Queanbeyan rates saga comes at a cost

The saga stretched from July when $3.7 million in backdated notices were first issued to ratepayers, right through to October 9 when they were withdrawn via a Council vote.

Council commissioned several sets of legal advice during that period seeking to clarify its legal options to withdraw the notices after they were met with widespread anger from the community and Queanbeyan City Councillors.

The Queanbeyan Age sought the total cost of legal advice commissioned by Council during the saga, as well as the additional costs accrued throughout the process. Council staff did not respond to those questions except to say the matter was now 'resolved'.

However a local legal source familiar with the firms involved and their costs estimated the total legal bill at somewhere between $100,000 to $120,000. That's on top of around $260,000 paid back to some ratepayers in rates refunds after the audit identified they'd been overcharged over the last five years, in one case by $60,000.

Councillor Jamie Cregan self-funded another set of legal advice worth $13,000 during the process (he was later reimbursed for that cost by Council), which led to a Senior Counsel (SC) being called in to review the whole process.

Cr Cregan remains critical of how the process was handled, and said the costs could have been lower had Council brought in an SC from the beginning.

"To be perfectly honest... this is something that had it have been done correctly five years ago, we wouldn't be having this conversation," he said.

"I'm disappointed that it took me to go and get independent legal advice given I asked a number of times whether Council had looked at every legal avenue for withdrawing these notices.

"Yet it turns out they could have been withdrawn had we gone and got an SC way back when it first arose."