Stratford council meets year’s targets

Stratford’s council completed most targets for the last financial year, its annual report shows.

At an extraordinary meeting on Tuesday councillors voted to accept the annual report for the 2015/2016 year.

In total 82.9 per cent of the performance targets were achieved, 12.5 per cent were not achieved, 2.88 were not applicable for the year and 1.92 were new targets that couldn’t be measured

That was compared to the 2014/2015 year, when 81.25 per cent of the targets were met.

The 13 targets not achieved included user numbers at the TSB pool, resource consent processing times, building consents being lodged online and road maintenance targets.

The pool saw user numbers drop by nearly 11,000 due to two shut downs used to redevelop and repair the pool, while the other activities didn’t reach their targets due to software issues, funds being moved to other activities or various other reasons.

The report also confirmed that the council ran at a $1.16 million deficit in the last year, due to the storms and flooding of June 2015, which cost it $5.2m.

Of that, $3.8m was covered by the NZ Transport Agency (NZTA) but the rest was drawn from council reserves which will be rebuilt over the next few years.

The council also has a debt of $9.56m, or $1,063 per head of population.

Mayor Neil Volzke said it was great to see a large portion of the council’s income, 33.8 per cent, was coming from grants and subsidies.

That included the assistance from the NZTA and TSB Community Trust.

‘‘It’s good to see that we’re getting some assistance from outside, we’re not just reliant on rates, so that’s an encouraging sign,’’ he said. He said it was also encouraging to see that nearly 70 per cent of the council’s expenditure was on core services.

‘‘It really does show that we are not an extravagant council but most of our money by far is spent on really basic core services that we don’t have a lot of discretion on, we just have to do some of these things,’’ he said.

‘‘I’d be concerned if there was some large numbers in discretionary spending in there but clearly there’s not, it’s pretty much a business providing core services.’’

Council CEO Matt O’Mara said he was pleased with how the council had performed over what had been a busy year.

‘‘I think there’s been a lot achieved and it reflects the hard work of staff,’’ he said.