liked to get the guardrail, the RAL bridge, because of shipping issues and getting things through. So that's going to happen. The pump priming of the economy is going to continue. The Commonwealth government will probably do most of that heavy lifting. But that is both an opportunity and a risk for us. It's a risk if we choose the right projects, build new assets and end up with the way the
00:38:00 Gimpies had to deal with their legacy issues. We've got to be smart about what we pick and choose and how we make sure we try and emphasise the renewals and try and pick projects that are consistent with our strategies. The other big message is that future generations are going to be paying for what's happening here. I tell a story of my son watching the news with me one night about all the borrowing and he said, how are they going to pay this back? And I just said, you are. Not my problem. But the good news is that our local economy has rebounded well. It has been a V-shape. But we shouldn't generalise. It is sub-sectors within what we're going to do. And maybe as we go through this and think about our response, it's going to be actually in sectors rather than a strong response or a weak response across the whole thing. So maybe I get a bit excited by graphs, but I hope you found that interesting. Thank you. And I always finish with a quote.
00:39:00 Here's Oprah Whitney's quote. Be thankful for what you have. You'll end up having more. Concentrate on what you don't have. You'll never have enough. Councillor Wilkie: Gratitude. Speaker 5: Gratitude. It's better than the one I gave last year about the Rolling Stones. You can't always get what you want, but sometimes you get what you need. I thought it was a much nicer message. So that covers for me. Thank you. Thank you. Thanks for it. Thanks for it. Speaker 6: Thank you. Speaker 3: So councillors, generally, as part of our scene setting, we like to have a look at our sector. So how's Noosa performing in terms of its financial and social and infrastructure-related performance against other councillors in our category? So that's what I'd like to do today, go through some ... There's plenty of slides here, so just bear with me.
00:40:00 We'll get through the benchmark, and then I'd like to then run a quick further presentation on the context for our 21-22 budget, how we're going with our financial recovery, and what that means in terms of some decision-making we need to have as part of the process over the next few months. So benchmarking, Noosa Council is a category four council, and the state government categorises councils based on, effectively, for council remuneration. So they have a tribunal that sets council remuneration each year, and that's based on, effectively, the category of council that you're in. So there's eight categories. Brisbane is excluded. They've obviously got their own act and regulation, so they're almost a state government besides the Tasmania. So they're excluded. But obviously, one is the smallest category of council, so you've got your Indigenous
00:41:00 councils right up through to eight, which is Gold Coast here. And there's criteria that sets what category of councils, and it could be population, other demographic, environmental area. Those types of things. Those types of factors. The types of services that a council provides can also determine what category you're put in each. And that's reviewed annually by a tribunal. Councillor Lorentson: Michael, can I ask, is one of the criteria, do they take into consideration visitation numbers? So we're a tourist destination. Is that recognised in the criteria? Speaker 3: My understanding is no. It's just purely a residential population. So, Amelia? Well, next time we go to the neighbourhood. Yeah. Thanks. Thanks, Preston. Speaker 5: We should have gone with the chairperson. Take the committee chair. Bob Abbott. Speaker 3: So look, we like to sort of look at, when we do this benchmarking, how are we comparing with our financial capital?
00:42:00 So our cash and our liquidity, our infrastructure capital. So are we replacing our assets? How are we going compared to others? And some socioeconomic benchmarking around how do we compare socioeconomically to other councils, which I'll run through now with some slides. And just as a reminder in terms of financial sustainability, because a lot of this is sitting in the context of financial sustainability, which Brett mentioned in his presentation. There's the thing that state government looks at in the legislation, and even Queensland Treasury. And they do their credit reviews around, is the council able to maintain its financial infrastructure capital over the long term, which is 10 years. And that's obviously your cash, or you're looking after your assets and so on. So the first slides around the operating performance, and this is all from the actual 2019-20 year. And I suppose just putting into context this, a lot of these numbers have been impacted
00:43:00 by COVID. So you're probably looking at probably from March to October. March to June for a lot of councils, there's been some fairly significant impacts similar to Noosa on our revenues. And you can see here that Noosa, we had quite a solid year last year in terms of our performance. We did have some concerns with our, we know when COVID hit, we did take some hits to our revenue. But however, we did manage to adjust our expenditure base. And included in our surplus, which was a good position for us to be in, was unspent grants. We received a lot of grant funding last year for bushfire recovery, which we didn't spend. So that's effectively built into that surplus. A lot of councils received the financial, all councils received their financial assistance grant, or half of it in advance in June. So that's also reflected in that surplus for us.
00:44:00 But you can see a lot of those councils in the, you know, for example, New South Wales, they're effectively within an operating deficit position that they're gonna have to be careful in how they manage their way through that. Some of those councils have had those deficits for four or five years, and that's not sustainable going forward, because effectively what you do, unless you're not replacing your assets, so you're saying, look, to balance our cash, we're not going to replace our assets. We're not going to effectively spend that depreciation we're collecting. You know they would effectively run out of cash over time. You can see there that obviously from you know Central Highlands probably need to have a good look at what's happening there. Gimpy, so we know they've got some issues they're dealing with at the moment but I think they've bottomed out. You'll see Gimpy probably improving over the next few years. They've got some good people in now that are looking closely at their financials.
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00:45:00 Western Downs is a very strong council. They historically have had really good financial management and they're consistently running good surpluses and I'll show you their cash position later. But you can sort of see Noosa as Brett mentioned we always are conservative with our budgeting and our performance and again whilst we had a challenging COVID few months with COVID we did still come out with a surplus which was positive. So this is one of the, the operating surplus ratio is one of the three key ratios that we are assessed on by the State Government in Shire. This primarily still reflects that previous slide around the you know the surplus and deficit. So you can see there that you know Noosa was we achieved a seven percent operating surplus ratio which is strong. That ten percent sort of maximum there is the reason that the State puts a maximum sort of target there is that if your your surpluses are too high you may be your rate base might be too high.
00:46:00 So are you not in bet or you're not investing but you're not investing potentially in expenditure that you need to so that's sort of why they say look if you're up around that ten percent consistently you probably want to have a look at your you know your revenues. Or even your costs so you and then adjust. Councillor Wilkie: Michael does that surplus ratio that's seven percent for Noosa does that include the unspent grant money or is it just purely operating revenue? Speaker 3: It does so that's and we'll get to our 2021 budget position shortly in terms of what we're budgeting in terms of a deficit but we'll talk through then but sometimes there's a timing issue. 30 June's are cut off for financial reporting but as you know things continue so if you don't spend something now like we are we'll be spending a lot of that seven percent in the current year which we are so.
00:47:00 Councillor Lorentson: What is the recommended operating surplus ratio or the ideal operating ratio? Speaker 3: I think anywhere between zero and ten percent would be the target Amelia that we'd be aiming for but look. We can help you get that down to five. But generally from a budgeting point of view as Noosa's approach for the last six seven years has been we budget conservatively particularly with our revenues so that we know then we can manage what we're charging our rate payers in terms of the rates and charges and then any upside revenues we receive during the year help us you know achieve that surplus position and that's worked quite well for us. Thank you. And again we'll probably look at that approach again as part of this budget process. Deputy Mayor Stockwell: Michael can you just confirm are we looking at the data of year to date or are we looking at the 2019-20 outcome?
00:48:00 Speaker 3: Full financial year outcome this is the benchmark 30 June 2020. And you probably wouldn't be able to access that information because they're published financial statements in the annual reports. Okay. The next one obviously is you'll probably hear me harping on consistently around cash which you know if you don't have cash then you can't survive so this is just a slide on cash position at 30 June for each council you can see there that in the median cash position sort of that Mount Isa level around the 50 million we're slightly higher than that sort of middle of the range there. As I mentioned earlier we're in the middle of the range there. Western Downs have they have a lot of cash so they're doing very well but again we're not sure of their infrastructure profile and where they're at because they may be coming into a cycle where they need to invest that cash in renewals.
00:49:00 Speaker 5: They had a lot of input when the coal seam gas stuff started out there they got a lot of payments in that. Speaker 3: Question I've got are these all in the same category as us? Yes so these are all category four councils which are you know roughly similar. Yeah. Demographics and characteristics apart from area which I'll get to so. Councillor Wilkie: So what centres are included in Western Downs Michael? Toowoomba? Speaker 3: Dalby Roma. Speaker 5: Dalby Roma. Deputy Mayor Stockwell: Chinchilla. No not Toowoomba. Toowoomba Centre. Where all the coal seam gas is. Okay. So Dalby Roma. Speaker 5: Yeah. Deputy Mayor Stockwell: And they own the airport too don't they? No they don't. No they don't. I think that's where they, I think they run the airports where all the clients buy out and stuff. Yeah I'm not sure. Speaker 5: They've been well run for a few years. They've got pretty good stable management in there and yeah. Speaker 3: I think Central Highlands runs. Yeah. They own all the airports out there.
00:50:00 Yeah. Central Highlands is the one. Councillor Wegener: So I don't see a definite trend because the Western Downs and the Whitsundays are totally different aren't they? Like in Noosa, it's not that one area is doing better than the rest. It looks like it's up to economic management because they're very different. Noosa, Isaac, Whitsundays and Western Downs are very dispersed across the state and very different sorts of economies it looks like. Speaker 3: They do. And look. And obviously there's different budgeting levels, different levels of asset bases and so on. So I think probably just as an indicator of what cash is councils holding in our categories is probably just a representation. So obviously each council needs to make sure they have sufficient cash reserves to cover their short term working capital needs and that's generally the three months which I think I've got a slide on. So. And that probably provides a bit better indication of sustainability rather than just pure cash.
00:51:00 But again, it's just information we're putting out to show from a comparative point of view where we're at. So. This one's an interesting one. This is where you're looking at how much cash per resident are councils holding. Interestingly enough, you can see that Noosa is at the lower end of the scale there. Doesn't necessarily mean we need more cash. I think we've still got quite a good cash reserve balance at 30 June. But interestingly enough, you can see that Western Downs, whilst they have the most cash from the previous slide, they don't necessarily have the most cash per resident, which Maranoa has taken the gong there. Speaker 5: It's been a while since I looked at it. My recollection is by population, we're the largest in that category of two. Yes, it is. Yeah. Yeah. By population too, not an area. Speaker 3: Which I'll, there's an interesting slide later on that.
00:52:00 Deputy Mayor Stockwell: I see that the less populated areas probably have a lot more road funding, things like that they get, because the road per resident is much higher. Speaker 3: There's, yeah, and there'll be a graph on the financial assistance grant allocations, which is, again, interesting. Working capital is probably one, back to your question. Comment Tom on how much cash should a council have? Working capital just strips that back to what, in terms of your current assets and your current liabilities, do you have sufficient working capital to cover those short-term obligations? And you see here generally the ratio of two is an industry sort of benchmark to aim for, so most councils are okay, they've got sufficient working capital, and Lockyer Valley probably needs to just keep a watch on their finances, they're slipping a little bit.
00:53:00 But even Yipi, whilst they've had their challenges, they've still had the working capital there for them to continue to operate and pay. And again, here's another one which is, it's a similar, so similar graph to the working capital, it's about that short-term liquidity, months of cash, obviously, three months of cash is the benchmark you need to be able to continue to operate, and this through, as at 30 June, you know, 9.1, so very strong, however, again, there's some money spent funds there that will be flowing through to, that did not work. flow through to the 2021 budget, and Western Downs, significantly high levels of cash there, and again, it's, you could argue, is that too much cash they're holding, but what a problem to have, so. So, another benchmark indicator around financial capital or financial health is debt, obviously, Brett talked about the state and federal positions around debt, you can see sort of
00:54:00 the, we're around the benchmark for the category four councils, we're around the, you know, the 20, 22 million mark, which is, again, most councils in this range, possibly apart from the Livingstons and the Whitsundays have plenty of capacity for borrowing, if needed, particularly for growth and new infrastructure, and that's obviously servicing that debts, a separate sort of piece of work that councils need to do. But, obviously, if you have capacity to borrow, it helps, in terms of your future infrastructure needs, so. Councillor Wilkie: How many councils in Queensland have no debt, like Western Downs? Speaker 3: Yeah, that's the best answer. Yeah, there's a few, I think, yeah. Not many of the big five. Speaker 5: Not many of the big ones, like the small ones, like the Indigenous councils don't hold debt, for example.
00:55:00 Okay. But it wouldn't be too many of the really big ones, would it? Speaker 3: So they were, so Western Downs and Casterly Coast were two that paid off their debt, but Western Downs have been strong, a really strong management there. Councillor Wilkie: So you're saying Western Downs gets a lot of revenue from LPG infrastructure then? Speaker 5: So it was the coal sink gas. Coal sink gas, yep. Deputy Mayor Stockwell: Can you flip back to the last one? Just there, you're looking at some of the ones that are holding significant amount of cash also to hire from, look at Central Highlands and Livingston. Speaker 5: Livingston's an interesting one for us to look at because that's another one of the poor councils that de-amalgamated at the same time. Fair bit of cash. That's your claim. Speaker 3: And realistically, Western Downs, if they wanted to provide some, you know, great pay
00:56:00 relief in terms of future budgets. They've got capacity, you know, via a number and they can spend, spend up, they could possibly look at their rating base in terms of their levels of rates and there'd be different ways and means for them unless they had significant infrastructure requirements in the next five to ten years to use that cash. Councillor Wilkie: Is that level of revenue flowed for Western Downs sustainable long term? Is this like an annual revenue stream that they can rely on? I'm not sure whether that's, whether they were specific payments or if it was actually Speaker 3: part of their rating base in terms of their rates to those mining type opportunities. Councillor Wilkie: There are very few people out there, similar to us, but spread over a large area. Speaker 5: Yeah, I know a little bit about it, but I couldn't dig down to that level of detail. What they have had is good stable management for probably five or eight years.
00:57:00 Yeah. And they've had, took the opportunity when the money was flowing through the economy, with the investment by the coal seam gas, to get their cut and set themselves up for the future. Deputy Mayor Stockwell: I suppose the key message out of all this is looking at the various different results for similar sized councils is how important the management regime is to achieving the outcomes that we're trying to get to the community. No pressure, Michael. Some councils have elected, even though they've got good cash reviews, to stay at a higher level of revenue. Speaker 3: So again, if you're sort of trying to strip it down to your population and how much debt per person, here's another sort of a graph to show that. And as you can see here, you know, we've obviously higher population in Noosa compared to some of those other councils. So the debt per person is in the lower range.
00:58:00 With some of those central highlands, obviously big debt levels. So, and that reflects in the graph in terms of debt per person. And you can see around the median there is around the scenic rim level of 700 per person. So we're well below that. And again, that helps us in terms of having that borrowing capacity going forward if needed. And what about East End? Can I take that one? Councillor Wegener: Yep. And then, well, in Gympie, it's pretty strong as well. Their debt levels are low. So would they, that would give them the capacity to borrow? Yes. Correct. Yep. Speaker 3: Yeah. So on the last graph there, you can see Gympie's- Speaker 5: Although most of their challenge, most of their challenge are in the operating side of the capital. Speaker 3: Which is what you borrow for. Speaker 5: So, yeah. Speaker 3: So Gympie does have capacity. Plenty of capacity needed for borrowing, so. Net financial liabilities is one of the other three key ratios that the state and QTC look at. Councillor Wilkie: Just out of interest for our notice to the south, what's their debt level for-
00:59:00 Speaker 3: Sunshine Coast. Yeah. It's significant. Okay. However, they do have some short term sort of transactions happening regarding the airport. So I think as part of that transaction that, you know, the council's funded the airport upgrade, and that will be repaid by the lessee, I think, this financial year. And then that will come off their balance sheet. Yeah. So I think Sunshine Coast don't have really any major issues with their, you know, capacity to borrow going forward, because they've got strong, they're a strong, they've got a strong balance sheet. Yeah. So net financial liabilities, again, is, it's one of those indicators around your capacity to borrow but repay debt. So it's effectively, it's your net liabilities, so your total liabilities, less your current assets, and then your capital liabilities. So again, as a proportion of your revenue, so again, as a benchmark, 60% is your maximum.
