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Business View Australia - March-April 2016 45
INFRASTRUCTURE
very strong attraction for retirees with
the result that demographically the
population of Great Lakes Council
is the third oldest in Australia.
Great Lakes Council has been doing
an exemplary job in maintaining
the infrastructure and facilities in
its territory despite the resource
constraints that it faces. Director
Engineering Services, Ron Hartley
says, “The Council has had a very
strong focus for probably the last
eight years on asset management.
We made a really conscious decision
that we wanted to address the issue
of bridges and roads as fast as we
could. We went through a process
whereby we did a review and identified
the areas where we could get some
more money to help with our assets.
“We are at the limit of our borrowings
and theonlyway thatwecould increase
our rates was to go through a lengthy
process with the State Government.
The third option for us was to
generate our own revenue and there
were limited opportunities for that.
“So we went for a rate increase
and got about half of what we
wanted. We also went through a
service level review process with the
Council and the community where
we looked at what businesses or
services we should be in. Council
did a review of our services and we
actually got out of a few businesses
and got back in some others. Any
money that we saved through
efficiencies was put into improving
our systems, particularly information,
communications and technology.
“The State Government also
introduced the Local Infrastructure
Renewal Scheme (LIRS) which
subsidised Council loan borrowings for
asset renewal so Council was able to
borrowquite extensively at low interest
rates. This enabled Council to bring
forward a lot of infrastructure renewal
that was going to be done over a 10
year period to a three year period.”
There are 150 bridges in Council’s
territory, half of which are made of
timber. There is also an extensive
Ron Hartley