MidCoast Council Mayor, Claire Pontin and several fellow Councillors will head to Penrith tomorrow to attend the Local Government NSW Annual Conference.
The region's representatives will use the conference as a launching pad for a number of important issues impacting not only MidCoast Council but most Local Government areas within the state.
Cr Pontin put forward an urgent Mayoral Minute in Wednesday's Council meeting which gathered unanimous support to table a motion at the upcoming conference.
The motion called for the NSW Government to halt implementation of the Planning Systems Reform Bills which passed in Parliament recently. The motion goes on to ask the government to undertake genuine consultation with Council's before progressing the reforms. Cr Pontin said adopting these changes would take important decision making away from the locals they impact.
Cr Pontin had previously received support from fellow Councillors to raise three other issues at the conference.
The first addresses the significant funding problem faced by rural and regional Councils and calls for increased funding for essential infrastructure.
"With smaller, more dispersed populations, a higher number of community and infrastructure facilities and limited revenues, Councils are struggling to maintain financial sustainability," she explained.
The next was to include betterment funding as part of disaster funding.
"Currently, Councils are required to rebuild transport infrastructure in a like-for-like fashion," she said.
"This makes no sense, each year the NSW Government is required to fund the increasing costs of disaster recovery, partly due to the lack of previous mitigation work. If money was made available at the time of initial construction to make these works more disaster resilient, reconstruction costs would drastically lower."
The Mayor will also highlight the issues with cost shifting particularly in regard to Council's environmental health and food safety compliance.
Cr Pontin explained the implementation of the Food Organics Garden Organics which is a State Government mandated legislation is further example of cost shifting without corresponding funding provided.
"Regional and rural Council's already have limited capacity to absorb increased costs. This is detrimental to our communities, our residents and our ratepayers, who in the end bear the cost," she explained.
The Mayor along with the support of her fellow Councillors will also raise motions requesting several procedural and/or definition changes including to the soft plastics stewardship scheme and will support the shared regional motions prepared by the Hunter Joint Organisation which includes betterment funding, recategorizing roads among others.
The annual conference determines the advocacy priorities for the LGNSW for the coming year and receiving support for the motions will go a long way to seeing better outcomes not just for MidCoast Council but for all NSW council areas.
