ANALYSIS AND OPINION
If you read only the Councillors' message at the front of Hawkesbury City Council's Draft Operational Plan, you'd be forgiven for thinking 2026/2027 is shaping up to be a banner year. A $240 million budget. A $121 million Capital Works Program. Headline figures include $66.1 million for roads and drainage, $48.5 million for parks and recreation, and $63.7 million for community and culture. The language is upbeat: transformative, city-shaping, a roadmap for the year ahead.
Having read both the Operational Plan and the accompanying Long Term Financial Plan (LTFP) cover-to-cover, I think the picture needs a more honest framing. There is genuinely good news in this budget. There is also a financial reality the Council itself acknowledges, but mostly in documents the average ratepayer will never open. Both deserve to be on the table before submissions close on 12 May.
What's genuinely good
Let's start with what's working.
The $121 million Capital Works Program is the largest in recent memory, up from $101.8 million the previous year. Much of that increase reflects real, fundable work, not aspirational fluff. The Western Sydney Infrastructure Grants Program (formerly WestInvest) alone accounts for $64.1 million of activity in the coming year, including major construction milestones at Tamplin Field, Woodbury Reserve, the Oasis Aquatic Centre, the Richmond Swimming Centre redevelopment, the Rickaby's Creek cycleway, the Kurrajong-Kurmond cycleway, Turnbull Oval, Fernadell Park in Pitt Town, and the long-awaited North Richmond Community Precinct, which will include a fit-for-purpose emergency evacuation centre west of the Hawkesbury River.
For a community still living with the memory of the 2020, 2021 and twin 2022 floods, an evacuation centre on the right side of the river is not a “nice to have.” It is overdue infrastructure, and it is funded.
The road program is also substantial in absolute terms. Beyond the headline $66.1 million figure, the plan lists named, costed projects, including Grose Vale Road rehabilitation, Pecks Road in North Richmond, Creek Ridge Road in Glossodia, the Tennyson Road Black Spot project, Sanctuary Drive in Windsor Downs, and ongoing flood-recovery work on Upper and Lower Colo Roads. These are not vague line items; they are actual stretches of bitumen with budgets attached. Whether the work happens on schedule is another matter, but the intent is documented.
Council also deserves credit for two things it isn't trumpeting enough. First, the Comprehensive Spending Review has delivered $1 million in recurring savings. That is modest in the context of a $240 million budget, at 0.4%. In my working life, the organisations I've been part of expected 6% year-on-year, the kind of housekeeping ratepayers have a right to expect. Second, the dual-scenario presentation of the budget (one with the proposed Special Rate Variation approved, one without) is unusually transparent. Most councils avoid that exercise. Hawkesbury has put both versions in front of us.
The proposed divestment of the Windsor Sewerage Scheme to Sydney Water, if it proceeds, will also relieve Council of an asset class it was never well-resourced to maintain, and the recent flood damage to sewer infrastructure made that brutally clear.
Now for the part that needs some light shined on it
Here is what the glossy pages don't say outright: according to the Council's own figures, this organisation is not financially sustainable in the medium term, and even a successful Special Rate Variation does not fix that.
The LTFP's Base Case scenario, that is, business-as-usual without the SRV, shows operating deficits beginning at $8.9 million in 2027/2028 and rising to $23.2 million by 2035/2036. The Operating Performance Ratio (which the NSW Treasury Corporation considers a “core measure” of council financial sustainability) falls from a healthy 17.5% in 2026/2027 to a negative 16.4% by 2035/2036. The headline 19% figure for the year ahead is largely an artefact of including disaster-recovery and WSIG grant income in operating revenue. When those grants end, the underlying picture is exposed.
The infrastructure backlog tells the same story. The Council's adopted Asset Management Strategy puts the current unfunded asset renewal shortfall at $99.1 million. Without intervention, that figure is projected to reach roughly $170 million by 2035. The Infrastructure Backlog Ratio, benchmarked at less than 2%, is currently 3.2% and is projected to climb to 4.3% in the Base Case.
The Council's preferred fix is the proposed Special Rate Variation: a permanent 8.66% annual increase for four years, compounding to a cumulative 39.4% increase. That request is now with IPART, with a determination expected in May or June. If approved in full, it would add $2.89 million in additional rating income in 2026/2027, ramping up over the four years to fund the road renewal program.
Here is the uncomfortable detail. Even if the SRV is approved in full and operates exactly as Council hopes, the documents’ “SRV Sustain” model still shows operating deficits from 2027/2028 onwards, averaging $6.8 million a year across the final four years of the plan. The Operating Performance Ratio still ends the decade in the red, at -4.3%. The infrastructure backlog improves dramatically (down to 0.6%), but the underlying operating budget does not return to surplus.
