G'day, Digby Rayward here again. It's my pleasure to present this week's Council Connect.
As usual, a lot is happening, and I thought I should start by reminding you that the upcoming state election is rapidly approaching early next year. For Dungog to be successful in lobbying for funding, we will need you, the Dungog community, behind us, supporting our loud voice as we ask for fair funding for Dungog.
See the T-shirts for Fair Funding for Dungog. I hope you see them around town, right? We've just launched this Fair Funding for Dungog campaign, and we have launched a new website for it - www.fairfunding4dungog.com.au
You can see that Dungog has continually missed out on adequate funding for our roads. I've done a couple of videos and messages on Facebook, and I certainly point out the lack of funding for our regional roads, called the Block Grant Funding, and that's taken off fairly well. It's gotten 30,000 or so hits, and I recently released another video on Facebook yesterday about how we were cut out of any discussion on increasing the Financial Assistance Grants by the bigger councils.
We had a big noise from Newcastle Council opposing this, and yet last week they just had another $16 or $18 million above their operating budget, right? $16 million plus, right? And we're on a deficit budget!
