By PHIL DALEY OPINION Like me, you probably don’t spend much time considering the Snowy Monaro Council's fees and charges. The fees and charges document is distributed annually for public comment under the suite of IP & R documents which can be viewed on council’s website or by visiting a council office. There is a huge amount of financial information in the document, which, when adopted by council are the fees you will be charged for a service provided by council excluding what is covered by your rates. Possibly not many of you have ever examined council’s fees and charges which traditionally increase by a percentage each year. Under s610(D)(1)(a) of the act, council is supposed to consider “the cost to the council of providing the service”. That suggests to me the charge should represent a fee that will be cost neutral, that is not losing money and not making an exorbitant profit. Most of us only look at the annual waste management, waste collection, water and sewerage charges all of which are set by council and are shown on our rates notices. There are many additional charges that we don’t examine unless the fee affects us when we hire a hall, a sportsground, connect to a water or sewer main, submit a development application or a host of other things which we access from time to time. Council enjoys monopoly status for some of its functions because there are no other providers permitted by council to contest the work. As a public monopoly I believe council should practice considerable social licence by not charging more than a particular service costs. I am assisting neighbours with a subdivision application where council’s approval conditioned water services had to be connected to the water main which fronts each of the four new lots. An “application” had to be made through the NSW Planning Portal with the fee to be paid to council. Council’s 2024/25 fees document shows the fee for approval to connect as $314 “per application” but I was charged “per lot”. So, due to the misinterpretation of those two words I was charged $1256 instead of the $314 (the amount appearing in the adopted fees and charges). I challenged the overcharge many times by phone and email but to no avail. Ultimately, I received an email stating the charge was correct and he suggested that what he had written would satisfy my query. It didn’t. He stated that only the council can alter the adopted fees and charges but our council has delegated that authority to the CEO to vary the charges except for the legislated fees upon request. He copied all of our councillors into his email to me but I didn’t notice the CEO on the list. As I was not satisfied with his response, I replied and copied all of our councillors into my reply. I received only one response from our councillors! I thank that courteous councillor who offered to raise the matter with council's new CEO. As this is a simple short term issue to resolve, requiring only two words to be a changed, I thought there would be a report in the following months meeting business paper. There wasn’t. Nor was there one in the September business paper. Let’s look at what I got for the $1256. I received an invoice and an acknowledgement of the “application” by email. A staff member performing at snail’s pace could not have spent more than three hours (excluding tea breaks) in preparing those two simple documents which are probably in a standard letter format anyway. Let’s assume that to prepare those documents costs $100 per hour (overpaid I know). So in my opinion I was overcharged at least $956 because the words in the adopted fees and charges do not relate to the service that is provided. Surely that inequity must have made some impression on the nine councillors who didn’t acknowledge my email. The long term solution is that the fees and charges figures need to be calculated based on the first principle of what it costs council to provide the service and avoid over or under charging. Councillors will be amazed at how inequitable the charges are if staff advised the actual cost of providing the service shown in the document. Council needs to be transparent and be a “trusted community partner” when considering the true cost of providing the services it charges fees for. The fees and charges document needs a major overhaul to be fair to our community.
