This post is the part of a Follow the Money series shining a light on Kiama Council’s ongoing failure to even interpret its own spreadsheets.
I am not an accountant. I am a community member, like the majority of our residents, reading the same public reports and trying to understand where our money goes. We should not need a crystal ball to interpret basic financial information. We deserve numbers that make sense.
The last Council agenda included a “quarterly update” on legal costs that, when added together, came to $12 million. Days later, Council issued a media release saying the number was wrong, that the real figure was $2.275 million.
But that is not what the agenda papers said, and not what any reasonable resident would have understood.
And here is the deeper issue:
🙋♀️Why did the error have to be picked up by the community?
🙋♂️Why was it not identified earlier? Why was it not raised in councillor briefings?
🙋♀️Why was it not corrected before the agenda went public?
This goes to the heart of a wicked problem in local government.
The councillor’s impossible workload
Council agendas are released six days before each meeting. Councillors are provided with briefing sessions where they can ask for clarification on complex issues. But how many councillors have the time to attend these sessions? Most have full-time jobs.
And even if they do attend, they face the daunting task of wading through agendas that, once supplementary papers are included, can run to 800 pages or more. How can councillors reasonably be expected to spot errors buried deep in financial tables or misleading cumulative totals?
Why accuracy matters
Councillors can only make sound decisions if they are given timely, accurate, and complete information. When they are forced to second-guess whether the numbers in front of them are right or wrong, they cannot do their jobs effectively.
That responsibility does not lie with councillors. It lies with the executive team. Their role is to ensure the data provided to councillors, and to the public, is clear, concise, and correct.
The wicked problem
This is why the $12 million legal cost debacle matters so much. Not just because the number was wrong, but because it shows how fragile the system is. If councillors cannot trust the information they are given, and if the community has to play watchdog just to keep the books straight, then we do not have transparency. We have a system that is exhausting, confusing, and corrosive to trust.
The financial year before last, Council’s own financial statements showed that 37 percent of all legal costs were grouped into “Other”. With no clear breakdown, ratepayers have no idea what “Other” really means or how that money was spent and when questioned the Council Public Officer refused to answer the question.
Where to from here?
In our next posts, we will dig into specific examples of how these failures in reporting play out:
- The weaponisation of the Code of Conduct and the hundreds of thousands of dollars wasted as a result.
- The ballooning of “Other” legal costs and what sits behind them.
Getting to the root of this wicked problem means demanding better. Councillors, and the community, deserve information they can rely on. Nothing less.
🤑Did you know that for a family of four in Kiama, $576 a year is effectively going straight to Council’s legal bills?
In my next blog, we will unpack what this figure really means, how it compares to other councils, and why residents deserve to know where their money is going.
Stay tuned — because when it comes to Council’s finances, it is time we all started asking tougher questions.
#KiamaCouncil #LegalCosts #Accountability #Transparency #CommunityVoice