The Council does not hide this. Buried in the LTFP, in language that deserves a wider audience, is the following: “even with increases in funding from the SRV, it is likely that future service levels will need to be reviewed and reduced to achieve ongoing financial sustainability.”
In plain English: ratepayers are being asked to pay 39.4% more in rates over four years, and Council is telling us in advance that service cuts are still coming on top of that.
The Sewer Infrastructure Charge nobody is talking about
Buried in the Annual Charges section is another item that has received remarkably little attention: a new Sewer Infrastructure Charge (Special Rate) of $3,374.67 per property, applied to approximately 8,000 Windsor Sewer Scheme customers. Council is offering quarterly payments of $84.37 over ten years, but the rate is being levied in full from 1 July 2026, with the income recognised up front and quarantined to repay a loan taken out after the 2022 flood damage to sewer infrastructure, when grant funding was denied by every level of government.
For an affected household, that is roughly $337 a year for a decade, separate from ordinary rates, waste charges, and any SRV outcome. It is the unavoidable cost of a flood-damaged asset that nobody else would pay to repair.
The capacity-to-pay question
The independent Capacity to Pay analysis commissioned by Council (from Morrison Low) found “moderate” overall capacity, with sharp variation across the LGA. Kurrajong-Rural North and Pitt Town-East were assessed as more financially robust; the Richmond-Windsor area showed “greater financial vulnerability, with lower incomes, higher proportions of renters and increased exposure to financial stress.” If the SRV proceeds, the analysis found, average residential rates would sit towards the higher end of those for metropolitan and metropolitan-fringe councils.
More than 2,300 submissions were received during the public exhibition phase. The Council's community survey found that 81% of residents were aware that service cuts may be required if the SRV doesn't proceed, and 72% supported service cuts to free up funds for road and asset renewal. That is a striking result, and it cuts both ways. Yes, the community understands the bind the Council is in. It also suggests residents may be more willing to accept reduced services than to absorb a 39.4% rate rise on top of the Sewer Infrastructure Charge, the rate peg, and cost-of-living pressures the analysis itself acknowledges are concentrated in the Richmond-Windsor heartland.
Structural problems that aren't Council's fault but become Council's responsibility
It is also fair to acknowledge what Council cannot fix on its own. Hawkesbury covers 2,776 square kilometres and serves about 68,700 people, with a per-resident asset burden of $20,630, almost double Blacktown's $10,513 and well above The Hills ($11,042) and Penrith ($12,901). The new rate-peg methodology granted Hawkesbury 3.1% for 2026/2027, with a 0% growth factor, a structuraldisadvantage for a low-growth peri-urban council with a vast road network. Council asked the State Government for an Emergency Management Charge to fund flood and bushfire preparedness; the Minister rejected it. Cost-shifting from State and Federal levels continues. None of this is invented.
But ratepayers cannot vote on the rate-peg methodology. They can submit on this plan.
What residents should be asking?
In my view, a serious submission asks Council to be clearer about three things.
First, if the SRV is approved, what specific service reductions are still required to close the operating-deficit gap the LTFP openly forecasts? The plan says “service reviews” are coming for Remnant Land, the Companion Animal Shelter, and the Cost of Council Services, but it does not say what the community should expect to lose.
Second: what is Plan B if IPART rejects the SRV in full or in part? Council has modelled the binary, but ratepayers deserve to see the staged-cuts scenario.
Third: how will the Western Sydney Infrastructure Grants assets, including the new pools, ovals, community precincts and cycleways, be funded for ongoing operation, maintenance and renewal once the construction grants run out? The LTFP itself acknowledges that these costs have not yet been factored in. Building shiny new things this decade and being unable to maintain them next decade is exactly the trap Council is trying to climb out of with the SRV.
The Hawkesbury is not in crisis. It is experiencing a slow, structural squeeze, as the documents on exhibition describe with more candour than the press release suggests. The community now must look beyond the headline figures, sit with the uncomfortable parts of the LTFP, and tell Council what level of rates, charges and services it actually wants.
The decisions made will shape the Hawkesbury for the next decade.
Submissions on the Draft Operational Plan 2026/2027 and Draft Long Term Financial Plan 2026–2036 closed 12 May 2026. Both documents are available via Council's “Your Hawkesbury, Your Say” platform, at the Council administration building in Windsor, and at Hawkesbury Central Library.