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01:00:00 So effectively, could you, you know, if you're at 60%, and I don't know what happened to my, oh, there they are. So yeah, so Lockyer Valley, they would probably really have to be looking carefully at what their borrowings are going forward, given that they're, you know, at that range and, you know, and how they're going to repay that debt over the next five, 10 years. And however, if they have, with Lockyer Valley, you know, they just, again, it's about servicing the debt. It's probably the critical thing, if you can service the debt through your, you know, you're recovering your interest payments and paying back the debt through your cash flows, then, you know, then you can be sustainable and manage that level of debt going forward. So. Deputy Mayor Stockwell: Michael, is that graph saying at minus 12% that we could pay off all our debt and still have cash in reserve? Speaker 3: Because minus 12%?
01:01:00 Potentially, but our working capital would be probably compromised. Deputy Mayor Stockwell: And so my next question was, what is the logic behind maintaining debt when you have got a reasonable amount? Speaker 3: The logic is probably around intergenerational equity argument, where you're saying, well, for instance, we might borrow for this road. That could be, have a life of 40 years. So we can borrow for that, spread that, then those payments over the next 20 years or plus. So that future users of that road will be contributing at that time. So that's the, some of the argument of borrowing for long life infrastructure. Who benefits, who pays. Councillor Wilkie: This is more about our capacity to take on more debt. Speaker 3: If we wanted. Yeah. So the. That minus 12% equates to. What would that mean to get to the red line? 70 million. So we could. But we'd have to. That's not an invitation.
01:02:00 But as you, for every million dollars we borrow, you're 100,000 in repayments. And that 100,000, we've got to fund through our operating statements. So through, effectively through rates or fees. And that's, you know, you're looking at, you know, $100,000. $100,000 would be. A quarter of a percent. Yeah. A couple of dollars per, $2 per rate part. So the. And then, but that all comes. That's all part of our decision making. And as part of the budget process. But healthy position for us. We've got good capacity to borrow if needed. So infrastructure capital, as I mentioned earlier is around, are you, are councils effectively maintaining their asset bases? And as I mentioned there, those councils that have sustainability issues, the first thing you can do is you can cut back your capital expenditure to maintain your cash. And then you, you won't go broke, but you'll notice your, your roads might start to, you
01:03:00 know, not look as good as they were. You might not be replacing stormwater and other infrastructure as regularly as you need to. So you then have a lot more reactive maintenance. So that's. Yeah. That's probably an issue for those councils on an ongoing basis. And I think currently they're being cropped up well by the state and federal governments with funding. Mayor Stewart: Interesting. Western Downs is lower on that. Speaker 3: Yes. So clearly they're into that. Mayor Stewart: Yeah. They've got all this money, but they're, they're. Speaker 3: And that could be an indicator that, A, that if they only need to spend 65% of their depreciation on renewals and have that much cash in the bank, then they're, they're, they're just cruising. They have a lot of new assets. Yeah. But you might find, and Gympie had a similar sort of situation maybe five, 10 years ago where they had really strong cash reserves and their, their infrastructure was fairly, they weren't coming to that cycle where they had to start replacing. And I think they're there now where they've really got to manage their replacement program. And you can see Gympie last year was at 100%, so that sort of makes sense to me.
01:04:00 And the target there is 90%. So if you're spending 90% of your annual depreciation that you're collecting through your rates on renewals, then, you know, the, our state government masters and our treasury and treasury are, you know, they're comfortable that you are on track to. Councillor Wilkie: So this is renewals only. Michael, does it include upgrades? Speaker 3: Just renewals. Councillor Wilkie: Just renewals. Yeah. Speaker 3: Actually, yes. It's replacement. Sorry. Yeah. Renewals. Replacing infrastructure. Councillor Wilkie: Renewals only. Yeah. Yeah. Speaker 3: And look, Noosa will probably be on that trajectory. We, I think we'll be there this year. We'll probably be there for the next few years. We'll be well over 100%. Councillor Wilkie: So for example, that, the Noosa Heads Boardwalk, was that an upgrade or a renewal? Speaker 3: That was a combination. Councillor Wilkie: Both. Speaker 3: Both. Councillor Wilkie: Yeah. Speaker 3: Yeah. So it was an existing asset. So it's a portion of the total cost.
01:05:00 It was renewed, but it would have been, a portion would have been included in here. Councillor Wilkie: Yeah. It does include new assets. No. Deputy Mayor Stockwell: We've upgraded. If we've renewed, but we've upgraded and renewed, then only the equivalent to the renewal Speaker 3: part of this. Yes. Correct. Yep. Here's just another slide of what's the asset worth across the category four sector. You can see that median there is around sort of where we are, around that billion dollars. So Brett had that slide earlier on the assets spread across the different levels of government and I think 38% or something, but you can sort of see we're an asset intensive organisation and we need to, that's where a lot of our focus is. It's on maintaining and replacing assets and that billion dollars is significant and you can see the spread there right down to 400 million, right up to 1.5 billion in the width
01:06:00 some ways. So that's obviously why we need to have asset management plans and have effective replacement programs. And operating budgets for maintenance and so on. Speaker 5: Councillor, there's another way of looking at it. You're sitting on a board of directors running a billion dollar company. That's effectively what you're doing. And you'd be in the top 200 on the Australian Stock Exchange. Wow. By value. Once again, I'm going with the pay rise. And if you want to just continue the humour on that one, I looked it up once. The company that was on the Australian Stock Exchange closest to our value was Bega Cheese. So it makes you big cheeses. Speaker 3: You can see here just another indicator of value. So that value per resident of our assets. You can see obviously we are at the lower end given we've got a higher population base than most of our other category councils. Deputy Mayor Stockwell: It's interesting in terms of the value of the assets.
01:07:00 And I've monetised it from memory when I was a student. It is the largest local government area in the world. Correct. But its assets are less than ours. Speaker 5: We've only got one road in now. It's main road. So we've now got a big area. They're the largest city in the world. They're a designated city. They're not the largest shire. That's cool. Oh, okay. Cool. It's the largest shire. Speaker 3: Yeah, the largest city. But again, you're at the 26,000 as a median asset value per resident in the category of councils we're in. So just moving on to some socioeconomic, it's probably these are the interesting graphs and sort of flows through to what Brett presented earlier. And again, this is the population graph. It probably has been reflected in some of those other slides. But you can sort of see there that Noosa has the highest population of all the shires. We've got category four councils. Gympie's not far behind us. So in terms of size and rate base and so on, we're quite close to Gympie. Very similar to us.
01:08:00 You can see there that obviously that the higher the population generally in a local government area, that it means you've got a bit better density and density is good in terms of being able to suit four things because you've got probably more breaking capacity and so on. So that's probably what helps Noosa compared to a lot of these councils that we've got that density of population and in our rate base. Benchmarking here is just area. So you can see whilst we have the highest population, we also have the lowest area. So that's even better for us because we have less area to maintain, higher population and that obviously puts us in a good position financially to invest where we need to and manage sustainability from that perspective. Deputy Mayor Stockwell: Being a geographer, the legend you've missed off is that it's 870 square kilometres? Yes. It is. Speaker 3: Apologies. Square kilometres of area.
01:09:00 Councillor Wilkie: As opposed to? It is. Speaker 3: And you can see some of those mining areas. There's very significant areas to maintain there so that have their own unique challenges around road maintenance. And so on. Which they have to deal with. So here's just another one, persons per square kilometre. And again, it's just reflective of the fact that we've got some good density and from a financial point of view, it allows you to probably have a bit more flexibility with your decision making. And probably the key difference between us and Gympie. Isn't it? Yes. That's right. Deputy Mayor Stockwell: That's right. Speaker 3: So you can sort of see there, the council area, the Gympie, 6,800 square kilometres.
01:10:00 We're 870. So yes, significantly bigger than us. And then that's reflected in that persons per square kilometre graph there. Speaker 5: We're a good size. I've dealt with some of the other councils in my other role. There's a council up in the Gulf that is bigger than Tasmania and has a population of 2,300. So that's something to look at. Speaker 3: And here's another slide regarding our population per kilometre of road in our Shire. You can see that we've got, again, that obviously we have a higher population per kilometre of road. There's a bit more capacity to help fund the ongoing maintenance and replacement of those roads. And you can sort of see we're well above the median there. It's around 14 people per kilometre of road. We're up to 64 mark, which is beneficial for Noosa. So this is the financial assistance grant.
01:11:00 And this is the annual grant we get from the government, which flows through the state. And there's two components, there's a general purpose component and there's also the road component. You can sort of see with Noosa, we are well at the lowest end and that's probably reflective of this. So there's a number of different, particularly the general purpose grant, they talk about horizontal equalisation and that's where the methodology to allocate that general purpose component is based on ensuring that all councils across Australia have a minimum standard that they need to meet in terms of serving the community. And that, I'm not quite sure of the exact formulas that they use, but there'd be population of a number of different socioeconomic characteristics. Or data that they would use to calculate those GPGs or the general purpose grant. I think the only challenge we've had, and we previously had the grants commissioned here
01:12:00 a few years ago, was deamalgamation probably was a challenge in terms of splitting out the general purpose or the financial assistance grant from Sunshine Coast Council. Because effectively, if Noosa got more or less, Sunshine Coast, you know that, I think, it was allocated based on probably not pure science, if we could say that. And I think that's reflective here where if Noosa received more, then someone else would have effectively lost out. So, and that's a challenging one for the state and federal governments to then reallocate funding. So unless more comes in the bucket, which is always a challenge, then it's difficult for them to reallocate to us from the state and federal government. But I think that's a problem, maybe from an area that possibly needs it. And that's, you know, we've, again, whilst we're at the lowest here, we've, from a performance
01:13:00 point of view over the last five, six years, we've maintained surpluses and so on. So we're still traveling okay. So just again, just to put it per, again, it probably doesn't really change too much when you're looking at per head of population here. But that's a challenge for us. So obviously we're still $21 per person is the general purpose component of the financial assistance grant where you, a Maranoa obviously has a different whole set of demographics and socioeconomic characteristics there, which means they get a lot more per person. So, but we're still well below the median there of around $120 per person for the funding from the federal government. So. Deputy Mayor Stockwell: Okay. Thank you. Thank you. Is that where you see the difference between the federal government support for things like build road maintenance and all that sort of stuff? That doesn't include roads recovery? Speaker 3: No. So this is a general purpose component.
01:14:00 You can see here, this is the roads component and there's a different methodology on how they allocate the roads, which is generally on, you know, maintaining road networks and conditions. And you can see sort of, it's quite different. And we are sort of around the median there, so we are getting our share from a roads component point of view. Deputy Mayor Stockwell: Per kilometre basis. Speaker 3: Per kilometre, yes. Deputy Mayor Stockwell: They've had thousands of kilometres more. Speaker 3: That's right. Well, when you go back here, you see we, our road component here is, I think the $1.2 million and, oh sorry, the $1.1 and you can see that we are still half a million behind seeing Grim. However, on a per person basis, it's, per kilometre basis, sorry, it sort of evens itself out. So, and that, that makes sense. Here's one, again, Brett showed this a little bit differently. He had it annualised, but here's another one that sort of shows where we see, in terms of weekly average household income.
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01:15:00 Brett showed the, I think the census information, where this has sort of been indexed. This one's been indexed from using wage. This one's been indexed from using wage indices over the last few years. And you can sort of see we are, Noosa is around that median mark there. Nowhere near the top, of course. You can see those mining councils have more capacity in terms of incomes. The interesting enough, though, we've actually, when we first de-amalgamated Noosa and Brian and Frank might remember this, but we were actually at the high end here, our, sorry, the. Councillor Wilkie: Rating. Speaker 3: Sorry, we were at the low end, but we gradually, we came back to, actually, I'll get to another graph and explain that, but, which is this one. So you can sort of see as a percentage of weekly income, in terms of our minimum general rate and household income. So minimum general rate is obviously, you know, with our rating structure, we charge
01:16:00 a minimum general rate on every property. So if their value in each category is higher than that, then we charge a minimum general rate. If their rate in the dollar times their value doesn't achieve a certain minimum, then we charge a minimum general rate. So currently ours is $1,143 for an average property, residential property. We're not too far off the median there, which is around 1,100. Councillor Wilkie: And it used to be a lot higher than that. Speaker 3: It used to be. Well, the minimum general has been effectively CPI-ing over the last five years. You can sort of see there where previously it was our, we were at the lower end, actually, and we've been coming, slowly coming up to the median. So, but we know we're near, sort of, at the moment where Gimp is. Gimp is. Councillor Wilkie: Sorry, Mike, I thought we were at the higher end. We were charging a higher rate for other categories. Speaker 3: Yeah, you're actually, yeah, you're actually correct. Yes. And we have been coming back. Coming back. Coming back due to CPI. Yes, correct. Deputy Mayor Stockwell: Apologies. There's lots of rate rises during the amalgamated period. Yes. That put us up high.
01:17:00 And when we break back down. 42% of the increases. Yep. Councillor Lorentson: Can you come back there? It'd be interesting to look at these numbers and compare it to increases in cost of living. I think that's sort of the missing factor in all this. Noosa, I think, has increased significantly, schooling, rents, housing, coffee. Speaker 3: Rents. All the essentials. Yes. And that, obviously, we need to, through the budget process, look at those type of issues in terms of our rate setting, decision making, and what we do moving forward, so. This is probably the one I meant to get to. This is the, just a, just showing here, well, what's the minimum rate? The minimum general rate is a percentage of weekly household income, so for someone's weekly income, what's that percentage of the minimum general rate for a year? You can sort of see here, we're around the median again, so we're travelling quite well
01:18:00 there. So as we, I think, what we previously saw back in 2014, we were effectively at the high end there. We were where Gympie were. So a week's worth of, our general rate was over 100%, so a week, a weekly income. Someone's, a week's worth of their income for a year was, they had to pay their general rate. But we brought that back to, due to, I think, CPI or lower increases over the last five years, that we brought that back. So now it's, you know, we're on par with sort of a lot of those median councils in that category, so. So that's the benchmarking. Mayor Stewart: Thank you, Michael. Deputy Mayor Stockwell: Put that in practical terms. If it was 100% and you had a five-day working week, you'd work for five days, pay your rates. If it's at 67%, it means one week, you get to about Thursday morning. Speaker 3: That's right.
01:19:00 So, look, that's just a little bit of context, you know, and I think, you know, I think, generally, you know, those slides are positive for Noosa. I think we're sitting quite well in terms of that, our category of council, but it's purely just for information. I don't think it really, it won't drive our budget decision making, it's more around that scene setting and where, how we're travelling. And what I'd like to do now is just run through the context of where we're heading with this budget, our financial recovery, in terms of COVID, and how will that potentially play out over the next 12 months, so. So the, I'll go, quickly go through our 19-20 performance, which was reflected in some of those previous benchmarking slides, our recovery plan, how we're currently travelling with our budget, our current budget, our, how we're currently planning our budget, how we're going to plan our 2021-22 budget, some of the pressures we need to be mindful of with our budget
01:20:00 decision making over the next 12 months. And also just quickly on the next steps in terms of our timetable. So just last year, we obviously had some impacts with COVID and we had to make some, you know, some decisions early on, closures and so on, which were mandated. Whilst we did, had some revenue impacts, you know, our cash reserves were largely maintained and we did achieve the operating surplus, which was a good outcome for us. We achieved all of our sustainability indicators, which was positive. I think what did help us, so there was a good inflow of grant funding, Brett touched on that earlier, there is plenty of, there was bushfire funding, we've got 1.8, 1.9 million bushfire funding. Obviously stimulus funding through Works for Queensland, Unite and Recover, which we've
01:21:00 invested wisely. We did get that early financial assistance grant payment of half, which is sitting in the bank and we're slowly spending that. And that did help from a cash flow point of view, buffer some of that loss of sales revenue through the facilities and holiday parks. So what we did, obviously in the middle of the COVID crisis, we did have to react very quickly. In terms of looking at our recovery and particularly do some planning around that uncertainty. So where are we heading with our budget and our financial position? What are the risks? And the main factors there were looking at protecting our community's equity and managing the risks where we could to make good decisions. What we wanted to do there was look at, and again, COVID is still, there's a level of uncertainty with COVID, as we know. And what are we talking about with the recovery plan? Are we talking 12 months?
