A NEW Queanbeyan City Council advisory committee has been born out of the ongoing retrospective rates crisis, and Chairperson Sue Whelan says it's aimed at ensuring the current predicament never happens again.
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Two community positions are currently being advertised to join Deputy Mayor Peter Bray and councillors Whelan, Jamie Cregan and Brian Brown on the newly formed Rates and Charges Advisory Committee in reviewing Council's rates and charges process.
Cr Whelan said she didn't believe ratepayers generally had a clear idea of what charges they were paying each year, or how they had been levied.
"No I don't think so, and I think something like this current situation is what triggers it. People just pay their rates and assume Council has charged them correctly," she said.
"That's one of the things that concerns me, that for a number of years we certainly weren't charging people correctly, and these people have been hit with these dreadfully huge rates increases, and I just want to make sure we do it right and this sort of thing doesn't happen again."
Cr Whelan said the new committee will start work next month, and will be looking specifically at water, sewer and waste access charges rather than general rates.
"The major issue the community has got is with the water access and the sewer access charges. That's the main things we want to look at.
"I want to look at the history of how we've done things, and then maybe look to make some changes so that it's a bit fairer.
"We need to have a look at how we do it, and if you look at the way rates have gone up over the last few years, maybe there's something we're doing that's not quite right. Maybe there's other ways of achieving what we want to achieve without slugging the ratepayers quite so much," she said.
The committee will aim to have its findings and recommendations before Council early next year to be taken into account before the next setting of rates and charges.
"It's important that people do know we're looking at it," Cr Whelan said. "There's been a lot of concentration on solving the immediate [rates] problem - and I certainly support that- but at the same time we need to move forward and make sure that the rates are charged correctly and review some of those costs."
