By DANE LILLINGSTONE
BEING the CEO of an organisation that is close to $30 million in debt comes with its criticisms but that hasn’t dissuaded Southern Downs Regional Council CEO David Keenan’s vision for the future of the region.
Since taking up the position in January, Mr Keenan has overseen the adoption of an unpopular budget with an even more unpopular rate rise as well as a continued reduction in council staff.
Mr Keenan explained what he would personally like to see for the future of the Southern Downs.
“We’d be leveraging off a strong education sector, have a strong vibrant community, have businesses that are succeeding and continuing to grow, develop an entrepreneurial and can-do attitude about how we seek out to achieve things and we also focus on the fact that we’re an area that specialises in high quality agricultural produce and to build on that,” he said.
“We need to build on the existing industries that are already here and help them expand. If we spend 80 per cent of our time helping those industries here expand, we should get a really good return. The other 20 per cent of the time we need to be trying to attract industries here from other places.”
He also pointed out the importance of balancing different age groups in the region.
“We need to think about the real people we need to be attracting to the area, which ideally in the medium-term would be young families, who are going to use the schools, who are going to use the infrastructure here and hopefully create employment and support employment here,” he said.
“Across the municipality, the average age is going up.”
Mr Keenan said managing infrastructure would be council’s biggest problem moving forward.
“The biggest issue for council will be the replacement of infrastructure over the next 10 years,” he said.
“That infrastructure specifically will be things such as the water and the waste water or sewer system. They’re probably the two biggest issues for us in the next 10 years, having the capacity to actually fund the replacement of some of the infrastructure which is very, very old.”
For all the negativity surrounding financial watch lists and rate rises, Mr Keenan remains positive when asked what he thought of his role so far.
“It’s great,” he said.
“There’s some challenges there, and obviously they are from a financial perspective and also trying to build up the culture of the organisation. I’ve certainly come at a time when there’s needed to be some hard decisions made around the budget, but some of those processes are starting to demonstrate some good savings. “
If all goes to plan, the current financial forecast would see council’s debt slashed to around $10 million in 10 years, but Mr Keenan refused to blame previous councils, the economy or amalgamation for the current level of debt.
“There is a significant component in there (the current level of debt) for the water to Allora and that’s a really good use of debt because that should pay itself off over a long period of time,” he said.
“If someone comes in and says, ‘I want to give an extra $10,000 to a community group, there is no pot’, I need to find that from somewhere else in the budget which means something else in the budget needs to be cut.
“As everyone knows, there are no reserves.
“I think it’s really important for everyone to be positive, if you’re negative it becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy.”
