Promoting the region and removing the emergency services levy are on Armidale Regional Council's agenda for the Local Government NSW Annual Conference in October, it was decided at Wednesday's council meeting.
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So are cleaner air and improving building standards. Financial assistance for amalgamated councils will not be.
The conference, held at at Warwick Farm on October 14 to 16, is NSW general councils' biggest policy-making event of the year.
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Member councils put forward motions, which, if passed at conference, become resolutions that LGNSW takes to the state government on councils' behalf.
Cr Brad Widders will attend the conference.
Another delegate with full voting rights - possibly mayor Simon Murray - might also be nominated; this has not yet been put to the vote.
Promoting the region
Cr Peter Bailey would like LGNSW to call on the state government to create a $5 million per year Regional Marketing Fund to promote living, working, and investing in regional NSW. The motion was carried.
"I have been proposing a Regional Marketing Fund from long before I was on council," Cr Bailey told the Armidale Express last month. (LINK) "It should be a state-wide marketing campaign on the virtues of living, working, investing, and relocating out of Sydney."
A representative body of council members - two each from regional and coastal cities, provincial centres, and smaller country communities - would administer the fund.
Both Northern Tablelands MP Adam Marshall and deputy premier John Barilaro were interested, Cr Bailey said last month.
Emergency Services levy
Crs Dorothy Robinson and Debra O'Brien proposed that the state government should reverse increases in the Emergency Services Levy imposed on councils. The motion was carried.
State government increased the levy in November to make it easier for firefighters with work-related cancer to access workers' compensation entitlements.
Armidale Regional Council's levy increased by 22 per cent - about $150,000 - to $862,190, putting council's expected small surplus at risk. (LINK)
"It is important that we join the chorus of voices all around NSW councils who are asking for this emergency services levy to be reversed," Cr O'Brien said.
The increased levy had affected councils' ability to deliver programs, she believed. The move was made after councils put budgets together; Armidale Regional Council had worked particularly hard to ensure it had a responsible budget, but now could not calculate the extra impost on the budget.
Cr Bailey was also concerned about the timing of the levy. "It happened at eleven minutes to midnight, and put us in a very difficult situation," he said.
State government had set a rate peg of 2.7 per cent to determine the maximum percentage amount by which council could increase its general income for the 2019/20 financial year - but, Cr Bailey thought, the levy had blown council's costs out.
"They put us through rate pegging; why can't they follow the same rules for us?"