BELCHER BLACK HOLE

MONEY PIT: Decrepit CBD building repairs drain $1.2m from city coffers

GEELONG council has been forced to shell out about $1.2 million to protect the public from the crumbling Belchers Corner building, with doubts it will be able to recover the expense.

GEELONG Council has been forced to fork out about $1.2 million to protect the public from the crumbling Belchers Corner building, with doubts the city will be able to recover the massive expense.

The City of Greater Geelong (CoGG) posted $2.43 million in “bad and doubtful debts” in its 2018/19 Financial Report — almost tripling the $900,000 it had budgeted for.

The report noted the increase was due to “provision for infringement debtors, majority being parking infringements” and “rectification works on Belchers building provided 100 per cent as doubtful”.

Council yesterday confirmed the cost of the Belchers building works for the first time, revealing it had sucked about $1.2 million from the city’s coffers — all of which had been written down as unlikely to be recovered.

“Costs incurred to protect public safety in the management of the Belchers Corner building form approximately 50 per cent of the total doubtful debts,” customer and corporate services director Michael Dugina said.

Council evacuated 24 businesses from the Belchers precinct in mid-2018 after engineers found “severe concrete cancer” had compromised the integrity of the structure’s supporting posts.

CoGG issued an emergency demolition order for Belchers Corner last September, demanding it be torn down no later than December 31. The building is yet to be torn down, with a Belchers Corner lot owner, Nathan Holmes, fearing it would remain standing for “a very long time”.

He said he believed many of the building’s owners had already been pushed to the point of bankruptcy as their asset was now “worthless”.

“We now have a demolition believed to be worth more than $1 million,” Mr Holmes said.

He said many owners had already been unable to pay levies for structural works.

Mr Holmes said the administrator and owners were in a bind as owners could not agree whether to try to recover money owed without selling Belchers Corner or sell the site.

“There’s a lot of interest from developers, but the sticking point is 100 per cent of the owners have to agree to the sale,” Mr Holmes said.

Mr Dugina also confirmed issues with Fines Victoria had forced the council to write off $1.21 million as bad and doubtful debt.

“The performance of Fines Victoria has resulted in a reduction in fine collections, which impacts on the calculation of the doubtful debts provision,” he said.

In June the City of Greater Geelong revealed a bungled Fines Victoria system had cost the council about $650,000 in just 18 months.

Fines Victoria, which deals with the processing and enforcement of infringement notices and penalties for Geelong council, has been plagued by IT system issues since its introduction on December 31, 2017.