Draft Budget and Draft Council Plan adopted
Each councillor got three minutes to discuss a year's worth of budget commitments. For me, the most striking thing about this budget is that we are effectively creating and compounding more problems than we can fix in our lifetimes, let alone within our tenure as local councillors.
I spoke on
a) enhancing the municipality's climate-readiness with well-thought out programs for sustainable living rather than $1.5m on new roads
b) rejecting the Civic Centre ($2m in this budget commits us to the whole project) and instead implement the Creating Better Parks Strategy in its entirety
c) an urgent review of Council's rates system to properly account for hardship and better reflect the social and environmental cost of the multimillion dollar industries in our municipality.
The Council Plan was also approved in its draft form on Tuesday night.

Residents, please have a read of it and have your say.