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Message from the General Manager

It’s hard to believe I’ve been the General Manager for almost a year now. What a year it’s been! When I started in this role, my number one priority was to find the balance between the needs of our community and Council’s long term financial sustainability.

This last year we’ve worked with our community to identify ways to increase financial sustainability. We focused on finding efficiencies, reviewing our fees and charges and increasing smart parking revenue, asset sales and we made an effort to obtain more state and federal grants. We also resolved to apply for a Special Rate Variation of 9.5% increase per year for three years, a cumulative increase of 31.29%.

The key priority has been finding a balance

Between The Needs Of Our Community

and Council’s long term financial sustainability.

This year, there were 14 Councils who applied for a Special Rate Variation ranging from a cumulative increase of 18.1% to 92.83%. On 15 June 2023, IPART announced that our application was successful. The new rates will start from the 1 July 2023 and will help to reduce projected budget shortfalls and ensure services across Port Stephens can be retained.

This outcome from IPART followed extensive engagement with the community. Over the past year, we heard more than 16,000 active responses via our community drop in sessions, presentations to community groups, through social media or through our online surveys. Our extensive engagement program has been recognised as part of the IPART determination, and we can now move forward and work towards balancing the needs of our community with our long-term financial sustainability. We’ll continue to focus on our service review program and where we find savings, use these to improve services important to our community; fixing our roads, protecting our environment, and improving our public spaces.

This year, through savings made within our Waste Services, we’ve been able to introduce our new garden organics waste service. By separating and recycling our green waste we’ve been able to generate significant cost savings allowing us to provide this service – you can find out more about this on the next pages.

Although rates in Port Stephens will remain some of the lowest in the region, we also know there are some that will find this increase particularly tough. To help, we’ve committed to including additional affordability measures to assist both pensioners and non-pensioners. We encourage those that are experiencing hardship to contact Council via our website or phone 4988 0255 to find out more.

I encourage you to visit our website to keep up to date on our latest news, projects and works, and services to see how we’re continuing to support our community where it’s needed most.

Tim Crosdale

Tim Crosdale, General Manager