01:22:00 Are we talking three or four years? What we needed to do was come up with, well, what is a path here? A path to recovery so that we could manage risk and that we were managing impacts on the community, especially around rating levels and so on. And that's sort of what we looked at, a path out over the next few years rather than a hard path out. And that's sort of what we did. And that will play out in terms of the future slides. And we did have some guiding principles we used in terms of our recovery planning. And one of those was, look, we're not, potentially we're not going to get all of our ratios met. So whilst, and that's, you know, we saw that in some of those previous slides with some of those councils. You know, some of those councils had revenue impact, but also significantly provided relief to rate payers and also business, their business community through fee relief. And so on. And other initiatives, community initiatives. So we were pretty mindful that we didn't want to, you know, still mandate our financial
01:23:00 sustainability policy target of achieving all of our ratios. So I think we are still of that mindset, but as long as we manage our cash, we can come out of this and be, you know, still remain in a good position. The other principle was, look, we're not going to cut levels of service. So where possible, which I think this current budget we have managed to pretty much maintain our current levels of service. And we can see that at the moment where things are still, you know, the budget funding is there. You know, we haven't had any significant, we haven't had any staff decreases due to COVID. Maintenance levels, budgets are still, were still protected. And the other principle there in terms of the third principle is, you know, and this is where we use, I need Trent's expertise, is that all around that cash flow. Because cash, we need to make sure from a cash overview, we can keep building our infrastructure
01:24:00 and keep paying our staff, paying contractors, getting money flowing through the economy. So that was another key principle. The other one was just that our recovery initiatives didn't compromise our financial position. And we did manage that quite well. I think we've been very measured and focused in our recovery efforts. And we've been quite successful. We've been quite targeted and I think it's working well. The continuous improvement focus was another one that we wanted as a principle. So keep looking at, can we do things more efficiently? You know, can we minimise any burden on rate costs by trying to be efficient? And obviously being careful about how we take on new debt. And those principles were developed last year. And obviously we've had a review of our debt since then, which we're going to see some benefits flow through to the next budget. But obviously we always consider debt carefully in terms of what we pay on.
01:25:00 Some of the assumptions in terms of our recovery plan that we also looked at was, look, we need to be conservative around our budgeting and our response. So, and I mentioned earlier, we've always been conservative in terms of our decision making around budgets and financial management, which has put us in a good state at the moment. We did a lot of work over the last 12 months and Trent in particular reworking our financial model to look at scenarios, in particular around some of the risks that hasn't have been traded yet, but may around our rate payers ability to pay their rates, because obviously if they can't pay their rates, the cash doesn't come in for us to spend on. You know, delivering services and so on. So that's, again, we needed to reset our capital program, which we did for the 2021 budget to
01:26:00 make sure we had some cash flow coverage there in case the rates didn't come in. And new councillors will see in our current financial reporting rounds that our cash position is strong because the rates have come in, which has been positive. But we're still a little bit nervous around the loss of stimulus over the next few months and how that will affect some of our rate payers' ability to pay their rates. So the other assumption was that, again, and I mentioned this before, we didn't want as part of our recovery plan to have, you know, if we lost revenue, are we going to then put the rates up to offset that going forward? So no, we're going to be measured around a recovery path here so that, you know, we don't shock our residents with any significant rate increases that we don't need. So that was also an assumption we made with our recovery plan. You can see here there's some, in terms of our four year path, we're forecasting a deficit for the current budget and that's the case.
01:27:00 Next year we're coming out of our deficit position. We would still potentially have a small deficit, but obviously nowhere near as significant at the moment given our assumptions around some of our loss of revenue. So we're seeing that come back. You can see that we are, as part of our assumptions, we were thinking, we'll look at, this is, again, thinking at the time, we will probably see a nice recovery out of some of our loss of sales revenue. So parks, holiday parks, reopening facilities. And look, we've realised that earlier than expected as part of this planning. So, you know, we, again, Queensland's done very well with its management of COVID. Things are going well. We haven't had any outbreaks. And that's being realised at the moment through our bottom line. But you sort of see there that we're sort of, over four years, we were getting to, almost back to where we were in terms of our operating position. We did forecast that, look, over the four year period, we would be looking at a cost
01:28:00 index or a CPI rate increase plus a percentage point above that. And again, that would be to bring us out of that deficit position. And again, that, those type of decision makings obviously will happen through the budget process, particularly for 21, 22. And obviously councils, you know, how we are currently positioned in our priorities and our spending allocations there. So. Sorry, so the cost index plus 1%, is that a 1% rate increase? So if you assume that the cost index for CPI is around two, we'd be saying, well, potentially you're looking at three. 3%. Yeah. So, you know, we'd be looking at, you know, 3% to bring us out over a three year period. We'd need a 3% rate increase over each year over that period to get us out of that. And that's, obviously that modelling occurred last year. However, we are reworking those numbers now and that'll be as part of our budget discussion.
01:29:00 We'll have some updated figures on where that's at. That's projected but it's not for sure. Correct. Yeah. It's projections. Deputy Mayor Stockwell: So, for example, if revenue in the current financial year is higher than what was supposed to be before, that might be the need to go above CPI by about 1% or whatever, may be reduced if we get more confidence in our revenue. Correct. Speaker 3: Or one of the new initiatives you want to do and then pay for that. Deputy Mayor Stockwell: Yeah, no, just revenue. Speaker 3: You can see with our, we talked about our ratios, you can see that we were forecasting that we wouldn't meet all of our ratios. And look, we're fairly relaxed with that. We've, you know, we've had these discussions with Treasury and look, again, it's about managing our sustainability in our cash position. We're not particularly concerned with where we're at. And obviously this year, and I'll get to a graph shortly with our asset sustainability, but this was pre-stimulus funding as well.
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01:30:00 So we've invested a lot of that stimulus funding into renewals, which whilst we were forecasting, we weren't going to have a sustainability ratio. At 90%, we are, we're over that now, we're at over 100%, so, and we would, we're not forecasting any major debt borrowings over that period. And again, this is pre our debt refinancing investigation decision to refinance our debt, which will again, give us capacity. So, and that's just a graphical sort of representation of sort of where, where we were heading. And as you can see, we come out over the four year period. We come out to a relatively stable financial surplus of around half a billion, which is what we generally target each year. So, that's what I just mentioned with renewals. You can see that we were around that 70 odd percent, 75%, but we're up now over a hundred with that stimulus funding that we brought in for Unite and Recover and, and Words for Queensland.
01:31:00 Speaker 5: Mike, does any of the Bridges stuff fit into that renewal? Speaker 3: Yes, it does. Yes. So, the 2021 budget, we, councillors, you know, we were all part of that process. We, we did make some fairly, we had some challenging conversation and had to do some fairly quick decision making around that given the timeframes. We did factor in some revenue loss assumptions. We did allow some fee relief for our businesses and, and our customers. And that's all been, that's all been realised, so we are still providing relief where needed, where certain criteria met for our, for some of our businesses. As part of that decision making, the organisation through the executive team looked at, you know, what discretionary expenditure could we defer?
01:32:00 And that's part of that 2 million bill from base expenditure that was deferred to, to manage, not only manage our cash flows, but try and offset some of that cash flow. And that revenue loss, which is fairly significant. So, and look, we did come in, we did budget a 1.8 million deficit while still managing our cash flows. That's up to 3, 3 million now in BR2, but that's because effectively, you know, the bushfire funding had to be brought in. The unspent bushfire funding, unspent grants, and some of that, that expenditure that, you know, that was built into our 19-20 operating position. So that's been realised now through that 3 million. So we, you know, when you net it out over the two years, whilst we had that fairly decent surplus, you know, over the two years, it, it, it washes out, which is, you know, that's just, that's just normal business as usual type things we deal with. So, and I suppose the point there that current performance is really strong.
01:33:00 We're seeing some significant revenues coming through our holiday parks, given with, you know, the changing nature. Yeah. And, and Australians holidaying at home a lot. You know, there's, you're hearing stories, you, you can't buy a caravan now. There's lead-consumption caravans. And, and we've, we've seen some of that benefit through our holiday parks with occupancy levels well up. So that's positive. Our facilities as well, given that we did factor in a three-month closure and they all opened pretty much in July. So that's, all that upside revenue will flow through to BR3 and we can, you know, that 3 million deficit will probably be, you know, we'll be looking at, you know, a lot lower and possibly even a minor surplus coming into the end of financial year, so. Yeah. Speaker 5: So you've got on your agenda for the committee meeting next week a report on the holiday parks and you can see those numbers flowing through. It looks good. Speaker 3: Yep. So 21-22 budget planning. So where are we at? Well, our staff, our management team and the executive team are busy trying to meet some deadlines and getting our built-from-base business-as-usual budgets developed.
01:34:00 And we use, probably one of the few councils that do zero-based budgeting. So that's your built-from-base approach where, you know, every single line on expenditure is built from base. It's not just a CPI. We don't say, well, you've got, you've got a million dollars in your budget. Next year you get, you know, 2% extra. It's actually, well, each year you demonstrate what you need. You know, staff is at the individual's FTE level. Our materials and services is all, you know, chemicals, materials, contract services. What contract rise and falls are we building in for waste and so on. So that's all built up from base. So we're currently doing that at the moment. There's still a level of uncertainty with the pandemic, of course. So we are looking at some of our revenue forecasts for facilities and holiday parks.
01:35:00 So we will more than likely factor in a little bit of conservatism there around potential for a, you know, maybe a two or four week lockdown. So what would that mean to our revenues in those areas? So we're probably going to be a little bit conservative there as per our recovery plans. The, we do, we're going to have some operating costing packs, particularly around cleaning of our public amenities. So at the moment we previously didn't have hand soap in all of our amenities, but now we do, and it's going to stay there. So we need to factor in those costs. And even with our, our other facilities here, we have, we have some ongoing PPE type costing packs that we'll, we'll need to build into our base budget. Not significant, of course, but it all, it all adds up. So. Does it take a lot of time to start at the zero base? I mean, there's a bit of effort there, isn't there? There is. I think our management team now, whilst...
01:36:00 Councillor Wilkie: The staff are all laughing. Speaker 3: But I think... That's the wrong person. There is indeed. However, we do have methods in place now where, you know, year in, year out, you shouldn't see significant movements. It should be okay. Well, last year's bill from base was this. We lift that into next year, it's reviewed, it's refreshed and updated. So it's not like, here's a blank piece of paper and we're starting from scratch. Yeah. Councillor Wilkie: Back in 14, 15, it was very... That, and it was. Speaker 3: Yeah, it was. Councillor Wilkie: Major upheaval. Speaker 3: It was more challenging. I'm not saying it's still not challenging because there is an expectation that that's, it's not just submitted, it's reviewed and, however, we, I think the benefit there is we don't, it's not systematic. If we need to find savings or we need to look hard at our bottom line, it's, there's a process in place. It's not just systematically taking 5% off someone's budget.
01:37:00 It's looking, going through what is discretionary and what isn't, having those discussions. Councillor Wilkie: It's quite common in private enterprises, isn't it, that method of budgeting? Speaker 3: It is, yes. Councillor Wegener: Just mention that. We keep running out of pens. Yeah. Yeah. Everyone owes me pens. Deputy Mayor Stockwell: Just clarifying. So built from base, you'd have to be really canny, someone like Wayne Shaper, who unfortunately now has retired, to keep a hollow lock. So the old days of the local government where you'd have the people in the local government having this little bit every year that goes and grows and it's just their discretionary. That's the big win from built from base. You have to jounce by even if you haven't got your, your big little, you know, the CEO knows how to game system. But there's not many hollow locks around here. Speaker 3: Thank you. Well, it's a good example because a waste, i.e., you know, they might be budgeting for
01:38:00 two concrete crushes at the landfill and then they might say, well, because of timing or whatever reason, we, we might only do one. So we know that that's, well, why, why are you underspending in, well, we've only done one crush where if you, you didn't have that level of detail, we couldn't then explain to councillors in their monthly finance reports, well, why are we underspend, like are we not delivering services or, well, there are reasons and we can, we can ask and, and our managers can explain with more detail what's, what's actually happening, so. Speaker 5: Just to sort of follow that through, the reason, the method behind it or the reason behind it is that if we are over budgeting and, and having all the hollow locks and having a higher operating expense, then we have to actually put up rates to be able to pay for that. And that means that we're charging our ratepayers too much, and that comes back to that graph where we said, well, after de-amalgamation, we're the highest rated council of our size and we need to put our average incomes are below the state average, so how do we not put up rates and how do we make sure we manage our expenses so we get back into that middle,
01:39:00 that we're not the most expensive rating council, we're in the middle to reflect the incomes, the capacity of pay. Speaker 3: And look, I think it's, whilst it's a, it's a rigorous process and it does burn our management team, it's, you know, I think it's, it's healthy and I think it's good, good for the organisation and I know that it's something that other councils aspire to, it's just obviously, you know, the challenge for them is, you know, starting it and then it's, it's, it's, it's, it takes time and effort, so. The, just with our planning, our debt refinancing initiative, we'll, we'll definitely see some short-term cash upside there, which we will be discussing through the budget process, so there'll be some interest savings, which will flow through our operating position, there'll be some redemption or repayment savings, that will free up some cash flows
01:40:00 to invest in our capital program, which is positive, so that's, that's been a good initiative that's, we've achieved some good results there. We will need to start looking at unwinding some of that $2 million of deferred built-from-base expenditures, so that currently that's, the managers are looking at what, you know, we're asking them to look at what they're proposing to unwind and then the executive team will go through that and analyse that and then we want to be, again, measured in what we're unwinding, given we're still potentially going to have some revenue shortfall in our facilities, and a bit of conservatism there, so we're going to try and unwind that over a couple of years. Councillor Wilkie: Just so I understand what the term unwind means, if I can unpack that, does that mean new initiatives? Speaker 3: No, so, Frank, what this means is, for instance, there could be, so procurement, for example, in my area have said, look, we, we were budgeting to have a, a, some extra support to, to do
01:41:00 some work around our, our policies and procedures, however, we've deferred that because we, we can, we can last, we can last okay, we know the revenues are down, so now. Councillor Wilkie: So it's a wish list from the staff? Speaker 3: Yeah, but it, it's part of their built-from, normal built-from-base business as usual. Speaker 5: I don't think wish list is probably the wrong term. Okay. Yeah, it's really about what, what, you know, the must-haves, nice-to-haves, what are the things that have to be done, still have to be done, but we can do without this for 12 months, we'll push it back. Councillor Wilkie: Yeah. Speaker 5: Deferring. Yeah, deferring things like that. And that's what, that'll stump, come to the bottom of the surface this year. Councillor Wilkie: Yeah, thank you. Deputy Mayor Stockwell: For example, in your procurement, one of those policies may be council's expected desire for a social procurement policy and that, that would be put on the back burner because while it's important to get it right, it's not important to have it, that important to have it this year. Speaker 3: Yes, and, and where we need potentially, obviously our, all of our operational staff, if there's extra things to do, we, we go, do we need expertise to help with that, and then you
01:42:00 don't generally have to buy it in, and then, you know, that's the type of thing we've said, well, look, if it's deferrable or we can do that, then yes, you know, we're all busy the last 12 months and some stuff just, we just have to park and, and we may still have to, yeah, we don't know, so. Have it written in practice. Exactly. And that's a perfect example, so. Councillor Wegener: So, so it's like you have these projects and you wound them up to these, a string of projects, you wound them up around a can, and this is unwinding those projects that need to be done. Speaker 3: Yeah, it is, and they're not quite projects, Tom, they could be just normal expenditures. Expenditure, okay. Yeah. Deputy Mayor Stockwell: Would loosening the belt be a better analogy than unwinding? Releasing. We tightened it really tight last year to get it back. Loosening. Speaker 3: Just loosening it a little bit. Well, I think, I think the belt was fairly, I think our belt's pretty tight. Yeah. It's probably just a notch too much, it's the COVID notch.
