Our Issues: Dubbo mayor Mathew Dickerson said council are currently looking to cut costs

Dubbo Regional Council is working on the final budget for 2022/23 and it will be released in the coming weeks.

In 2020/21, it was reported Dubbo Regional Council would have recorded an $11 million deficit had it not been for grants and COVID-19 had reportedly been a big factor for the loss.

When asked what specific things could be done to lower costs moving forward, Cr Dickerson said changing a decision which caused an uproar in 2019 was one possibility.

"There are some obvious things we've looked at already and things I think we will be able to have an impact on," he said.

"It's mainly just asking the question so one example is the swimming pool used to be managed by an external contractor.

"That used to cost the community around $800,000 per year when, for whatever reason I've seen no business case for it, but it was brought to be internally managed.

"The cost to the community rose to about $1.7 million for the three pools including Dubbo, Wellington and Geurie.

"So you look at that and say that's a fair difference there. Rather than just flick the switch and go back to an external contractor, what we are doing at the moment is looking at that from the perspective of look at the business case for internal vs external management then make a decision.

"Before the next swimming season, we'll have made that decision. If it turns out, that change in the way we run that can save potentially $700,000 or $800,000 in that scenario."

While COVID-19 is still prominent in Dubbo, Cr Dickerson believes from Dubbo Regional Council's perspective the worst of the financial hit has already happened.

"I would think that most of the impact from COVID-19 really should be gone from a council point of view," he said.

"I'm not saying the community, in general, is out of the woods with COVID but the biggest impact we saw on our bottom line was the airport.

"When you normally are the vicinity we got to the stage of before COVID we had 200,000 passengers going through the airport.

"When you take that number of passengers and the money that they are paying when they go through the airport, you are talking about $3 or $3.5 million round numbers of income plus the security screening on there.

"So you might have $4 million of income from the airport with a couple hundred thousand passengers, suddenly you reduce that number of passengers to a very small number and that's the major impact we've seen."

With COVID restrictions having eased significantly in NSW since the start of 2022, Cr Dickerson admitted things are starting to get back to where they were pre-pandemic especially at Dubbo City Regional Airport.

Unfortunately for this current group of councillors, they won't get to have a big impact on the upcoming budget as they are only halfway through their first term but the elected representatives of the community are already looking ahead.

The upcoming budget is likely to feature funding for major infrastructure projects which were outlined in May this year, with road upgrades and bridge replacements planned.

Cr Dickerson believes the councillors can get the finances of Dubbo Regional Council back to a strong position during their time in the role.

"We don't want to wait to get back to that balanced budget, this council have been actively trying to get back to that in this financial year now," he said.

"We won't be in the black for this financial year but to be fair to this current council we were halfway through the year already when we officially became elected.

"Half the year was gone then you've got a new group of councillors to get up to speed on a whole range of things council does including a budget.

"The reality is there wasn't really any potential for this group of councillors to make much of an impact on the current budget that we've got.

"More or less we've had to live with that and focus on next year.

"That's what we've done and focus on next year to see what we can do about a whole range of things."

With the current crop of councillors coming from all different backgrounds, Cr Dickerson is confident the business experience a lot of them possess is an advantage when undertaking something like a budget.

"I have got a lot of confidence in all our councillors but you do have people like Damien Mahon, Jess Gough and Matt Wright who have that business background," he said.

"Then you've got accounting backgrounds like Richard Ivey and Shibli Chowdbhury so you've got that group.

"Someone like Pam Wells manages a large organisation, it's not her business but she has to balance a large budget and Lewis Burns has a business background.

"Vicki Etheridge has experience at Warren Council before she came to Dubbo then she has experience on Dubbo Council.

"So we do have people with the experience and background, I do have confidence.

"I've even enjoyed being in some of the workshops we've done already where we are focusing on the budget and some of the nitty-gritty of the budget.

"Just some of the questions some of the councillors have been asking and some the approaches they have been taking has been very impressive."

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