The WA Local Government Association today released its draft plan for restructuring of the sector, with a focus on a regional system of service delivery but no forced amalgamations of local councils.
More than 250 industry representatives attended the launch of the 10 year plan, which rejects the amalgamation of council in favor of voluntary participation in the proposed restructuring.
The draft report entitled The Journey -Sustainability into the Future is a result of almost four years of consultation and analysis by the WA Local Government Association.
The plan recommends the creation of a regional system of service delivery that leverages the economies of collective local government geographic groups while retaining local councils to represent the specific interests of their communities.
Key measures include the capacity to create trading entities; best practice models for rate setting; setting of fees and charges and setting development charges.
Prudentially managed debt, improved asset management and continued investigation of the creation of a local government finance authority was also recommended as part of sector reform.
WALGA president Bill Mitchell said the plan released today would be a draft to enable the sector a further six weeks to provide feedback and comments.
"The plan is predicated on voluntary participation by Local Government as WALGA has maintained that determination of need and action should be the decision of individual Councils and their communities," Cr Mitchell said.
"We understand local communities need the opportunity to embrace the need to redress sustainability and commit to the process as any enforced action would have less likelihood of long term success."
Key research underpinning the plan and uncovered by the review process found that 58% of local governments in WA were currently unsustainable on their own source revenue however Cr Mitchell said it did not follow that amalgamations were the solution.
"All the evidence we have found and the experience from reform in other states is that bigger Councils are not necessarily better," Cr Mitchell said.
"If you have two small problems and you combine them there is the real risk you will just end up with one big problem and nothing would have changed in terms of delivery of value to the community."
