Bega Valley Shire Council is projecting a $400,000 overspend this financial year to to the current inflated fuel prices.
While supply has been too much of a problem with scheduled projects like road works able to continue so far, the bills are increasing.
General Manager Anthony McMahon said this could have a flow on effect in the new financial year.
“We’re still getting fuel supplies, so we’re still able to do what we need to do the financial impact is starting to affect us and grow.,” Mr McMahon said.
“In terms of numbers, we use anywhere between sort of 60.000 to 65,000 litres of diesel a month and then around $12,000 of petrol. So you start multiplying those numbers by the increases that everyone’s seeing and the cost gets up pretty quick,” he said.
“So at this stage, if if the rates did stay where they are for the remainder of this financial year. We’re sort of thinking it’d be around a $400,000 direct impact to council from that fuel cost increase.
“The one that’s probably not so obvious maybe to the community is that we do actually pay a lot of contractors and suppliers for different things that rely on oil and fuel products as well. So things like our bitumen sealing.
“We’re just starting to see some of the impacts of that and getting requests from contractors to review rates and a bit to work through before we know the full impact.
“You’re certainly going to have to recut the cloth a bit. I think the bigger issue for us at the moment is we’re looking at our budgets for next financial year at the moment and sort of even where we thought we were, three to four weeks ago in projecting forward.
“That’s all changing now, and we do have, we already have the revenue set for next financial year as to how much we can increase it by. We are expecting the cost to be much higher so we’re going to have to keep an eye on things and more than likely reduce what we actually can do next financial year and I guess over time assess the impact of that long term.”