01:43:00 The capital program and Brian and the guys are here at the moment. The, we are, that's currently in development. I don't, we can't see that program being any less than what it is currently, given that we've got some significant major projects we want to deliver over the next 12 months. You know, we're talking about the Rufous Street, that'll flow into next financial year. Bridges, some significant bridges. The roundabout, Becklands Road roundabout, there's a $10 million project on its own now. So we, again, that, what we'd be putting 10 year planning draft in front of councillors for discussions will be, and will try and be reasonable around our capacity to deliver those projects. So that's a key. It's not so much the volume or the, not so much the value of the program. It's the, it's the volume, it's the number of projects and the ability for us to design, plan and project manage the delivery of those.
01:44:00 So that's something we're always mindful of and we'll have those discussions as part of the process. As Brett mentioned, we're expecting some more works for Queensland funding. So there'll be obviously another focus there on can we, can we continue doing what we have been doing with some of our facilities, our public amenities and getting some spend happening across the Shire there. So, and again, that'll be a similar process where we will talk around what projects we think are the priority and we can agree on those as well. So, but again, when you're looking at the 30 million, we, that works for Queensland funding won't be as much as last year. It'll be, it'll be lower, a lower amount, so. Just some observed budget pressures and risks will need to be mindful of moving forward. The, one thing we are, and I mentioned this earlier, is we're always cognizant that if some of the JobKeeper and JobSeeker starts to drop off, what does that mean for our cash
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01:45:00 flows and our radar is? Our radar is, I think we showed last month's financial report is, is around where it normally is each year. So it's, so we, we've been lucky, but I think that stimulus has helped us where people have been getting pensions and been getting support payments. They've been getting one-off payments, helping them and, and they pay their rates. The same with all of our rate payers. They've had, generally, we, we haven't seen a big influx of arrangements to pay. They're around that same level as normal, which is, which has been interesting, but possibly reflective of the fact that we, we have, we have been recovering in Queensland quite well. But again, we, we're a bit mindful of how to, how will that potentially, you know, particularly the current rate, the current rate notice is out and it's due sort of the end of this month and next month. There's two discount periods as per last rate run. How, it'll be interesting to see how that pans out in terms of payments. And then, but we're going to be mindful of that in terms of our cashflow modelling and,
01:46:00 and what that means. So the other budget pressure we've, and Brett mentioned the rivers of gold is that whole of life impact over, over the next few years in terms of our budget. Whole of life means operating costs for infrastructure, maintenance costs, depreciation, which is probably the bigger one. Depreciation we need to fund in our operating budget each year. And, you know, the Beckman's Road roundabouts is a good one. You're talking $10 million project. You're looking at maybe $300,000 a year potentially in depreciation. It's going to come on our books in the next couple of years that we're going to have to fund. So there's some fairly big pieces of infrastructure that are coming on the books. Rupert Street, playground, trails, walking, cycling, and other, other ones that might come through sports grounds where funding might be available there. So we need to, you know, model that out accordingly and understand that the future impacts
01:47:00 on our budget. Again, all great projects, but you know, that's the challenging decisions we have on how we, how we manage our bottom line with those, those projects. The other one is unwinding those COVID related operating budget reductions. Unwinding, we'll use that term again, but that's, we just need to be mindful of that. Usually this is a normal one, but looking at our build from base increases because the, you know, they're, that flows through to a number of different things around pricing of fees and charges, pricing of waste, pricing of general rates and so on. So that one will be, we'll need to look at what's coming through our build from base. Are there any significant contract increases from our suppliers? Any particular other, other, other things that we need to be mindful of when we start
01:48:00 looking at revenues? The new initiatives will be always, we need to be mindful of as part of the process. There's, it's always, there's always more initiatives we want to do that we can fund. So it's about prioritisation and good decision making there, which that's part of our normal budget process. Delivering grant funded projects is a bit of a pressure for us. There's some, we've been a victim of our own success with getting all this grant funding, but delivering those projects and maintaining, you know, that puts pressure on our infrastructure delivery area and our, and their project management resources are, you know, we are trying to maintain that level that we need given that there's infrastructure being built everywhere. So project management resources are at a premium at the moment. And the other one is just balancing expectations. So there's always, as you know, we'll be, there's always, we can always do more and more.
01:49:00 It's just then that balancing act between expectation versus, you know, who pays and affordability. The, and just probably wrapping up, budget engagement is something that we are reporting to this, this round of meetings. So those agendas that sort of hit the internet now and the council has had those. The, we'll be recommending a budget engagement process for 21, 22, which will involve an education piece. So it's trying to educate our community regarding budgeting and it's, it's not, it's not as easy as adding more on. It's about balancing the budget. So we'll be using some good tools around encouraging our residents and ratepayers to, to get online or, or come and talk to us about how we budget and where the priorities are. There'll be, we'll try and do a combination of online and face-to-face engagement and, and we'll, that'll occur between March and June. So we're expecting to have stage dates where we will get feedback.
01:50:00 We'll feed it through our process. We'll have a, we'll have another meeting to talk through the feedback, how that influences our decisions. And we're hoping as a first, you know, being first, one of the few councils to start this, you know, it's a fairly, we're trying to do this properly. We're not just going to put documents out. We're going to try and engage in a proper way here. And I think starting off, we're going to start off and see how we go. And then we can then look at, you know, what tweaks can we make moving forward? So that's, it's going to be an interesting, interesting process, this one with our community, but we're, we're all committed to getting good outcomes here. So, so that's again, kicking that off in March. We're working with community engagement to get our Your Say page up to speed and then seeking, seeking feedback from the community. Just next steps in terms of our timetable. So obviously February will be finishing our base budget development.
01:51:00 Starting to review internally where we're at with our budget. Starting the discussions with councillors. We will be starting our engagement with the community in March. And that will be providing information out for feedback, asking them to use our balancing tool, balance the budget. And again, obviously the next February through to April, May, June is all, you know, there's, there'll be a number of councillor discussions around the budget. We'll, we'll be discussing the feedback from the community. In May we'll actually, we're looking at publishing our draft budget for feedback for a period of time for the community to have their say again. We're doing it a little bit differently this year where we'll actually seek some feedback on our draft budget position. That will include things like our proposed rate increase and our capital program. And then we'll have another council meeting to consider those, the feedback before we actually then, and then any decision making coming out of the feedback.
01:52:00 We'll then be taken on board before we then look at adopting the budget at the end of June. So that's a little bit different in terms of the process as well this year. So look, that's the, in terms of where we're at with our budget process, it's early days. However, I think today's important from a C setting point of view. So just to explain where we're at and thanks for your time. Very sobering. Thank you. Thank you. Mayor Stewart: Before we resume standing orders, does anyone have any questions? Michael. Councillor Wilkie: Good morning. Mayor Stewart: Thank you. Speaker 5: Interesting topic. Sorry, that's what Matthew said. Michael and I. Councillor Wegener: Thank you. Thank you, Michael. Do you want to take a little bit of a break? Yeah. Why don't we do this again? Mayor Stewart: We're just standing orders. Deal with it tonight. I move that standing orders be resumed. Would anyone second that? Okay. Thank you, Councillor Stockwell. All in favour? Okay. We might take a five minute. Speaker 5: Do you want to do the recommendation? Oh, okay. Maybe just deal with that. All right. We'll get this one and then we'll go.
01:53:00 Deputy Mayor Stockwell: I'll move the resolution as proposed by staff with an additional sentence. And that is, and council thank the Chief Executive Officer and the Director of Corporate Services for the quality and depth of the analysis and comprehensive framing of the budget process. Councillor Lorentson: I'll second that. Yeah, that was good. Good job. Deputy Mayor Stockwell: I do so because this is our first step into opening up the budget process to the general community. And while the last two hours is something that we've got previously, it is something that really takes a lot of work to try and get in our minds and decision-makers' minds the influences on our decisions. And so the wonder of local government is today we've heard everything how a communist country is the only country in the world that's had economic growth over the last year.
01:54:00 And that command and control is great during a pandemic and a war, but not that it sucks all the other time. Right down to why it's going to cost us more to put pants up in the local banks. And to me, I think it's going to take a lot of work. I think it's going to be having the understanding. As a planner, we're taught to go from general to specific. So we've gone from macro scale influences right down to the micro outcomes of those influences. And that is really important for us to understand. But I think it only appeals to the most engaged in our community. But those most engaged will have a resource that's available to them from that briefing that will really help form their opinions about how realistic it is to put forward new initiatives. Now, I've come out of it, certainly, realising that my desire to triple our capital investment into walkways and bikeways is unrealistic and I'll have to be satisfied with a mega doubling. I've also come out of it realising, and it's not new, that I have to convince the
01:55:00 chief executive officer that the ability for us to facilitating, activating lazy assets to facilitate affordable housing needs to be done in a way that is revenue neutral. We're not asking ratepayers to provide social housing, which is one of the misconceptions about how we can make the best use of our assets for our community. And it's really important to understand that, yes, we are filling what is a critical issue coming out of the pandemic and an issue that the state government is behind the ball on and has been for years. So these are, I think, the real... I think it's the diversity of the things we have to deal with and it's been an excellent process of coming from that general down to the specific. So thank you. Mayor Stewart: Thank you, Mr Stockwell. Would anyone else like to speak to this recommendation? I will. I'd just like to really thank Brett and Michael and all the team.
01:56:00 Trent, this new online budget tool called Balance the Budget, I believe that we're one of only two or three Queensland councils who are actually initiating this and I think it's something for our community. We won't be able to play Santa Claus, there's not a bottomless pit, but what this tool will give us and what the meaningful online and also face-to-face communication will give us real hard, tangible evidence of what our community wants. And we won't be able to satisfy anyone, but we will be able to take those wants and desires of our community and they will provide the basis of what we discuss. And I think that's really powerful and it gives us that hard, tangible evidence of knowing where their motives and ideals are at and where they really want to see money go to. So thank you very much for this. This is, I'm excited by this tool. I think all council are excited to be a part of this online balancing the budget tool and
01:57:00 see what, and have our own go at it and see what transpires. But thank you very much and let's get the ball rolling. Thank you. Councillor Lorentson: The only sort of note I'd like to make Michael is thank you firstly CEO Michael and all your staff. But I think that I just want to acknowledge that when we started in council, we all made sort of this collective agreement to have genuine consultation with the community. And I think this is one step forward in that collective agreement. That we're serious about it being a community based council. So thank you. Mayor Stewart: Thank you. We might put, we'll put the recommendation to a vote. All in favour of the recommendation on page three. That's unanimous. Thanks colleague. And we might take a five minute break. Thank you.
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02:08:00 Welcome back everyone. We're up to item two on the agenda, which is 920T138, Design, Construct and Maintain Hinterland Adventure Playground Contract Award. I believe we have another presentation for this item, so I would like to move that the operation of the standing orders or any relevant provision thereof be suspended to allow Council to receive a presentation from the Director of Infrastructure Services in relation to agenda item two. Do I have a seconder? Thank you, Councillor Wilkie. All in favour? Thank you. Speaker 5: So, Councillor, we've got a little presentation. Probably just a quick intro for you. You might recall we had a special meeting last week. That's when we had an out-of-town planning authority hat, and we had to consider this project from an applicant or application perspective under the planning scheme. Today, we have our other hat on, which is the proponent of the project and putting forward some material.
02:09:00 Obviously, the guys watched, there were some questions at the last Council meeting about, you know, what it would be about. You know, the project and things like that. So, what they thought they might do is just do a bit of scene setting and probably answer questions. I'll hand over to Paul in a moment just to run through that and talk about, you know, whether he wants to take questions on the way through at the end. But probably about 10 or 15 minutes will help set the scene. Over to you, Paul. Speaker 1: Thank you, Brett. Good morning, Councillors. Yeah, so, following the meeting, as Brett said last week, we thought we picked up on a few talking points, so we thought we'd just put together a quick, short slideshow to kind of run through the points that we picked up on, and I'm quite happy to take questions as we go, if you'd like, while there's a lot of the topics on the screen. So, we just kept it fairly short, as I said, we'll give a quick background on the project and where it's at now, a quick talk about the design, we also have a video fly-through available on our website, we'll just, we'll show that, we'll talk about fencing and security, have a discussion on where we, what our thinking was behind the current design on all abilities, access, flood management was discussed at length last week, we'll have to talk a bit more about that if you wish, and then we'll talk a bit more about, you know
02:10:00 contaminated land, and contracted water, just, just a quick summary of where we're at right now. So, the project has a long history to it, it's been active within Council and within our section for a few years now, but we've got documentation dating back to 2003, first proposing that sort of infrastructure in that area, this is prior to the Cooroy Library being built. The intent behind this design was just to provide physical infrastructure, such as amenities block, swings and slides, it's also to provide social infrastructure for that, the town. There are economic benefits to the community, and we commissioned a financial report available on Council's website, which discusses the benefits
02:11:00 to the immediate Cooroy main street and the broader Leicestershire. The project was officially adopted in 2017, and it's featured in our current corporate plan. All the way through, the development of this project within infrastructure services and outside of Council, we've stuck to this through line, which is, the hinterland playground will be an iconic nature based all abilities playground, encourages engagement with the environment, inspires the imagination of children and adults alike, and provides a signature destination for local and residents and tourists visiting the hinterland. So, that's kind of our one line description, I guess, of what this project's trying to do. And at times when we get pulled in different directions, and we're not quite sure what way to go, we've always sort of just what the intent of this site was going to be. And the idea being that the final designs will be delivered by a design and construct
02:12:00 contractor, which is the subject of our report today. The designs fitting that through line you saw before, incorporates, obviously, it's extensive landscaping with mature trees, ground cover, and nature-based play structures, so predominantly timber, water play area, a little splash play area, picnic and barbecue shelters. There will be a new public amenities block to the community, and unique or bespoke play and landscaping features. We wanted this to be Noosa, distinctly Noosa, which is different by nature. Not trying to give it a point of difference to similar infrastructure around the place. There was a specific request from Council, the previous council, to have risk-based play a feature. So our play structures are designed to challenge and inspire, which fits modern thinking on how playgrounds work in the 21st century. And throughout all elements of the site design, we've incorporated and will incorporate a risk analysis to allow the final installation to be certified and insurable, so that we're not left
02:13:00 with serious public liability issues for Noosa Council. So on that note, why don't we show the So this was developed by our landscape architect and our communications section put together the text. There's a lot of music in the background, but they literally built the design up from the ground up. And you can see the idea behind some of the play structures. We call this the spine. It leads to a central tower. You can see the mature canopy, the trees that we're talking about. We don't want this to be a fully open space. We really want to encourage the plants to provide the shade for the site. Our water play is intended to be, it's an artificial structure, but we want to
02:14:00 try and replicate the creek, the feel of the creek as much as possible. Councillor Wilkie: So this is like five years down the track, it will look like this? Speaker 1: The trees, you're seeing the trees in about five years time. Yeah. We have an amenities block as well, which is designed to fit into the landscape. And then this is the other heads you'll get for the site. And we've got some traditional structures, including flying fox, play swings, slides, all the stuff you'd expect to see in a playground. We've also got an open space to allow people to have a run around and have a play. So there we go. And this, just for your information, those mature trees we're talking about, they're not going to be planted as small shrubs. We've actually already procured a lot of the major species that we want to put into the site. We bought those nearly a year ago,
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02:15:00 and they're sitting out at a nursery in Verradale and currently growing very quickly. So when we do go to plant them, just prior to the playground being opened, you'll have some quite significant trees in there. We're talking mixture species, including figs, all of them are endemic to the local area. Councillor Wilkie: How recently was that photo taken of the trees? Speaker 1: That photo was taken about June last year. Speaker 2: Wow. Okay. Deputy Mayor Stockwell: Yeah, they're big. I'm guessing that community tree planting with shovels is out of the question? Speaker 1: They need to be big shovels. We could organise something. So let's talk about fencing and security, because I know that was discussed last week. We have only proposed for the site to be open in daylight hours, not in the dark of an evening. To manage that, we'll probably need to look at some form of security patrol and gates that are locked. So to make that work, we will need to fully fence the site.
