Annual Plan and Budget Estimates 2023-24

As adopted by Council 27 June 2023, Item AO098-23

In 2023-24, the Burnie City Council is delivering a $45.547 million budget to continue our momentum in achieving our commitment to the community - by the delivery of the Council Plan 2022-2025 three key objectives (above).

Highlights of the budget include:

  • Total operating expenditure: $45.54 million
  • An underlying surplus of $0.12 million
  • Investment in infrastructure: $39.69 million
  • Investment in essential city services: $6.08 million
  • Investment in important community facilities: $6.75 million
  • Investment in roads, footpaths and drainage: $1.84 million
  • Support for community connectedness through the Community Grants Program: $0.145 million
  • State and Federal Funding: $38.75 million

 

Annual Plan and Budget Estimates(PDF, 3MB)

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Burnie City Mayor Teeny Brumby said:

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"The Burnie City Council’s 2023-24 Annual Plan and Budget Estimates outlines how the Council intends to utilize the resources it has available to it, within the upcoming financial year.

This document is designed to detail the income (revenue) that is available to the Council this year, and the allocation of those funds toward the many community programs, services, maintenance and renewal of Council facilities and critical infrastructure, and to meet other responsibilities like our numerous compliance obligations.

It is true that our Council remains in budget repair mode, since the decisions to reduce the rate burden to our community for a five year period which commenced in 2016-17. We continue to make progress in this area but just as this decision has taken a long time to produce the present financial constraints that we are now experiencing – it will take a number of years to repair (but it won’t be forever). We need to gradually repair our financial position as we continue to pursue a more financially sustainable future for our community.

We continue to work hard to supplement our normal income with grant funding made available from the Australian and Tasmanian governments through new partnerships and initiatives. This year alone we have forecast capital grant funding of $27 million being made available to our City through these relationships.

We remain committed to shifting our focus from building brand new assets during our budget repair period, to instead improving the many valuable community assets and facilities we have now in order to refresh them for the future. As there is never enough money to go around we have started work on determining the usage of our assets and the condition of the assets themselves.

These two important pieces of information will be incredibly important moving forward for the Council to make financial decisions around where to invest its funding. This will mean that we can make evidenced based decisions of where to allocate funding based upon not only the condition of the asset but also the usage of the assets to ensure that our funding is provided to assets where the community will get the largest return in terms of community value. This work will then allow the Council to think about those assets that are not used frequently and whether there may be benefit in consolidating our assets into the future.

I am so very proud that within this next financial year we are delivering a number of key strategic projects for our City, incredibly exciting projects that everyone will have an opportunity to enjoy:

· The Western section of the Coastal Pathway

· The New Reimagined Cultural Centre

· The redevelopment of significantly flood impacted roads (from the October rainfall event)

· The Gateway project for the City

· An Urban Design Plan for the City

In adopting its long term Financial Management Strategy two years ago, Council set an ambitious target to deliver an underlying break even budget from the 2022-23 financial year. We are working hard to deliver that, and the new financial year presents similar challenges to this year, particularly with inflationary pressures. We are up for this challenge and continue to evaluate our costs and income sources as a means of continuing our pathway to long term financial sustainability."