ANALYSIS
Hawkesbury City Council Financial Plan 2026 - 2036 resourcing stategy has commenced with a down turn in funding for road renewal.
Hawkesbury ratepayers start paying an 8.66 per cent rate increase this month. In the same budget year, Council's spending on renewing roads, bridges, footpaths and drainage falls from $49.7 million to $29.9 million. That is a cut of just under 40 per cent, in the first year of a levy IPART approved for one purpose: asset renewal, with a focus on the local road network.
Both figures come from Council's own documents. The rate rise is the Special Rate Variation IPART approved on 2 June, worth 8.66 per cent a year for four years, a cumulative 39.4 per cent. The spending figures sit side by side in the income statement of the Long Term Financial Plan 2026-2036, adopted with the Operational Plan last month.
The fall is not a scandal, nor is it theft. It is arithmetic. The flood recovery grants that paid for the past three years of road repairs are finishing. Those grants put roughly $20 million a year more into the road network than Council could fund itself. The SRV replaces them with $2.9 million. So the honest description of 2026/2027 is this: ratepayers will pay more than they ever have, and the road renewal program will shrink to less than two-thirds of last year's.
Council never put it that plainly. It should have.
New toys before old roads
The same budget tables show a second pattern worth naming. In 2026/2027 Council will spend $70.9 million building new assets and $50.2 million renewing existing ones. New spending outweighs renewal spending in the first year of a levy whose entire justification was a renewal backlog.
Most of the new money is the Western Sydney Infrastructure Grants program, $98 million of state funding toward $113 million of recreation and culture projects. Good projects, probably. But every new building and park comes with running costs, maintenance and eventual renewal, and the plan says, in its own introduction, that those future costs are "unable to be built into" the modelling. Council is adding to the asset pile it says it cannot afford, and the deficits printed in this plan are understated by a known, recurring amount that nobody has quantified.
The plan fails on its own numbers
Here is the part that deserves more attention than the rate rise itself. The financial model Council adopted, the one that includes the full SRV, does not reach a sustainable position. Read the projections at the back of the document.
Under the SRV model, Council returns to operating deficits from 2031/2032 and stays there, losing between $6.5 million and $6.9 million a year. The asset renewal ratio, the measure of whether infrastructure is being renewed as fast as it wears out, peaks at 84.7 per cent against a benchmark of 100 per cent, then flatlines. Unrestricted cash runs out. By 2035/2036 the model shows it at negative $4.5 million. The plan describes this trajectory as "moderate financial sustainability".
The SRV runs for four years. The plan runs for ten. For years five through ten there is no revenue strategy at all, just a recorded slide back into deficit. Without the SRV the picture was worse, deficits reaching $23.2 million a year, so the levy was not pointless. But a plan whose best case ends in negative cash, with no response modelled and no decision point flagged, is not a plan. It is a countdown.
Numbers that do not add up
Some of this document appears not to have been checked against itself.
The balance sheet shows Council's long-term borrowings jumping from $6.3 million to $22 million in 2027/2028. The cash flow statement for the same year shows borrowing proceeds of zero. Roughly $15.7 million of debt lands on the books without ever passing through the cash statement. Later in the projections, loan repayments keep running after the debt is exhausted, leaving borrowings at negative $3.2 million by 2036. A negative loan balance is not a financial strategy. It is a spreadsheet error, sitting in an adopted statutory document.
Then there is the sewer charge. Council resolved last October to levy a Sewer Infrastructure Charge on Windsor scheme properties from 1 July this year, an estimated $3,448 per affected property, payable over ten years. The charge is in the Operational Plan. The narrative of the financial plan describes it. And in the ten-year financial models of that same plan, the Special Rates line reads zero in every single year. A charge Council has formally resolved to collect, from real ratepayers, starting now, does not exist in the modelling.
Council has committed to a full remodel of the plan during 2026/2027, and these defects may well vanish in that version. But this is the adopted plan for the year the levy begins. Ratepayers were asked to trust the modelling that justified the SRV. The modelling cannot reconcile with itself.
The cut that dares not speak its name
One more absence. The plan states, twice, that even with the SRV, service levels will "likely" need to be reviewed and reduced. It cites its own survey finding that 72 per cent of residents accept service cuts may be needed. So Council's stated most probable future involves cutting services. Not one of the financial scenarios models it. The single decision most likely to affect residents in the next decade appears nowhere in the numbers.
What happens next
The IPART approval carries conditions. Every dollar the SRV raises above the rate peg must go to asset renewal, and Council must report annually on how it was spent and on its savings measures. The Operational Plan 2026/2027 lists the projects the first $2.9 million will fund. That list is now the measuring stick.
The Gazette has recorded it, and when the audited accounts land in October and the first SRV compliance report follows, we will check the list against what was actually built. The remodelled financial plan arrives next year. This article is the marker against which it gets measured.
[Disclosure: the author prepared a submission to IPART opposing the SRV application on behalf of Concerned Hawkesbury Ratepayers.]