02:16:00 There will be many gates and points of egress around that fence line, of course, to allow for maintenance, escape if that's needed. But the plan is at night, it will be locked off. The fencing is designed to provide security and peace of mind for the parents and carers as well. It's not just a security thing, it's to just allow that they know they're going into the safest spaces we can provide, especially with the Cooroy Creek next door, Maple Street around it. And the design, we're aware that the development application, which was approved last week by council, had conditions on flooding and how the gates and the fence will deal with that. We have some ideas. We were aware before that came through that we're going to have to account for the fence potentially providing issues in terms of flooding, and there's some precedence out there on how we can manage that for the design point of view. The question is the investor. Deputy Mayor Stockwell: The planning assessment model, I think that would be the same line,
02:17:00 but in retrospect, I was thinking the condition in regard, that was very general. Are we, as an investor, talking to the development assessment crew in terms of the specifics? I really only need the flood knockdown panels, et cetera, where we think that, say, in technical engineering terms, the manning's coefficient is going to be significantly impacted such that it would create an increased flood risk behind. But the condition is more general. Are we happy that the condition has flexibility that it can have a realistic approach to, and not require all fencing to be knocked down? Yeah, that's a good question. Speaker 1: Our personal viewpoint was that it was very much we just want to put the fences in where it's obvious that they'll need to be knocked down. So, for example, near the front entrance to the playground, which is above the flood levels we're talking about, we don't see why they need to be of that technical design. So, we were overthinking that they should only be placed where they
02:18:00 should be placed, based on the flood model. Well, we can negotiate that with the planning. Deputy Mayor Stockwell: Yeah, and there is a process that, as the investor or the developer, we can go back to development control to negotiate condition processes. Speaker 5: I guess, to answer that further, what's the purpose of that condition? The purpose of the condition is to make sure that fencing, whether it's flooding, is not going to, right to the barrier. So, if there's no flooding, then you don't need to push down. Deputy Mayor Stockwell: Oh, yeah. It's about, it's like if it's just pooled, drop down fencing isn't going to do anything. If it's low, that's when we need it. Yeah, it doesn't want to become a barrier. Speaker 7: Our plan would be to look at where it's high velocity and perpendicular. I think you were saying that at the last meeting as well. So, we'd be putting together a proposal and bringing that
02:19:00 Speaker 1: Exactly yeah. Let's talk about all abilities it's we always allowed for certain obvious points for an all abilities type playground so our access is one of the primary areas of focus all pathways or major pathways within the site certainly the access to the amenities block and the design of the toilet facilities will be centered around full abled and non disabled body access to the major features including picnic shelters the barbecues you know the water play area will specifically have the very least a zone where people in wheelchairs for example can get into the water if they need to we've focused we've got a zone for sensory planting for certain trees and plants which are allowed to inspire the senses of a smell or touch or even taste and
02:20:00 I'll let our operational crews know that one if it turns up and obviously the buildings will be all designed to the latest DDA compliance standards it's certainly play equipment certain play areas will you know be challenging for some more than others but we're trying to strike that balance there the fencing was always intended to provide that safe and secure space for for carers as I mentioned in previous slide so I guess that dominated the conversation right from day one in fact when we struck the balance between what's the fencing here for security all abilities or flooding we actually began with all abilities that was why we felt we had to fence the entire site and as I said the planning is designed certain sections of it are designed to offer stimulation for the centers and will curate certain areas for that but there are other opportunities to be explored in this space it's certainly an interesting space and different playgrounds and the research we've done in different parts of
02:21:00 Councillor Wegener: not only southeast Queensland but around nationally have come up with some fascinating solutions and ideas and at this stage we're still open to exploring will the state or any other agencies be coming in and installing these things along the way are there conditions that that you have to meet rules and so forth to comply with this so in order to could you ever come to a bottom like we said okay this is our plants now we've got to put them Speaker 1: before this authority and wait for them to okay it not necessarily that it tends to focus more on buildings so under the Building Act in Queensland will defer to DDA standards which I think was said federally and that does involve access to things like public amenities toilets there is but from a landscaping side point of you know it's up to us to manage that I think about the the fencing especially yep the fencing is that there's no you're not gonna
02:22:00 Councillor Finzel: bottle that or stop to slow it slow down in the process because of the fencing issue for example not that not that we're aware of with regards to the all abilities amenities blocks I've noticed the Sunshine Coast Council have just built one in line with the changing places in Australia which was an initiative you know kingdom have you drawn those design principles for the amenities block has that been not much of a level of full changing places which I'm aware Speaker 1: involves potentially quite a large space with you can include hoist helping bring out its adult standards to quite high need disabilities we haven't taken it to that level the toilet block at the moment is designed around access ambulance and DDA compliant toilet cubicle but not to the changing places level yeah I've recently been in touch with young mums in the Shire that spoke to me specifically about
02:23:00 Councillor Finzel: parking parks fence parking and change changing places that are fit for children say up to 12 and then inclusive adults as well so you know including any change table facilities for older people not for old people or what about children that are up to 10 no at the moment the the changing that any change that would occur within that area is more more around Speaker 1: changing napkin nappies for babies or all those not all abilities standards so that you're calling it all abilities so in what way are you meeting the standards of all abilities well we're not well this is the problem if you look at public amenities blocks we've struggled to find a standard we found different councils that develop their own standards we previously when we first started looking at this nearly two years ago the changing places standard that you referred to Boston we call it ad hoc seem to be focused more on in that local area there were identified socio-demographic that was of high needs disabilities and it makes sense to kind of bring it up to that standard but generally I guess for budget and operational reasons we haven't found many of those around around the place now things may have evolved and moved on since then in the two years in which case we can we can revisit that is there an option to revisit that because I think that
02:24:00 Mayor Stewart: those mothers that can't cancel things else we talking to that's a real there's no there's no park across the Shire that actually or anywhere they can find you know that suits their needs and they are significant needs yeah if we're building something from scratch why don't we just still you know I know I know obviously obviously budget this is if it's more abilities playground I think that we can we can we can look at that this this is remember this is a design contract so we're not there yet we're still Deputy Mayor Stockwell: so if I can add I think the the disabled child scenario the older child and I think the other group which I think is one of the target audiences for this park is actually the age and people suffering dementia and people who are you know disabled towards the end of their life this would be excellent and so for me I think it is something we put in front of the budget session in terms of it's in addition to what the scope has been up till now but it's something that I think we could
02:25:00 have specific consideration of because I think I think we should make it a showcase and if it is one place we should be the biggest and best playground we've ever built and yeah and I think the other key design features make sure that all the kids know that people over 60 have priority on the climbing structure it's certainly we can we can we can revisit that Speaker 1: thank you that's right given the iconic you know and it's just this you mentioned the budget it's not just the budget to make operate a budget to build us it's obviously the maintenance budget behind that equipment as well as a little bit higher so we just have to feed that into our model yeah there's mechanical infrastructure that requires maintenance and operation and potentially keys and other things so does the consideration but certainly we can look at that we have the space
02:26:00 flood management I guess let's touch on length last week and Mitch can talk at the walk if we have any technical questions more about the flooding but I think there's a question about what actually was the model that we used look we use the latest flood model of Cooroy Creek which council developed in 2018 that looked at the topography of the whole area but with the creek and we also combine that with our proposed site levels for the playground site as of last year we we focused on major storm events from the latest Bureau of Meteorology data sets and of course we focused on the Q100 flood event but this is the flood event that is up to the year 2100 isn't it yeah that's right so based on the new AR&R flood modeling techniques and they've taken on some information from the CSIRO so should be taking into consideration some climate change I know that was
02:27:00 Deputy Mayor Stockwell: considering yeah so there's probably that was the question is the design life of this is what 57 years well depends what you're talking about yeah so typically play equipment no if you're getting 10 years out that you're doing well and that's just the nature of that equipment that the buildings certainly are and it's not the buildings that are in the flood zone it's just the play equipment yeah can I ask Paul given that the playgrounds in a flood prone area is flood insurance Speaker 1: available that's a good question I suspect that would be challenging for this site insurance I guess we're focusing more on the public liability perspective can council safely and responsibly operate this playground and open it to the public risk has been focused more on the children's well-being the patrons well-being in terms of flood sites I don't think we've investigated yet so given that we know that potentially is uninsurable
02:28:00 Speaker 5: I would therefore suspect that public liability insurance would be quite considerable just go back a couple of slides one of the things down the bottom early on was it's about getting it assessed by our insurers for the risk assessment so part of the process part of the process right down the bottom is that the final installation has to be certified for insurance purposes so our public liability insurance will come in and go yep this is fine we're gonna we'll sign that off and include it in your existing public liability insurance so they do their risk assessment to make sure that's okay so when you talk about insurance you can ensure for a number of risks public liability is the big one and that's what we want to make sure that's what that process is about in terms of flood risk I mean what you're ensuring therefore is if an asset is in a play area and online it's an example a swing you know get washed away well the value of that's going to be pretty low
02:29:00 that might be very different from the public toilet which is worth hundreds of thousands of dollars that's not being built in the flood area so the way they've managed the risk for that process is which assets are in potential flood areas and which aren't and that's why that insurance issue is not a public liability issue for the risk of accidents is more important whereas the flood insurance risk is less important for us we have done that by design to reduce that risk do we have cost estimate on potential increases in public liability is that information available or is that yet to come yet to come yeah we haven't finalised the design yet I guess so I'd be surprised if it increased at all to be honest yeah we have a whole range of you know we've got a big Shire 870 square kilometres and what they do is look at our claims history how we manage risk we get assessed every year
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02:30:00 Deputy Mayor Stockwell: look at historical claims against us and they've determined their premium based on that but rather than an individual site and I would imagine the other playgrounds we have in flood prone areas are all covered by flood insurance and Kempie Terrace is the best example of that I'm guessing that the one where you would have the most management would be the fly box and the climbing structures above Speaker 5: the key is having that regular inspection and having people trained to do that regular inspection and an operational management plan that follows through on those so Amelia probably just to follow through on that question it's also about the due diligence you put in place ongoing to manage that risk so you have your regular risk inspections you can show the insurers we've got this in place therefore they assess that you you know you're finding out if the flying fox is fraying at the edges or whatever it might be and they start to get more comfortable with managing risk
02:31:00 Speaker 1: thank you so just in terms of the flooding I guess our risk management speaking of risk is is centered on that information exchange during those when that severe event occurs we know that we're talking about a low flow generally speaking and time to flooding allows escape or evacuation and we need to manage that process so I guess we're still developing how that will actually work but in terms of the structure on site and we alluded to a before we are incorporating as resilient infrastructure as possible so for example electrical infrastructure will be as flood proof as we can make it obviously the main switchboard for example and we're talking about minimizing loss of materials and potential damage so we don't want soft material like bark cover or mulch just to constantly sweep away every time there's some rain you'll find that's generally the case in most playground designs but obviously on this site we're particularly paying attention to that and we've already
02:32:00 started to tweak some of the landscaping elements to try and minimize that potential of course the site development like any development cannot exacerbate or make worse local or downstream flooding conditions and I think this is where the fence issue comes into play that specifically around that so it doesn't act like a dam wall so we will be as per the development application revisiting the final model once we finished our final design to make sure that that that doesn't happen and as Mitch alluded to before the post flooding operations will check one of the advantages of course having a site that could be secured that is locked off there'll be a operational plan in place where we check for any potential contamination from flood water or otherwise any damage that's occurred any repairs that are needed and of course the site will remain closed at this time
02:33:00 as we did with most of our playgrounds during severe weather we've let's talk about contaminated land and we could talk about this at length but look briefly given the history of the site and again I think this was discussed last week I just want to throw together quickly that the actual testing that we did do it's not the easiest thing in the world to see but all those dots you can see in the screen are all the boreholes and samples that we took across the site we did three lots of testing we initially began by just checking for what we thought were the most obvious chemicals that were identified for former typical sites I guess we include the heavy metals hydrocarbons because these to be underground fuel tank benzene phenols you know we tested for those across the main playground site we also came back and did some check checks for polychromated
02:34:00 dioxins and furans of the tcdd and we did find one small hot spot just in the northern north eastern corner there which of western corner which we'll remove and take to a waste facility we also noted that we to be honest we just missed a little strip along maple street this is what we call the road reserve and we're in currently in the process of transferring the ownership of that land to council from the state we came back and did testing for all those in that area through there and we found that all any presence of these chemicals apart from that small spot i showed before were all well under or within australian guidelines dioxin is challenging though because we found there are no australian guidelines we had to use us epa standards for that and in fact there's no laboratory in australia to test for it we had to send
02:35:00 samples overseas so then we actually forged new ground there i'm not aware of any other council or any other authority that has actually actually tested for that in the past one of the lowest points in the site where you found it yes it's likely to be well it's good captured in the clay that's what we think possibly they did go and assess the historical um aerial photos as well to see where different materials were stored when it was a timber mill can you run us through what what what will have to be done to remedy the situation uh the only remedy we really have to do and we will there's two two scopes of work from here based on the final the final uh report we will you can see that red um zone just at the top there uh we that's that's what we call the hot spot we will remove that soil and take it to a waste facility and replace with um um extensive testing and we'll continue to do testing throughout the site as it's disturbed during construction so that's one of the um report outcomes we we had to stop there and we're done we we have to keep going and then once we've finished our major earthworks then a final report will be written based on sampling and testing across the site so it's still got a bit to go um but the initial findings for those four holes of samplings is that we're good to go we can proceed to construction
02:36:00 Councillor Lorentson: and have we got an estimated cost for the remediation work i noticed on page nine that there are estimates that we um just put money aside for contaminate contaminated land management but have we actually gone out and asked what is an estimate for the cost of this excavation of approximately 30 square meters and sample testing yeah we got a we got a quote um or an estimate from our consultants Speaker 1: on what it would involve and our contractor um our proposed contractor has verified those costs they're happy to take on board that scope to help manage that scope of work and we're talking around uh twenty five thousand dollars so we've still got to get um final costs on what a waste facility would charge to take um there's still a few questions there but yeah the the whole process leading up to this point though has been quite expensive and extensive it's been more in the order of around a hundred thousand
02:37:00 Deputy Mayor Stockwell: so it's been quite a process so in the terms of um the level of you know we're dealing with concentrations there's a natural background level of dioxins the various with soils etc etc so in terms of disposal if it was thinly spread over as part of the film you know capping of a the dump for example yeah it's then got to a level where it's no longer exceeding yes because it's triggered an epa to a contaminated waste Speaker 1: so there's or we have to take a gender a contaminated site like we're going all the way and taking it to a contaminated facility yeah it's it's been challenging to navigate this particular issue because there isn't there isn't a lot of formal consensus on what to do about this um we have taken a pretty high level
02:38:00 we're taking a cautionary approach an option to spread it out over the site was there but we felt that wasn't an appropriate solution for this site given that we're actually encouraging kids to dig in soil and get dirty if it was a factory for example we're building a building on it you could absolutely look at that as a solution Deputy Mayor Stockwell: talking about liability insurance going up you should see it what it is for contaminated lean consultants Speaker 1: it's been an interesting process and they said we didn't just forge new ground in terms of this particular investigation our consultants built up a new skill set to do this as well it's one of these intangibles of this project today that's actually offered the local suppliers
02:39:00 Speaker 7: but on the question of costs while dioxins are quite new the actual process of digging up contaminated soil and taking it off site to a disposable facility council's done that process a number of times so we can have a decent confidence in the cost yeah the hard work sort of been done this is Speaker 1: and look i haven't got much more i've just got probably some final points just as we're aware the project is and remains 60 funded by the state government we recently because of some delays with the da process and to an extent code and we've had to extend the deadline which they are generously granted to us so we've now got to the end of this year to deliver the site we obviously had our da approved last week albeit with conditions which we're still refining exactly what we need to do with some of the scope of works from that we do have an existing environmental management plan and flood management plan in place they will need just some adjusting
02:40:00 before we move on actually begin construction again placed in the da approvals we will develop an operational finalize an operational plan during the construction which will account for how to manage the site ongoing not just from a an emergency flood point of view but also just how to maintain this quite elaborate facility that we're building we've been liaising with our passing garden section for quite a few number of years now on what's coming up there and i guess the reason why we're promoting the approval of this contract is because we are now on a bit of a tight schedule to get this completed by the end of the year it's been a the the extension of the grant was uh welcome but it's now there's a ticking clock i guess for us in terms of getting um a contractor underway people that we're still going to do got to finalize the design process so i guess that just gives you a bit of the background on what we're Mayor Stewart: working with just so just on that um just on the potential risks and and obviously time is of
02:41:00 the essence in this project we have to have it completed um on page nine it says one of the risks is delays from equipment supplies and we just heard in our previous um i guess item on the agenda the agenda how we had some hold-ups with the hand routes at Orealla yeah um so are we going to and i know it says here the contractor has backed this into their construction program but are we we can get when we're hearing this all over that there's been delays you know because of things coming in from overseas are we confident we can deliver the equipment we are they've had Speaker 1: uh investigated the suppliers they want to use and that was part of the ccr process we went through that we encourage them don't just come up price and work out how you're going to do deliver this for us and um at this stage their advice is um they are confident that they can deliver the supply chains that's right honestly if we find that there is a significant delay for a significant item it's likely we'll we'll revisit that and come up with a different supplier or different
02:42:00 solution for it rather than delaying your time at the moment we are confident okay thank you Mayor Stewart: and we're comfortable with the staff to be able to do that i know staffing and our infrastructure Speaker 6: so um a key part of it is securing a delivery coordinator to head up that team which is i've been successful in securing that a staff member and having that staff member commence so that's one step towards that yeah but i've still got four steps to go okay so i'm working on that as my Councillor Wegener: number one priority right what four steps that you do just reiterate that a little bit um so Speaker 6: i think it was last year i put up a briefing note on some additional staff to help with the next three-year workload um there's a communications position that would sit down in infrastructure um two graduate engineers positions to assist and then part of that would be going out for project management services for garth proud bridge lucy parade beckman's road and Doonella bridge so
