ON Friday, July 25, Kim Morris and his next-door neighbour Lisa Robinson appeared on the front page of The Queanbeyan Age, looking equal parts determined, angry and frightened. Their lives were about to change dramatically.
Subscribe now for unlimited access.
$0/
(min cost $0)
or signup to continue reading
That Monday they'd both received rates bills in the mail, Kim's for just under $10,000 and Lisa for just under $7,000. It was the beginning of the backdated rates saga that would engulf the town for the next three months. But in those early days, Kim says he was simply stunned and trying to work out what a backdated rate was.
Like most ratepayers, he'd budgeted for a sizeable annual rates bill, and always paid them on time. But he hadn't budgeted for a $10,000 one-off invoice for backdated fees and charges.Lisa can still recall the moment she opened her letter. A client had just arrived at her exercise therapy business for a 4pm appointment when she quickly opened the mail and saw the figure.
"I said 'hold on, I've got to call the Council.'
"I called them expecting to hear it was a mistake. But it became quite clear to me that this wasn't an error, that this was a really serious situation."
The reality was that an audit of Queanbeyan City Council's rating database had identified widespread errors in its system on water, sewer and waste access fees stretching back to 2009. Around 2000 local properties had been overcharged for rates during that period and were refunded, but around 860 properties were undercharged. Council made the decision to pursue the charges and issued the notices in July.
That meant some small businesses who'd been paying their annual rates invoices in good faith each year were now looking at massive backdated bills that ranged up into the tens of thousands of dollars. One bill was for over $90,000.
If a fix wasn't found, several Queanbeyan small businesses would have had to close almost overnight.
Kim and Lisa knew they had to act, although they weren't sure exactly how. They put their names, faces and phone numbers to that front page newspaper article, determined to get together with other affected ratepayers and fight the notices. And the phones started ringing immediately.
"They just didn't stop," Kim said.
"We were spending all day answering phone calls to people who had the same problem and didn't know where to go, or they'd approached the Council and been fobbed off.
"People just started ringing us, and the word started getting out that we were going to hold our first public meeting."
The word went out on Facebook and in the media, and the following Thursday, the first public meeting was held at Lisa's business premises. Around 160 angry ratepayers attended, as did Mayor Tim Overall and local state MP John Barilaro. It was an angry and frustrated crowd, Lisa recalls.
"There was a lot of anger and fear, because at this stage no one had an answer," she said.
"The issues were very mixed at that stage, and we had nothing that was clearly explained to us.
"Tim Overall stood up and said this should never have happened. And we were thinking 'well how did it happen'?" she said.
Kim and Lisa heard that night from people in worse financial and mental shape than themselves, people who were looking at losing their businesses and their livelihood if the backdated rates bills weren't withdrawn.
Although Kim thinks his business would have been able to sustain the hit in the long term, he recalls being shaken by the stories of those business owners operating almost week to week.
"For me, it was the unfairness of it," Kim recalls. "I could have paid the [additional] bill and it would have been ok, but it wasn't fair, and there were plenty of people who would have been forced to close by these.
"Especially when I started talking to people who were in pretty serious mental and financial anguish over this. I felt at that point that we really couldn't let those people down," he said.
The two ratepayers were aware then that they had the numbers and commitment in the room to mount a challenge. The problem was how to focus that energy into a coordinated response, while also keeping on top of their day-to-day business commitments.
"The first couple of meetings, we were a bit of a rabble really," Kim said.
"We didn't really know anyone else until that first public meeting. And even then, it took about three more meetings until the really passionate people started coming to the fore, the ones who really felt they had to defend the rights of other ratepayers."
The next 10 weeks would prove frantically busy for all the ratepayers involved, juggling their businesses during the day, and researching legislation and Council policies at night, along with attending two to three weekly meetings of the group.
Lisa said that juggling act proved "an absolute nightmare" to manage.
"I have my first client in at 6am and I look after the health and rehab of people with high needs health, and it's one on one- so it's intensive. You can't just close the doors for a while, because people are relying on you.
"And I had so many phone calls and people dropping in, and then the meetings at night until 9.30 where you haven't had any dinner and you're cold and tired. We were all so exhausted."
Lisa was also calling on her psychological training and counselling other ratepayers struggling under the weight of large rates bills.
"People were so distressed. You can't just say 'I'll ring you back' when someone's talking about suicide. It was really extreme.
"And we had to still front up and open the doors the next day. I wasn't sleeping; most of us weren't. We were really running on empty."
Nor did the wider public have any real understanding of what these people were facing; the invoices affected less than six per cent of Queanbeyan's rateable properties.
Lisa says she remembers getting asked several times in the community 'Why don't you just pay your bloody rates?'
She said she took particular issue with a comment from the Mayor in August that said there was "not a legal option for Council to waive rates" and that doing so would "create an unfair advantage to a small proportion when 95 per cent of other residents have already paid the correct amounts."
"We were projected in the media by the Council as if we had done something wrong," Lisa said. "We were being talked about as people who weren't fulfilling our duty.
"And it was technical. How do you explain a rates audit into fees and charges and maintain people's interest? It was hard to make people understand about what the retrospective part meant."
But through the meetings and the late nights a hard core of committed locals had stepped up, and the Queanbeyan Ratepayers' and Residents' Association (QRRA) was born, along with its founding committee. Kim Morris was elected as the group's first president and Lisa Robinson as vice president.
The group sought legal representation, and Cr Jamie Cregan came to the party to fund independent legal advice from his own pocket, a $13,000 commitment to the cause. That advice offered a different legal perspective on the validity of the invoices, and prompted Council to refer the matter to a Senior Counsel, who found the notices had indeed been invalidly levied.
That allowed Council to vote unanimously to withdraw the rates invoices at a meeting last Thursday, putting an end to more than three months' stress and anguish for those affected.
And with the rates now successfully withdrawn, Lisa said she's feeling relieved, but exhausted. She said she also feels great pride in the new Ratepayers' group.
"It's heartening that people will stand up and say 'no, we won't take it'. The group of us that remained were really invested, and it was powerful.
"It's given me faith that we don't just sit around and accept what those people in power do without question."
And both she and Kim said they feel a new connectedness with the town.
"I do feel like something has been awakened in me," Kim said. "It's more of a community spirit I guess. I really do feel like I can do things for people who maybe couldn't have done it for themselves."
However the job's not entirely done as far as the QRRA is concerned, and Kim and Lisa said the group is looking forward to working with Council's audit committee towards a review of the backdated rates situation, and also contributing to the newly formed rates review committee.
"There's still a lot of issues that we can get our teeth into," Kim said. "The most important one is getting into the Rates review committee and working with them."
And Lisa said she'd like to see the QRRA grow in the future as a link between Council and the wider community.
"We don't want to have an obstructive dialogue with Queanbeyan City Council. We want to be a conduit between the community and council," she said.
They're relieved, exhausted, and ecstatic with the result, but both these local business owners say they're in no doubt that they would have been paying these bills in full had they not banded together with their fellow residents and formed the QRRA.
"Absolutely," Lisa said. "We'd all be paying off those rates over the next three years. Without even a vague doubt."