Their alliance comes as Dubbo roads reach the two-thirds point towards their use-by-date.

From 2020 Dubbo’s roads may start to crumble but with this

vow the council hopes it may

have made a start towards

filling their infrastructure tar-black hole.

Parkes MP Mark Coulton hosted a roundtable meeting of the mayors and general managers of the 11 councils within the Parkes electorate this week to discuss the need for an appropriate direction for local government funding in the future.

Dubbo’s general manager Mark Riley said the roundtable showed councils were all in the same crisis position.

One council told how they had to dig up their bitumen and go back to gravel because of a lack of funding, he said.

Mr Coulton said there was an urgent need to move towards a reasonable system of funding.

“The current system, which is largely based on both population not productivity and the current electoral cycle, is sending many regional councils broke,” he said.

“The outdated formula of funding local governments per capita when providing financial assistance grants discriminates against councils with a small population but an enormous work load.

“This method fails to recognise the work regional councils are doing in not only the traditional areas of roads and rates, for example, but in the provision of education, childcare, aged care and health.

“Currently councils are scraping the bottom of the barrel to provide basic services.”

Dubbo has identified a $10 million per year funding shortfall at a time when its roads are nearing their last days.

“Roads last between 40 and 60 years and in Dubbo a lot of roads were built in the 1960s,” Mr Riley said.

Dubbo successfully sought a special rate rise in 2003/04, 2004/05 and 2005/06 with infrastructure as its justification, but has not been able to repeat this since.

Rate-pegging in NSW made it difficult for councils, Mr Coulton said, but councils needed reliable funding from the Federal Government.

Mr Coulton is in favour of presenting the Government with an alternative funding system rather than simply lobbying for more cash.

“With a proposal that reflects the enormous productivity of Western NSW rather than just its individual councils there is a far greater chance of obtaining a reliable source of funding that is adequate to provide the services that ratepayers expect,” he said.

faye.wheeler

@ruralpres s.com