02:43:00 they're the four steps the million dollar question or in this case the 5.2 million dollar question Deputy Mayor Stockwell: are we happy that we've got the 16 grant which means we've committed to another 40% how close are we now to being a 60 40 deal or is it going to be a a a classical 55 to 45 deal Speaker 1: well the grant excludes specifically a number of items including planning tasks and so no there's Deputy Mayor Stockwell: something else the additional costs are in that pesky development control process uh predominantly Speaker 1: i'm not just pointing fingers that that's just what happens so it's bearing in mind it's led to positive outcomes environmentally from to an extent we're obviously providing more car parks to the community as well so there are benefits broader than that but
02:44:00 it has come at a price uh car parks was included in the grant application um but you know the grant excludes certain tasks and um and items and that predominantly forms the cost otherwise we're sort of within the cost ambit of what we've always been from a construction point of view yeah from the the original cost and that's the process we went through last year with um this eci process we just asked was about keeping that construction significant reduction from 1.588 yeah so it might Speaker 5: get called just to explain how design construction of the normal type of contract would do just how that design process works everyone gets the construction but then how the maintenance Speaker 1: obligation works except yeah different processes the we we generally do design in-house so we engage design externally we take ownership of that and then we hand it over to a contractor to price and build and that either through tendering or through our um itq process the the key thing with that is
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02:45:00 that the design remains owned by council so if there are any issues with the design we have to take ownership and responsibility for it and take on board any liability or financial implications for it and if we have to change it at the cost of the council with the contractors so there's a lot of and that's that's okay if you're doing a very uh controlled piece of infrastructure such as culvert or a road or a bridge stuff that we're quite familiar with even buildings we're happy generally to take that on board in this case this project has been challenging on a number of fronts because it's a unique piece of infrastructure that involves many many things and we found that from a risk point of view we'll develop our concept designs up to a point where we can manage um the effects that the project's going to have on the environment and the idea process helped work through that but in terms of controlling the budget we're going to
02:46:00 hand that liability over to the contractor so they're now responsible for finishing off this this design but they'll take responsibility if there's any cost implications for that so this is locking them into this is what it's going to cost to build and it's your liability if you have cost overruns either through supply chains not working or come up with a better idea but it's going to cost more in reality we tend to negotiate that on a case-by-case basis but it's a design and construct contract so this will tie them into finishing off the design and the price that they'll commit to building the maintenance afterwards is definitely unusual and that we had identified that from an operational point of view this was going to be quite an expensive piece of new infrastructure to look after so we wanted to have the contractor tied into continuing to have involvement not just from construction's finish they'll help us work out precisely what it is going to cost to maintain this site so that our parks and gardens crews when they take full ownership of it can have their operational budgets have confidence that's what it's
02:47:00 Deputy Mayor Stockwell: more likely they'll pay particular attention to the quality of their workmanship exactly they get vested fully from Councillor Wegener: the whole process okay well just quickly this is is this the normal procedure where like it's other times when we get a get something there the plans are there you know you know that this is the plan this is what's going to happen here the plans are still being developed there's a lot of questions involved a lot of what you know even the costs is this the normal procedure and as well as to have a deadline at the end of it where if we don't make the deadline we might lose the funding it seems to be an unusual situation Speaker 6: well we did it on the oriel crescent bridge and we realized um time savings and we realized financial savings through that process and we had a deadline and we had a grant and we didn't have design plans when we were awarding the contract so yeah we had it but the eci was the the difference
02:48:00 Speaker 1: with this project wasn't it yeah that's the other point of difference we we put an interim step in place so that we're not just when i say we're handing liability off to the contractor we're not just throwing it and saying make it work we we sat down with them and went line by line through every single aspect of the project to date what they can do what they can't do and we invited them to bring ideas to the table so they've already got investment from a from a um getting to the end Deputy Mayor Stockwell: um through that process we might have detailed design plans we've got very rigorous specifications Councillor Lorentson: for what they have to achieve we did so in the um tender aspect contractors their initial price that they submitted was 5.349 million and their final price was 3.761 million so that's quite a significant difference so what do the revised works look like and what elements or building designs were admitted to reach that final price um that's really concerning for me so we're going to
02:49:00 sit in here trying to make a decision um i don't even know what the project looks like i don't know what the community whether the community knows what the revised work looks like um and i'm not sure whether they've agreed to it so 1.55 million that's the difference that i've worked out um is a quarter of the build cost can you give me some assurance that um you're right in in the report that the it's minimal the changes and public arts have been omitted um it's minimal the changes and that the design concept will remain mainly intact um that's not enough information for me Speaker 1: we well we didn't give a full breakdown um that's certainly available as you can imagine we've been controlling when i said line by line we've got about 180 separate cost items that we we sat down and went through um piece by piece give some examples so examples include um the and just to
02:50:00 take a step back we deliberately challenged ourselves from day one on this project when we what is iconic what is um a nature-based signature playground for noosa we we came up with a lot of ideas um including feedback from the community at the time but we uh based it on uh experience um through developing playgrounds in noosa shire in the past and looking at where the latest what's what's happening out there who who's who's building these sorts of playgrounds gimpy built one about three years ago i'll give you council um private developers are building these in their own um large uh land subdivisions so what is actually happening out there and what defines it as a as an iconic space we came up with quite a detailed concept for the playground and that's basically what you see in the 3d images and then the video fly through there's a whole extensive documentation underpinning that because we knew that we were going to be challenged with the budget so we decided not to limit ourselves i mean without being um over the top we decided we
02:51:00 were still going to come up with a space that um is the ideal and let's see what the market comes back with but we anticipated that we were going to come back high that the the tenders were going to come back um higher than what we expected and that's indeed what happened so we set up in our procurement process that involved this interim step where we'd sit down with them and say all right how can we maintain the design intent for this playground that through line that we showed you earlier how can we keep to that keep to our ideas keep to what we what we need without compromising the original vision for the site and the only way we could do that was to sit down and go line by line with our architects involved and work out what are we willing to keep and what are we willing not to keep what what happened was um pleasingly and we half expected this the main cost savings were in just a handful of items and that included um the buildings the amenities block for example was designed originally uh to be quite a large elaborate structure um that was buried under
02:52:00 dirt um part of it is still mounded but we've just pulled that back and we decided we can come up with cost savings it was originally costed as a reinforced concrete structure almost like a bunker where we've now gone for a more traditional building that alone saved nearly saved several hundreds of thousands of dollars smallish items include that we the original design included sections of colored concrete well we've just gone back to playing concrete for the pathways now so we we've just rationalized every single element with the contractor confirming their pricing and their supply chain and i have to say there was a potential that the eci process wouldn't get down to that original our ideal number but uh it did and that's why we're confident so aspect Councillor Lorentson: were given an opportunity to resubmit their price were the other two contractors natural form proprietary limited and eureka landscapes were they also given an opportunity to resubmit
02:53:00 quote based on the revised drawings no no so how do we know that we've actually achieved best price Speaker 1: well aspect came up with the best best offer at the start and when you do the process of interviewing and assessing the tenders we decided that aspect were a preferred contractor for moving forward but our tender process was always set up made it clear that this eci process would be involved the eci process is new from a procurement point of view because normally we get tied into first and final offer if we can negotiate certain elements but we just have to sign a contract with them here's the price do we have a budget problem or not and that is business i actually do understand that yeah yeah uh this process was new because this gave us the flexibility we needed to renegotiate the price but it was tied into the design of the playground and so we had to bring them into the table and sit down and go through what what what what design can we keep um that will maintain the vision but come up with our budget keep our budget that is that was a contract they signed and it was
02:54:00 a contract that could uh that didn't tie them to being automatically awarded the dnc contract we could have ended there there was no liability on council to complete that process there was a lot of caveats in there that the process could fail that if we can't agree on a scope on a price on a way forward it just stops and we'd have to come up with plan b either retender the site or just simply sit down and redo the design um but that's and at that point we had to come up with a plan b we would have gone back either to the previous tenders or more likely would have retended the job from scratch so it's a process that allowed us the flexibility we needed to move forward one step at a time and from a procurement point of view we're now ready to endorse a traditional contract i guess procurement agreement Councillor Lorentson: um that was adopted by council did it factor in coded related disruptions um and my question is
02:55:00 if the project is delayed due to covert related reasons we just spoke in the previous agenda item that um that we are still in covert uncertainty and there is a real potential for a lockdown so how does that impact on um the requirement that this construction needs to be completed by december 2021 Speaker 6: so we actually built the terrace during covid and we actually found that it was in some ways it benefited advantageous yeah so yeah it just depends how you look at it the worst thing to stop here in code is what you see it impacts different projects differently and different supply chains differently um so it's something we just have to manage and i think it's going to be here for a Speaker 5: while i mentioned that if you know i call it a hard lockdown but every single person couldn't go out and you couldn't do any construction for a month or something like that i'm pretty 99%
02:56:00 sure the state government will say well that 31 december will allow for that and that won't be an issue so um yeah i probably don't have as much concern about that as i would at this time last Mayor Stewart: year right going back to the um aspect contractors we in regard to rupert street we've totally changed sort of procurement and having a trust account and the money's ensuring that we can pay our subcontractors or the subconscious do we have those same levels of protection here in regard to this Speaker 1: yeah the new trust account system is absolutely important yeah we're using it on this project you're using it on this project yeah we have to extend legislation i think that's actually Speaker 6: officially kicked in now isn't it um i'd have to confirm that it's only for large building projects over a certain age but civil projects it hasn't kicked in for civil projects this one's a hybrid though because it's got yeah there's all the used things um i'd have to confirm i don't think it's Speaker 4: been uh uh let's talk about that that hasn't been enacted on this one but no it's a lot a different type of risk because it's not uh it's civil contractors and we we see the risk a lot lower
02:57:00 and we haven't acted on that uh and this point it's uh for that that one reason that we've done our due diligence around the contractors part of the procurement process with the early contract contractor engagement and we're confident that um uh this is their bread and butter and that this these this isn't a major contract for them okay it's low risk yeah so my apologies so trust Speaker 1: accounts um with one issue i think yeah but how we manage that yeah okay there's been deemed to be Speaker 4: low risk from a contractor yeah and followed all procurement processes at the date and guidelines for that so we haven't you know we're fully confident in what we've done uh we've mitigated thank you well what are the risks if it's not that one time Councillor Wegener: like what what is the risk that the state you don't get that your state money what then we have to fund them 3.6 million dollars okay and so it it's a it is a bit of a gamble that we're going to get it done on
02:58:00 time or is it just set in stone that we're going to get it done on time uh the contractor's Speaker 1: committed to getting it done on time we've told them that's the deadline and they said we can do that um but there's always a risk with any construction project that um it's inclement weather or global pandemics can interrupt um they've factored in delays into their current schedule but when i say the clock is ticking i don't i don't have months up my sleeve to slowly get ready i've got to get going with this bearing in mind we have a design process in front they're not they won't be going out and breaking ground next week for example a little bit more today there's a process we're still going to go through and i've still got some of the development on application approvals to conditions to work through so how how important in regards to that Councillor Lorentson: how important is it um to amend the approval to include the development within the road reserve we need state approval for that don't we we've got agreement from them already that we we have
02:59:00 Speaker 1: it's virtually paperwork from here so we we managed to get that through towards the end of Deputy Mayor Stockwell: last year so my question from the ceo of the flip side um in your experience um if council has worked on a grand application in good faith and it's progressing at a at a good speed um state government granting authorities if there is an unexpected delay for reasons outside our control they in your experience they tend to be reasonably um uh what's the right word not generous but Speaker 5: flexible in terms of end dates that is normally the case i'm not convinced it would be um anymore the state's clearly looking at um and they've been ringing around checking where councils are not just us other councils are up to with their grants because they're trying to call some money back um because they have financial deficits as well so um they're probably not going to be as flexible as they have been in the past i would have thought this is a fairly hard end date
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03:00:00 unless you know i'll use the example before answering Amelia's question about you know is it a full block down for a month well that i think that'd be flexible around that but um you know project risk for six months for something we've done wrong and i don't think that would be the next Deputy Mayor Stockwell: question then is it a stage three process or a lump sum at the end it is stage action um Speaker 1: the three milestones initial payment um uh sixty percent complete and final Councillor Wilkie: paul if any uh those of us who have been part of the external reference group the chamber of commerce core area residents association core futures group have been party to all these elements there's 180 line items that you mentioned before um any councillors that want to go and familiarize themselves with that um they're able to visit you and and have a look at the elements Speaker 1: involved yes happy quite happy to show the process we went through now and what we what we rationalized Councillor Wilkie: yeah just looking at aspect contractors um website a lot of their projects include a lot of sunshine
03:01:00 coast parks mary cancross park ramble skate park budram district park pierce park dick catholic park queens park maryborough leslie patrick park so they're a local a regional firm um which is a tip for me um what else about their track record uh that made them the um the prime tenderer the quality Speaker 1: of the work this was very important for this site we didn't want um playgrounds can sometimes live or die by just how well they're done in the end we were impressed with the way they finish their projects because the landscaping arena can be highly varied in terms of quality and the feedback from others who have received their work has been they've been very happy with not only the way they finished it off but their Councillor Wilkie: dedication to making it as good as they can so i noticed in your report you say you've worked with
03:02:00 them as part of the early contractor involvement process from july through december yeah that's quite a considerable time and that's when you went through each line item with them and decided how you could deliver that design item but reduce the cost of the delivery um obviously it's it's more of a partnership that you've developed than a year then i i get the sense it's a partnership it's close to categorize the relationship it's close Speaker 1: to the client or where the client we're the client we're the client we still hold the site at the end of the day it's still from here it's a traditional contract where we're the principal they are the contractor we have a superintendent in between nothing nothing is different about that we're the project manager yes we are yes so they don't take uh responsibility for full delivery and we're hands-off if that makes sense we're still involved very very closely you're still in the Councillor Wilkie: driving seat yes drive the project on but the process we've been through gives them a level of
03:03:00 Speaker 1: investment both not only financially but um in terms of what the outcomes for this project are one of the challenges we found and when we got the tenders back was that we felt that one or two of the other tenders just didn't quite get the project they didn't quite understand what we were trying to achieve here they really wanted to wipe the site clean and start over with the design no no we're not doing that this is what we want we want you to do and one of the items that was put on Councillor Wilkie: hold was the um public art element yes um there's i mean producer council that's a bit of work we've got to do in terms of getting ourselves a public art policy in place about what public art should look like in noosa shire is there the capacity to include those elements further down the track Speaker 5: yes through extra grant funding or maybe i was going to ask a similar question but another way um council finzel had asked me this before the meeting so what's the flexibility as we go through the design process i'm talking in the short term and then perhaps capacity in the long
03:04:00 term if you want to bring another element in um public art is the example so whether it's in the short term in terms of um uh you know that will the finalization the current design enable future public art if we have funding or council make the budget decision whatever it might be and how does that work in terms of timing and at what point will we have to finalize design that would give us flexibility to do stuff in the Speaker 1: future i think we're under the pressure now to finalize the design sooner than later um we always saw to be honest the the public art process is a bit of a separate thing which we were going to manage so that was never actually uh for the contractor to deliver we want them to focus on building a playground not um getting involved with that we felt but in terms of the design Speaker 5: the design would have to give a capacity to bring physically so to speak in place or location yeah Councillor Finzel: yes that's right yeah so paul that leads me the question is there space made available that if a public art piece was you know funding was found we've engaged the artist through the process
03:05:00 is there in the design sitting at the moment space to include that look i do have a map here um of what Speaker 1: the proposed the current proposal is for the site uh it's a bit um high level and it does show you know mainly it focuses on the trees but the key thing here is that the built infrastructure the buildings the picnic shelters the play equipment probably covers about 30 percent of the site the rest is open space with trees shrubs planting you can see there's an open space at the top left-hand corner there for example it's quite a lot of flexibility to come back and position for example sculptures to curate certain zones in a different way if that's part of the art solution i guess part of the challenge is what what sort of art do we want to incorporate and the landscaping
03:06:00 Speaker 7: has a lot of trails and stuff weaving through the trees part of the design intent was for the kids to be able to explore the landscaped areas and when we were thinking about public art it wasn't necessarily always about a large sculpture it was a series of small discoverable items of art Speaker 6: a frog and then they run off and tell their parents and bring that look for other friends Councillor Finzel: but just with regards to your external consultation i noticed that you've got caroy futures group caroy residence association and kind of commerce chamber of commerce which is not listening here but i noticed there's no one in the creative sector that was engaged we do have the butter factory sitting there and you actually say in your report that the budget allocations for incorporating art into the site was defunded um
03:07:00 Councillor Wilkie: can you could i could i just jump in there to answer your question councillor the caroy future group managed the caroy butter factory Mayor Stewart: it's part yeah councillor Councillor Finzel: excuse me i directed a question to paul chair is that okay oh yeah sure Speaker 1: uh so the art was uh not defined no we haven't spoken to anyone because we don't know we weren't Councillor Finzel: sure how to go and get up okay so this is why i'm raising the issue because you've spoken to us today paul and told us that you rationalized this whole project this is why i'm raising the issue because you've spoken to us today paul and told us that you rationalized this whole project concept and i get that from a business viewpoint all the requirements that you've answered the questions adequately today however the heart of this project sits with community community without identity linked into our civic structures and playgrounds etc to me does not sit
03:08:00 Councillor Wilkie: right you have not demonstrated excuse me point of order um this is the council is debating the staff Councillor Finzel: this is the question is there a question um is there a question in order to maintain the iconic nature of the brief how moving forward do you anticipate that we are going to address the issues of either priority artworks or smaller bespoke stuff but it was discussed as an integral part at the beginning of the process of discussions around this park i don't think it's fair to say it was considered an Speaker 1: The brief was to deliver a playground that was iconic. The discussion around that was based more around it was nature-based, which suited nurses different by nature. We agreed to explore opportunities, however, for incorporating art from the community. When I say we agreed to, we had no process in place. Council doesn't have a process in place for it.
