'Coast levy rise is a scam' From the Fraser Coast Chronicle.
22 Jul 2010 - 15 Aug 2010
See a copy of the Letter from Graham Berry, a member of councils Environment Advisory Committee .
'Coast levy rise is a scam'
22nd July 2010
FRASER Coast ratepayers are about to be hit with a massive environmental levy rise.
The levy will not be used for the purpose for which it was designed and was yesterday described as a rates ruse.
“This is a monumental rates ruse,” the council's Environment Advisory Committee's Graham Berry said.
“This $15 levy rise, which our committee suggested was needed, was meant to only buy environmentally significant land across the Coast.
“Instead the council's own budget papers entirely leave out the acquisition of environmental land and spend all of the $1.124 million it expects to collect from levying the ratepayers this year on things like climate change, coastal management and ‘other environmental initiatives'.
“The general rates have just risen by 6.37 per cent and now the council has sneakily loaded on this extra $1.124 million.”
A prominent member of the Fraser Coast branch of the Wildlife Preservation Society, Tim Thornton, told councillors at the Maryborough City Hall meeting yesterday morning that the levy “is nothing but sleight of hand and a great deception”.
“Ratepayers are about to be charged a 15 per cent rise in their environmental levy and this is actually a masquerade by the council because the increased levy will not be used to buy the land it's supposed to buy.
“I estimate that if the council had been honest and added this big levy increase to its general rates, it would have equated to a 1.5 per cent escalation in those.”
Mr Thornton said he was “accosted” in the main street of Howard on Monday and accused of being “one of the greenies responsible for putting up our environmental levy”.
“‘You bloody greenies,' this man told me. ‘It's all your fault'. I told him it was the council masquerading under the guise of the levy, simply so they could put their rates up.”
On July 13 Mayor Mick Kruger wrote to Mr Thornton and to Mr Berry, saying the council believed the “expansion and increase in the environmental levy was critical” in funding things like buying and maintaining land – but he then adds on 10 more funding categories and says the levy won't necessarily stop at those.
Mr Kruger also says in the letter that council had to “consider and balance” priorities during its budget deliberations “to deliver an affordable and modest rate increase for the community”.
He writes that the council had to review the scope of the environmental levy to help provide funds for “other environmentally related initiatives”.
Mr Thornton and Mr Berry, along with others in the community, disagree with Mr Kruger. Mr Berry said the council had made matters even worse by neglecting to budget any of the hiked-up levy for buying environmentally sensitive land for the next 10 years.
“When the levy was originally brought in in 2005/06 the money collected was to be used solely for the acquisition of environmentally significant land and to fund the preservation of such land acquired by the levy.
“In the council's latest budget the levy's purposes now bear absolutely no similarity to that original policy. This cost-shifting is blatant smoke and mirrors.”
