Frankston Council 15% rate reduction?
Did you get your rates notice just a little while ago? Did you have trouble reconcilling your rate rise (including all extra charges) and the Frankston Council Annual Report for 2022-2023? I certainly did.
Do you think there will be a reduction in rates anytime soon? Not if Frankston Council and the batch of councillors who were in power for the last four years have any say in it (There are a couple of exceptions). Anyway Councillors who say anything get silenced - I wonder who that might be? I wonder who silenced them?
So what is the problem? To get to the bottom of this let's ask: "Why does Frankston Council exist?" Is it for the benefit of Frankston residents or the benefit of Council and their staff? It sounds like a rediclous question, but if residents don't have enough information to decide what should be done or not done, or Council never actually ask them, then Council is making the decisions not based on what reisdents want but what council beaurocrats and maybe councillors want.
For example if you only ask 0.5% of Frankston residents about their statisfaction with Frankston Council, your results could be out by a large factor. But this is what Frankston council does every year. It produces a satisfaction survey based on about 0.5% of the Frankston population. So Frankston Council's actions are based not on what the majority think, or even 10% think, but a suposedly representative selection of people, of about 1 in 200. How wildly off might that be? I suggest their satisfaction survey is likely to be significantly off. There's probably an almost 100%, well 99.5% chance it is wrong and well off course.
So do they get more people in some of their other surveys? Probably not. A few years ago we raised a petition about a park in Frankston. We stood outside a couple of shopping centres for a few days. Yes just a few days. In that time we raised over 1400 signatures, over 10% of the adult population in Karingal/Frankston. Did we have to persude people to sign? Oh no. People heard it was about Frankston Council and opposing what they wanted to do, and we had people lining up to sign. Compare that with the so called satisfaction survey. Actually the satisfaction survey is a farce. Frankston Council is just not that popular.
So here's a scenario. Let's tell people what Frankston Council's revenue surplus was for 2022-2023 and then ask how satisfied they are with the increase in their annual rates. So what was the surplus?
Surplus - $15 million
But hang on, rate revenue is only $142 million so thats:
10.5% of rate revenue
Yes, they could have reduced your rates by 10% and still been in surplus. But it's not just 2023. In 2022 there was a surplus of $13.6 million or 10.0% or rate revenue. The year before the suplus was only 6.6%, but they made up for it the year before that when it was 15%. Below are the surpluses from Frankston Council Annual Reports for the last 10 years. Over 10 years the average suplus is over 15% of rate revenue. Council Rates over the last 10 years should have been 15% lower than they were.
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| Rates & Charges up to 29% more than needed |
Do you get the picture? Frankston Council whilst continually crying poor had surpluses of up to 29%, 26%, 21%, 15%, 10%, 6% of Rates and Charges. Meanwhile Kris Bolam advocates for rate rises, Brad Hill except for this election year votes for rate rises. In fact most of the councillors voted for rate rises - except for two. So I wonder who most councillors are advocating for? Certainly not rate payers.