03:09:00 We've had to, from the ground up, consider how we would go about doing that. We have only progressed it to the point where we came up with a process for how we felt we could engage to get the art, which is quite separate to the contracting process that we're talking about today. But when it became apparent that we had budget items, we came back to that through line, we said at the start, and we went, we're here to deliver a playground. The space has enough flexibility and opportunity available to come back and revisit if we consider that it's worth it. So we're putting specific community art into the song. Councillor Finzel: Yeah, Paul, I would put it to you. I have a question. We have a Noosa Cultural Plan, which is a significant corporate document that speaks to us. On page 22 of this document, the heritage sector states we need to engage with the community in modern and interesting ways. Speaker 5: I might get Kerry to answer that. She looks after that policy.
03:10:00 Speaker 2: Thank you for your question. In addition to this, the cultural plan did include an element of places and spaces, which aims to increase the arts and creative component, whether that's through physical representation of art or things like performance art. And so that would be our ideal scenario. In this aspect, we certainly had discussions initially, because one of the priority focus areas is when we're undertaking a new piece of civilisation, that we look to incorporate a creative element. Critical to that was that it wasn't what we sometimes get to call plonk art, where you might have a piece of civil and then you come along and you plonk a sculpture in. But that's not good representation of arts and culture and that it comes through the space. And sometimes that can be in traditional forms, such as sculpture. Sometimes it's in the design element of the buildings.
03:11:00 Sometimes it's through the natural infrastructure or the natural environment that's there that you're creating that it will come through. So when we approach public art, as Paul says, it's not ordinarily that we would engage our lead civil contractor to do that and that we would have a process alongside to be able to work through that, which would include community engagement, would include a design brief that spoke to the site itself, that would then go through an expression of interest process to engage an artist who spoke to the design brief in the site and to then eventually implement the art. So initially, we certainly were involved in the project to determine ways of building art into the project that added to the experience and added to particularly the nature play focus of it.
03:12:00 Obviously, as the process has gone along and the budget constraints have built, that element has come out. I certainly see, though, that that element can continue as a staged approach and that we can continue to look for both funding and go through the normal public art process that you would to engage an appropriate artist to then deliver a further creative element into it. Councillor Finzel: Thank you. Speaker 2: I'm just saying, while public art policy is an important component, our public art policy is actually more important for us in terms of managing existing public art. We can implement public art through a process like this. Like we're doing, for example, in Rufous Street without having a public art policy because they're projects where we're doing a design brief.
03:13:00 It's a site that's under our control. Councillor Finzel: Thank you for that. But I referenced today your Noosa Cultural Plan and the significance of culture. I didn't pull into the other one. So I have a question outside of just the public art in terms of plonking, as you say, a piece in place. Is there any way that you're going to look at or consider engaging for workshops or like, for example, in Cooroy back in the day where they got the kids to do projects in the school and put bricks in and so we have embedded in the park the narrative of our identity and community that benefits at a civic level and a future level for our heritage and the narrative of our story here in the Shire? Speaker 2: So you're referencing there that kind of community art space, which is something that is really important in terms of community connection.
03:14:00 I could see that there is scope for community arts in a space like this which could engage with people of all generations. So it's something I'm certainly happy to go and speak to Paul about. What I would say is it's actually probably much easier to get funding at the moment for a community arts project than it would be for large scale public art because once upon a time we could get external funding for public art, you know, larger scale public art. That has evaporated a lot over the last 10 years. However, a community arts project that have a physical outcome is easier to obtain. Councillor Finzel: Thank you for that. I would like to, with regards to that application for funding for public art, I am the chair on the rev. And you will note that in my speech back to the table at that meeting was that due to COVID, government has extended an extra $800 million to the arts.
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03:15:00 And I'm sure if we work hard enough, we can secure that through strengthening partnerships and being able to deliver iconic art for the space. That would be an awesome result. I myself this morning started some conversations. And I'm sure I'm happy to talk with you guys about how I can move forward on that. So that leads me into, do we bring amendments up now? No, we've still got questions. Thank you, everybody. Deputy Mayor Stockwell: I really appreciate what Councillor Finzel is drawing out. And that's about the embedding culture and creativity into the site. And when you look at the site, the whole project is the artistic installation. But the ability then to engage communities so that that culture and history is more actively reflected. In my mind, and it's probably a question to Kerry, is that it's purely a matter of budget.
03:16:00 It's not a matter of intent. But part of actually the character and culture of Noosa is about ephemeral art. And so one of the low-cost options is actually ephemeral community art. So I'm thinking, what better way to make it ephemeral than if you have your first community art is design installations that are able to float away. So it's in a floodplain, they float away, and then we have another project. And so the next time you come to the site, the whole installation is completely different. So you've got a new experience after every flood. So to me, that's the sort of low-cost community engaged is probably, you see that as fitting as a way to overcome the budgetary hurdles. Speaker 2: Certainly in our co-op planning process, one of the big aims was to take arts and culture out of traditional venues. They still have their place there, but actually take it out to where people are. And so we actually, from a cultural space, look to this playground as an opportunity for that.
03:17:00 And so there are people in, for example, our Anywhere Theatre area. Our performers, our ephemeral artists, are looking to this space as a unique gallery as such, or performance space, to be able to bring their artworks in, which, as you say, are of a temporary nature. Deputy Mayor Stockwell: And it's not true that the first performance we booked is Parthen and Jane. Councillor Wilkie: Yeah, through you, Madam Chair, just to reassure councillors that as part of the external reference group, the Cooroy Future Group had at least one, if not one or more artists at the table giving input into the project from day one. Thank you. The other question I have is in the previous report we had, there were about 10 other similar playgrounds in regional South East Queensland that the team investigated. Could you give us a sense of price range?
03:18:00 Where does this one sit in terms of the ones that you visited? Speaker 1: Yeah, it's a good question. This is quite a fascinating space at the moment. The playgrounds to this level are increasing. They're being rolled out across the board, not just in South East Queensland, but nationally just in the last two... It's been led not only by government authorities, local authorities, but developers. They are now building large, quite expensive playgrounds in their residential subdivisions because... And I spoke to one of them and they said because it attracts buyers. It's literally that simple. We went to one in the Gold Coast in Bimbimba Park, which was completed in February last year, Gainsborough Greens in the Gold Coast. That was approximately $7.5 million on a site of some architects.
03:19:00 So some of the design aesthetics we see in our proposed plans match what they did there. A much bigger site, I will say, possibly at least a third bigger than this. We've seen... They generally range from around the $2 million to the $8 million mark. So we're about in between. We've tried to get a lot of bang for our buck. We've only got actually quite a small site. It's only 0.7 hectares. And we have tried to curate every square metre that we can to try and match those sorts of visions. Brisbane City Council are now investing heavily in these sorts of play spaces as well. So it's an evolving, increasing space. Thank you. Councillor Wegener: I don't really have a lot of questions, but I want to go back to something I just asked before. It seems to me from the outside that there's an inherent conflict with this project, and that is that aspects have been given a price for a general project, but no blueprints,
03:20:00 not a lot of detail. So there's the different abilities, like contamination, fences, flooding, disability access. Those are just ones we just hit now, which all have the same answer. We're designing that. We're in the process. And it seems to me that because there's a conflict, is it usually going to start with this, yes, you guys have got the contract, but now we want to do this and you want to do that and you want to do this and you want to... And the going back and forth is they're going to be looking at the bottom line. We're going to be looking at what we really want. And is there a proper conflict resolution in place in case this happens? And is there, with a dispute resolution, and if there are problems, we might not hit the deadline? It just seems... It seems to me that this is problematic. I'm not in this field that you're in, but from the outside, it looks problematic.
03:21:00 Speaker 1: Well, I'm happy to answer that. As I mentioned before, there is extensive documentation behind this. There's no way we could have created that video fly-through or the images that you can see on our website without design. We actually have full landscape drawings for this. We elected to actually take it to the next level. So that's why I mentioned in the earlier slide the detailed concept designs. It sounds a bit...a conflict there, but we literally came up with our vision for the program. We realised when I said we had to curate every square metre of space, well, we didn't just, you know... We didn't just sort of look at it and go, we think this looks right. We challenged our designers, well, draw it up for us. Actually draw this stuff up. So we have architectural drawings for the amenities block, for the picnic shelters. We have all the play equipment. We actually have that designed, and that's what went to tender. So the contractors actually had very detailed drawings to work on. In terms of managing conflicts and conflict resolution, that's what the contract's for. It's exactly what it's for. It's about allocating risk, and when disputes arise,
03:22:00 this process is built into how we negotiate and manage them. Speaker 6: So I can probably jump in there. With Park Road Board, we had a full working result. We went out to tender and we said, you can, you know, contract and price this design, or you can build your own design. And they chose to take the best parts of the design that we put out, because it was a design and construct contract, but innovate the areas where their expertise were. So we didn't look at the product we ended up with, you know. So there is opportunities, and we used the contract through that process to manage that process. Councillor Wegener: Okay. So if I had come to you earlier about this, you would have taken out a big , and here we go. Look at this, Tom. This is this meter. This is this meter. This is what we're doing. And we've done it before. Deputy Mayor Stockwell: Yeah. Yeah. And I think, as you say, the design and construct on the boardwalk, there's two years or so of community engagement, leading to, you know, we even got some old surfer to help us design the rails from memory.
03:23:00 And at the end of the day, it was design and construct, and, you know, they took all that, as you say, modified it, but the intent and the specifications didn't change. We built what, you know, locals and visitors loved, and, you know, achieved an iconic project, which is what we're trying to do here. Yes. Councillor Lorentson: Can I ask, will approving this playground result in a rate rise? Speaker 5: I'll ask the council. It's ultimately the council who decides the rate rise. What it will do with this project is add to our ongoing maintenance costs. So once it comes off maintenance, so that's the idea of the contract, is that they design, construct, and then maintain. Eventually, when it comes off maintenance, yes, there will be increased maintenance costs for council, more work to do, more grass to be cut, things to be inspected, and so on. And that will increase our cost base. So that's what the council, when we look at the rates increase each year, we'll have to take into account our increased cost base.
03:24:00 And that same answer will apply to when we build the Pridgen Beach Community Hub, or the boardwalk, or whatever it might be. Every asset we build that's new will add to our rate space. Councillor Wegener: That obviously, this is, is a good light on the ongoing cost. It sounds to me like it's going to be one or two, probably two people full time maintaining the park, you know, for, for, did into the distant future, plus the, you know, the depreciation and so forth. Speaker 5: I don't think it's in this report, but I think that has been reported to council previously. Yeah. Yeah. You're right. No, no, no. I just can't, I haven't got it. Speaker 1: Is that it? You go. So in August 2019, we, we provided in the report to council, only a very initial high level of, look at what the operational costs are going to be. That was based on a model that we developed in, well, the corporate services developed.
03:25:00 And like a lot of things in this project, we did it because of this project. It was just, we, we, we, we, we developed it from scratch. Since then, our corporate services have refined their operational model. And we didn't discuss it in this report. I guess, I even wanted to maintain focus on our contract award, but the, now that we feel that once we complete our final designs, that's the opportunity to then sit down and go, this is exactly what it's going to cost to operate and maintain. Councillor Wegener: We, we, we just talked about, you know, the, the problem with Gympie, they made a couple of nice things out of, you know, the pool there. And that's what, we, we can clearly see their financial predicament, due to our most illustrious, um, Michael Shane. And, you know, we've obviously, that, that's, that's what we're probably all dancing around, like, wow, you know, Speaker 5: it's just going to cost in the future. What I've always said to council, you need to make an informed decision. The informed decision is, when you build something new, it's going to have an ongoing cost. Um, as I said, that cost had previously been reported. And I think, um, when we end up with the final design, we'll come in under that.
