GLENELG Shire residents are refusing to lie down and take the rates hike dished out to them in this year’s council budget, with a series of meetings and petitions planned, starting next week.

The public meetings will be held on 18, 19 and 20 July at Portland, Heywood and Casterton Sandford Football Clubrooms, respectively – all at 7pm.

At time of going to print, Casterton ‘Fair Go’ rates advocate Andrew McEachern said he was waiting on confirmation of a keynote speaker for the Casterton event.

The purpose of the meetings is to launch and gain signatures on a petition, calling for a full and independent audit of the adopted 2022-2023 Glenelg Shire draft budget, by the Victorian Auditor General’s department. 

“Specifically, the discrepancy of $3.46 million ‘rebate' which has been treated as income received, which forms the basis of the rates hike, due to it distorting the allowable 1.75% overall rates increase,” Mr McEachern said.

“The petitions are being sent to the Victorian Auditor General’s department, the Essential Services Commission and the Local Government Minister.”

A little typo

GLENELG Shire Council has admitted that one page of the budget document that was passed in the June 28 council meeting was an error.

Page 12 of the document should have listed most of the services, initiatives and performances for each business area within the ‘Our Health and Wellbeing’ strategic objective, with the amount of money the budget has allocated to each, but instead

was a duplicate of a later page of the document.

Once the Observer made Council officers aware of the mistake on Friday, the budget document on the Shire website was amended to put in the correct page.

The mistake was a collation error, according to the Council.

“This collation error relates to the service units only and does not affect that validity of the budget adopted at the recent council meeting,” a spokeswoman said.

According to the Local Government Act, council needs to prepare and adopt a revised budget before it can “make a variation to the declared rates or charges…undertake any borrowings that have not been approved in the budget…make a change to

the budget that the Council considers should be the subject of community engagement.”

The error was not picked up by the council officers or councillors who presumably read through the document ahead of the council meeting that attracted a big crowd of ratepayers who were against significant rates hikes.

Council was asked about the review process for the document and how the error was not noticed, but declined to comment further.

The error was not in the original draft of the budget, which was released for community consultation on April 26 in and received 78 submissions.

There are some slight differences in the descriptions of services between drafts for the page in question, though no changes to the amount budgeted for this financial year.

The sentence “provides parking control and enforcement throughout the shire incl and follow up legal action where required”, being removed from the description of local laws services is the only significant change.