Mayor’s View – 10th July, 2008
As council budget time deliberations begin to dominate our thinking it is worthwhile looking at the bigger picture. The concept of a triple bottom line will be familiar to many readers and is becoming more widely appreciated and part of normal business reporting.
The three bottom lines are: financial, environmental and social.
The concepts of income and expenditure, balance sheets, cash flows, borrowing and investing and the like are well known. For councils this equates to rates and charges and the spending of that income. It also covers borrowing for capital purchases and the resultant interest charges. No one should plan on borrowing for meeting day to day expenditure and everyone is aware of the need to live within our means. These basic principles are true for governments as well as for individuals.
Increased rates and charges, selling assets, reducing costs and improving efficiencies will play a part, but are unlikely to provide all the funds needed. Unfortunately the state government, like local government, is under financial pressure and the federal government is not willing to reinstate to local government the funding level of a share of income tax receipts enjoyed a generation ago.
So local government has to rely on a tax on property owners – which is precisely what rates are, grant income and charges on developers – which have direct implication for housing affordability.
Consequently our council is left with no alternative than to encourage growth and this leads to the second bottom line – environmental outcomes.
Sound environmental outcomes are now mainstream concerns and explain some of the planning laws, the concepts of sustainability, ecological offsets – where threats to biodiversity have to be compensated for, ecosystems service payments – including carbon trading, even pet control laws. We need our environmental assets to underwrite our growth. Tourism is our second most important industry after bananas with sugar third. What we can’t allow is growth to pressure our environmental assets.
The third bottom line is social outcomes and this is the area where council can have a big input. The appeal of local government for me is the closeness to the people. Good social outcomes involve developing a sense of community, the availability of health, educational and recreational facilities, clean air and water, bike ways and walk ways, lifestyle choices, prevention of problems rather than cures for problems, quality of life issues etc. In recent days our community learnt about a Canadian initiative being launched across Australia called “Healthy Communities” and had a presentation by Claude Lewenz on his excellent new book, soon available in our library, on “How to Build a Village”. These are different but relevant approaches to achieving desirable social outcomes.
Given our incredible assets, our problem won’t be attracting growth, but rather steering it.
See you at the Innisfail Show.