03:26:00 We'll always be conservative with that original estimate. Um, but, that's no different to awarding the Peregian Beach Community House. Um, that's going to have an ongoing maintenance cost, and depreciation, and so on. So, same for every single asset we build, that's new. Deputy Mayor Stockwell: So, it might be, Brett, who calls on the project team, when it was reported, I suppose, the new councils that haven't got the benefit of it. Um, we did a comparison, there was a comparison done between the other, um, services council offers. And from my memory, it was fairly close to operating costs for the botanical gardens, a lot less than the NAC and the J. Um, and, it was, yeah, in terms of where the scale sits, it was pretty typical for a, for a, for a, A major asset. Major asset. Correct. Speaker 4: Yeah. Deputy Mayor Stockwell: And the other question I had was, that's looking from a cost perspective, there was also an economic analysis done. If this was put up as an economic development project, would we invest in it? Speaker 5: Yeah, the original, um, when we had the original council decision, um, to seek funding, part of that funding proposal was a,
03:27:00 uh, economic assessment, um, by, AEC. Yeah, AEC, we were Australian Economic Consultants Group, um, which looked at how much economic benefit would be generated, generated for Cooroy, how many jobs were created and so on. So that was also part of the reason why we got the $2.6 million funding from the state government, Mayor Stewart: but we're, we're still in the informal part of, um, the meeting, so if there's no more questions, I might resume standing orders and then we can move to the more formal part, if no one has any more questions. Deputy Mayor Stockwell: I think I missed my 12 o'clock appointment. Mayor Stewart: We can ask questions if you want. Yeah. Yeah. So I, I move that standing orders be resumed. I second. Thank you, Councillor Lockie. All in favour? Unanimous. Thank you. We're good. Now there is a staff recommendation, uh, on page five of our agendas.
03:28:00 Um, does anyone have any further questions, want to speak to the, move the motion, speak to the motion? Yeah. Councillor Wilkie: Look, I'll, I'll move the motion. Thank you, Mayor Stewart: Councillor Lockie. Councillor Wilkie: I'll second. it's been a long process to get here. We have, uh, a tender, a successful tenderer who's, who's emerged ahead of the pack. That's as a, a strong track record here on the Sunshine Coast and up to Mirraburra. Uh, they've been working closely with the staff, uh, since July last year, working, um, very closely, I would say, in partnership with the staff on all the 180 line items that make up this very detailed design brief for this, um, uh, adventure play, this, um, nature based all abilities playground. Um, they're, they're considering cost savings on the full landscape designs.
03:29:00 Every building is, is architecturally designed. All the play elements have been designed and they're working to deliver the project. It will remain true to the project within the available budget. Um, there has been extensive community input onto this project so far, especially from the Cooroy based groups, the Cooroy Future Group, who, as you know, manage the, uh, Cooroy Butter Factory and also the Fusion Festival, uh, the, uh, Cooroy Chamber of Commerce, who do the Body Art Festival and also the Cooroy Area Residents Association. It is, uh, a very difficult project. There are risks involved, um, but the Council will remain the project manager working very closely with aspect contractors so that all contingencies can be, uh, responsibly managed. Um, I'm heartened to hear that the work with the State Government Department to give us permission
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03:30:00 in principle for use of the road reserve is already in play. That was one of my main concerns. Um, one of my main concerns is that waiting for State Government approval for transfer of land title can take years, but they've already given in principle approval of that for the use of the road reserve. That's, that's very heartening. I appreciate that time is of the essence. I'm also heartened to hear the, um, the, uh, CEO's comments that if there is, uh, a COVID related lockdown, that the State Government is likely to, um, have a sympathetic ear towards that and not bring down the heart, cut off the funding by, if the project isn't finished by December 31, because of these sort of circumstances. I'm also heartened to hear that, um, any public liability issues for taking on board this playground can be incorporated in the Council's overall public liability insurance, which covers use of all the playgrounds and all the assets.
03:31:00 Um, uh, and, and, I'm glad there's going to be regular reporting on this because there are a lot of milestones to be released, reached prior to the project being completed. Thank you. Mayor Stewart: I think the council will keep it in and I'd just like to speak to this motion. Deputy Mayor Stockwell: Anyone else? I do say, this is an iconic project. I think it's really important. While I totally agree with the points that Councillor Finzel was making when she was asking questions in regards to embedding within this development our cultural and hereditary, I suppose, flavour. It really, the last time I talked about this, I had just found an old report, the first report or first document I ever wrote as a Noosa Shire Council where I was advocating for an environment policy.
03:32:00 Because there was none, none at all in Noosa Council at the time. It would have been in 1990. And a whole page of that was dedicated to how a nature-based playground would be an essential part of demonstrating what Noosa is all about. It might have taken 30 years, but it is, you know, within this whole concept is, it's embedding the culture of Noosa in a playground environment. I also did, last time in 2019, my Boffinish role of going through all the literature on the public health, the community health, mental health benefits of nature-based playgrounds and it was immense. And it wasn't just for children, it was all people of all ages, that nature-based play is really emerging as a key need to address the multiplicity of problems that modern society is having. It's based on screening. It's based on learning, it's based on their genes, it's based on how they have their genes and in-earthness and how it's better than, for example, organised sport for people with obesity.
03:33:00 But, as I just pointed out, this project would stand on its own regardless of all those other community benefits as an economic development project. If you really looked at return on investment, it'll probably be one of the best returns on investment for an economic development project this Council makes in ten years time. Because the other lot of research really shows what it can drive and what we'll have to manage this process because we're not about just driving things to your home, we just don't want more and more people to come to Croyd. So we have to make sure that we build it to a scale and we manage it so that the use of this site doesn't impact on the town more generally in terms of congestion and I suppose that's where the realistic concerns are from a number of people in the community. Now I'd like to thank staff, now we're really, I shouldn't be talking about that, I should be talking about the tender process, but the ECI process has been amazing to get from, you know, this is what we think, let's sit down and get down to what is, you know, what's your favourite quote at budget time?
03:34:00 Where dreams meet reality, hope meets reality and we've got it down to within budget so I think it's a great initiative and one that I support. Councillor Lorentson: Thank you councillor. Councillor Wegener: When reading this, that was not, I had lots and lots of concerns, I felt that there was a potential of throwing the dice with the ratepayers money, on the other hand I wanted, I want this project so bad because I'm from Croyd, I had kids, and I know that this raises the standard of living for the community, especially Croyd, but Pomona, Cooran, Kin, Peregian, Noosaville, Cooran, Kin Kin, Peregian, Noosaville, Cooran, Kin Kin, Peregian, I mean we used to drive out to the Kenilworth Park because that was a great park, you know, with my kids, it's absolutely iconic, it is gorgeous, the concept, and so you've relieved my worries that I had about disruptions, possibly not making it on time and so forth, as you said, you did it before with, this isn't a novel way of doing things, it's actually more of a standard way of doing things.
03:35:00 And, oh, you know, a lot of people want to know exactly how much this is going to cost afterwards, the ongoing, but of course that's nebulous, but we have, we have the ballpark that have come through, so, yeah, thank you very much for, for your very, very hard work and your vision for this. Thank you. Thank you. Councillor Wilkie: I might ask a question, Madam Mayor. There's councillors around the table who, during the process, just talking informally, are interested in the capacity for the playground to include a space for a coffee cart in case mums want to buy a coffee while they're there watching their children. Can you tell us what's been built into the project to allow that, if possible?
03:36:00 Speaker 1: We have allowed a space for a coffee cart or a food truck. The price here includes that. It includes, allows for a concrete slab, a water supply and a power connection. So we've found a space for that. Speaker 5: Councillor, just to clarify, obviously we were in a free-flowing discussion earlier. Just check the notes that I had. A couple of things that staff will follow up from following those conversations. So one is that we'll look at all abilities aspect in the toilet block. We'll talk to the contractors about that. And the second is about the opportunities to incorporate, particularly community arts or public art, into this space, that the design will make that facility. And we'll look at those funding options, obviously working with the chair of the RADF committee to find out how we can try and get that into that design as well. They're the two issues that staff will take forward as well. Thank you, Mr. CEO.
03:37:00 Mayor Stewart: Councillor Dixon. No, can I say something else? You guys talk first. Go ahead. Councillor Lorentson: I'm still getting some thoughts. Mayor Stewart: You don't have to talk, Councillor Dixon. I'll speak. I can speak. Last week we approved the material change of use and this week we've been asked to approve the tender to the contractor which is suggested. This project has a long history of consultation. I think the staff did very hard work in that regard. The tender process was competitive and thorough and had the additional advantage of having an early contractor involvement which sounds like a great process. The contractor is a strong contractor who has been chosen, he has the runs or he or she or they have the runs on the board. We've heard they've undergone and successfully completed many similar projects and they are financially sound and there's no risk in that regard. As Councillor Stockwell said, you know looking at the economic development, as this is an economic development project, it's a really strong and positive one.
03:38:00 I looked at the local economic plan last night and two words which came up were rural, enterprise and health and wellness. And I think this project fits really well into those themes. In 2018 we saw that the concepts for this began. I'm really excited by the fact that we're going to further investigate the all abilities toilets and specifically what we talked about. The coffee shop, the coffee van, as someone who will be there quite frequently with three children, that coffee van will come in handy. And the public art, I think that's a great initiative and something that Councillor Finzel is very passionate about and will put herself, throw herself wholeheartedly in. into looking at that with the project team. Look, it is expensive but we've just heard how financially sound we are in, the position we are in as a council. We're going to save because of our reduction in interest rates over $2 million a year with Michael negotiating with QTC. We've never had, it's an unprecedented time in history, we've never had lower interest rates.
03:39:00 If we're ever going to be bullish, if we're ever going to take the time and put money into this infrastructure and to community benefit, now is the time to be borrowing from the bank. I'm not sure if Michael will like me hearing saying that, but we have the opportunity to flow interest rates, strong cash reserves and a strong financial position to actually implement this project. And everything we do around this table is for community benefit. This is a great community benefit and we've heard about the other risks. We've heard about the potential slots with COVID. We've heard about the risks with the suppliers not being able to get their equipment, but that you have spoken about how that's been factored into, taken into consideration and that the contractor has also, you know, has ulterior options available if that need be. The road reserve, as Councillor Wilkie said, that's a great thing to hear too, that the state are on board and that could have held things up, but clearly it won't now. So thank you very much. I'm really excited by this project. I'm very happy to support it. Thank you.
03:40:00 Councillor Lorentson: I'll speak. Rates are paid not only by our wealthy residents, they're also paid by low income residents, our pensioners and those on fixed incomes. So today when we, we're sitting here making a decision on how to spend $3.19 million dollars on community money, I want to make sure that I'm making the right decision. We've got a duty as councillors to provide value for money to ratepayers and we need to prove it and we need to prove it transparently. We've also got a duty to ratepayers to cut wasteful spending and focus on providing core services. Like Councillor Wegener. Mayor Stewart: Yes. Councillor Lorentson: I came into this meeting quite apprehensive.
03:41:00 I like to do my due diligence and exercise due care and understand the enormity of my responsibility and my responsibility to this community. I'm, my conclusion is that I'm actually satisfied that we are spending $3.19 million dollars on community money. I'm satisfied that ratepayers $3.19 million dollars will return significant economic, social benefit and will be of regional significance. So I'm happy to support this recommendation and thank you for the many years of hard work that's brought us to this table. Thank you.
03:42:00 Speaker 5: I might just help Councillor Finzel if I should raise some concerns obviously before the meeting with me about the public art or the community arts aspect. And that's why I said before you're comfortable that the staff will take that on. That's one of the outcomes that we got from the feedback this morning that staff will take on the opportunity to find community art projects or public art projects that can be funded into this. So the design can deal with that or whether you want to move an amendment along those lines, it's up to you. As I said, the staff are happy to take that forward without an amendment or it's up to you whether you wish to move on. Councillor Finzel: I'd like to move the amendment. I just have a question for Paul. When you were looking at this as part of the budget before it was removed, what fee did you come to at that point? Speaker 1: We had initially allowed up to $150,000. Okay, thank you. Councillor Finzel: So I propose... I can help the Councillor. Speaker 5: She had raised with me, depending on where the conversation went, whether or not she moved the amendment just to sort of firm up that element about the public art.
03:43:00 I had provided her with a suggested wording and she might want to move that if you want to test him in. Councillor Finzel: Sure. Do I need to stand up and read it out? Speaker 5: Yeah, stand up and read it out. Councillor Finzel: Oh, okay. Note that the public art component of the proposed project is not included in the proposed contract and further note that while Council would like to include a public art component, that would be dependent upon consideration of this issue in the upcoming 2021-22 budget process or alternatively if grant funding for public art becomes available. Can I also add in there with public art, what was the wording you gave for the others? Public sort of art, the elements of... Deputy Mayor Stockwell: Community? Yeah. Public and community. Councillor Finzel: Yeah. Deputy Mayor Stockwell: Public or... So public... Councillor Finzel: Oh, uh... Disposed art. Community art. Speaker 5: I think public or community art.
03:44:00 Yeah. And then... Councillor Finzel: Just so it covers both, we don't want to give you the idea it's just a plonking statement. Mayor Stewart: Thank you. Speaker 5: You mean to speak to that? Oh, I speak to that. Councillor Finzel: So I thank everyone for their efforts they've put in today. I think this will be a fabulous addition to the Noosa Shire and it will be a gateway into the hinterland and it fits with the cultural plan that with view to giving us cultural significance into the future. Economically, it's going to be... It's going to be a benefit to our community and attract all sorts of people to our place and have connection with the Shire. That's all I need to say. Thank you. Mayor Stewart: Anyone else like to speak to Councillor Finzel's motion?
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03:45:00 Councillor Lorentson: Councillor Stork. Deputy Mayor Stockwell: I'd like to support the amendment. I think it's wonderful to see Councillor Finzel really take on this issue. It's great for anything like this to have a champion. And as a... On the... On the RADF committee, it's really good to have someone who's compassionate, clearly understands what makes Noosa different by nature. And one of it is our artistic endeavours. So it is an important element that we can put in there, but it is separate to the construction side. So I fully support it. And I think one of the options, I'm pretty sure it's still there, is... I think we've fossicked some old bricks from the old brickworks to feature as part of the entrance statement. So building in both creative endeavours, but also heritage within to the site will be an important part of the process. Thank you. Councillor Stork. Councillor Finzel: Would anyone else like to speak to this motion? No. Would you like to close? Mayor Stewart: No.
03:46:00 Okay. So I'll put it to a vote. All in favour of the amendment? So it is unanimous. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you both. Councillor Wilkie: Thank you Madam Chair, they say nothing worthwhile is ever achieved without, it's never achieved easily. This, as we said before, it's been a long process. There's a lot of risks around it. The councils have rightly weighed up. With great caution, what they're committing to here in terms of value for money, in terms of spending, ratepayers' monies, and that's entirely appropriate. It's also been mentioned the social, economic, the physical and the connectivity benefits that this will deliver to the hinterland and also the prosperity of the hinterland. I think we're pretty, we can all see the value in that and I'd also like to thank the staff
03:47:00 for the enormous amount of work they've put into this. This seems to be one of the, as we can hear, there's a lot of excitement around this project as well, not because of what it will deliver but it's also because it has challenged the staff and I think they appreciate more than most of this, the heartache involved in delivering something that's going to be really worthwhile and that the community will appreciate for in the long, long term. Thank you. Mayor Stewart: Thank you. We'll put the motion to a vote, all in favour? Unanimous, thank you Kylie. That brings us to the end of our meeting but just to let everyone watching at home know we're opening council meetings, committee meetings, next Tuesday here in Chambers. So I believe it's a first in, best dressed policy, there's no booking system so if you're raring to go.