MERCURY SAYS
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The Wollongong public has reacted with dismay and confusion to the citizens panel’s recommendations for wholesale cuts to council services and steep rises in fees and rates.
Dismay, because the cuts and rises are so wide-ranging.
And confusion, because so many of the recommendations have so little detail to them, to the extent that it’s actually impossible to understand what some of them even mean.
No doubt Wollongong council’s budget is a mess that needs drastic surgery. Surgery that will involve great pain.
No doubt the citizens panel has done its best with a thankless task.
And no doubt, too, that the desire to seek broad community input and consultation is laudable.
But this is the most far-reaching overhaul to council finances in living memory, yet Wollongong residents are being given a mere two weeks to chew it over before council sits in judgment.
It’s an impossible deadline, one that is driven by council’s need to decide by December 13 whether it will seek permission for an extraordinary rate increase.
And it begs the question whether, by design or circumstance, this entire process has, as they say, been set up to fail.
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