The council is proposing to increase its minimum residential rate – which is paid by 77 per cent of landowners – of $715 to $1200, and its minimum rate for businesses from $715 to $1400 in 2025/26.
If councillors support the staff recommendation, the council will apply to the NSW Independent Pricing and Regulatory Tribunal for a so-called “special rates variation”. This would allow the council to levy businesses or households with higher rates than the rate “peg” – the maximum annual increase councils can charge ratepayers. Any changes would come into effect from July.
Mayor Zoe Baker has been a long-time critic of the former council’s handling of the pool redevelopment.Credit: Dean Sewell
The report also recommended the council seek an additional $10 million loan to help fund the redevelopment of the North Sydney Olympic Pool. The controversial project has been frustrated by cost blowouts, lengthy delays, heritage concerns, legal fights and doubts over its scale and design.
The council said the pool would cost $58 million when plans were approved in 2020. The site closed in February 2021, construction began in March, and the pool was supposed to reopen in late 2022.
Construction is forecast to be completed in May.
A November project update said the value of the construction contract was $91.47 million, but the council would need to find an additional $17 million as the forecast cost had risen to $122 million.
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Mayor Zoe Baker has previously said the former council’s decision to sign the contract for the pool redevelopment before the designs were finalised had caused many of the cost blowouts. She defended the council’s rates as “the lowest residential rates in our regional organisation of councils and among the lowest in metropolitan Sydney”.
“It’s no comfort to North Sydney residents and ratepayers that we’re having to do this,” Baker said of the proposed increases last year.
A council report last year said its financial position was “very weak, and the financial outlook is unsustainable”.
“Through decisions made in the [pool’s] initial planning phase, including the contract strategy and the decision to proceed prior to designs being complete, significant risk was taken and has been realised.”
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