Council projects spending hits $50m in just nine months
Almost $50 million has been spent in nine months on Rotorua Lakes Council projects, just over $19m of it on the Lakefront, performing arts centre and aquatic centre redevelopments.
The council has also achieved 54 per cent of its key performance indicators in the past six months. About 39 per cent “need improvement”, according to the council.
A report prepared for the Rotorua Lakes Council operations and monitoring committee meeting today by council finance business partner Michelle Overbeek said the council’s capital expenditure was $49.9m at the end of March, with capital revenues at $12.2m. It said $10.4m had gone to the Lakefront redevelopment, $5.3m on the Sir Howard Morrison Performing Arts Centre and $3.4m on the Aquatic Centre.
A further $8.5m had gone on roading and drainage, $5.6m towards sewerage renewal, including a CCTV survey of the network.
The rest was “spread across numerous smaller capital programmes”, an average of $.5m each.
Overall the council was tracking ahead of budget in March by $706,000, with a deficit of nearly $6m. All but two expenditure areas out of six — depreciation and finance expenses — were in the red but revenue was up against the budget, including almost $1.5m in rates and almost $1.7m in grants and subsidies.
Council corporate planning and governance manager Oonagh Hopkins also gave an update on the non-financial performance of the council for the last six months of 2020. Her presentation showed of 55 performance measures, the council achieved 32. Fourteen needed attention and nine would not be met. Four were not measured, because “of changes to legislation and the availability of the data source”.
One of those was measuring the GDP of the district and another was measuring transactions in the CBD, which had proved cost-prohibitive, she said.
The method for measuring GDP had changed so in Rotorua it looked lower than the national average, her presentation said. Only one measure was achieved in the area of community leadership, and Hopkins’ presentation noted more complaints about the ease of access to information on the council’s website.
Cycleway targets were also slightly below target, she said.
The council achieved all of its targets in sport and recreation, sewerage and sewage, stormwater and drainage, and water supplies, according to Hopkins’ presentation.
Last year, Local Democracy Reporting revealed the council failed 43 per cent of performance targets in 2019/20.
The council achieved 71 per cent of its targets in 2018/19.