Councillors braced for harsh budget cuts

CORK county councillors will find themselves between a rock and a hard place this week as they face up to what may be major cuts in some services in 2012.

A difficult budget meeting, scheduled for Friday, will reveal a significant shortfall in funding for the year ahead.

Councillors met behind closed doors yesterday to discuss a draft of the budget, which will be significantly reduced on previous years.

Senior council officials told the Irish Examiner that two items in particular will affect the local authority’s ability to sustain services.

One is the completed, but unused, superdump at Bottlehill and the second is the fall-off in development charges.

The council recently decided to mothball the plan-ned opening of the €46.8 million facility at Bottlehill because of fears it would be a drain on resources.

However, county manager Martin Riordan said yesterday that the local authority would still have to pay back €2.2m next year on bank loans incurred through borrowings needed to develop the north Cork facility. Similar repayments will have to be made for several years to come, it was indicated.

Mr Riordan previously wrote to the Department of the Environment seeking funding to offset the cost of developing the site, but yesterday confirmed he had received no reply.

The county manager is on record as saying the Government should not keep all the levies it charges private refuse operators to bury their waste at landfills.

The council insists it embarked on developing Bottlehill as a result of a Government directive to provide new landfills and Mr Riordan believes the Government should foot some of the €46.8m bill.

The decision to mothball the dump was made because there was excess landfill capacity in the country and there was no legislation in place to prevent waste generated in a region being buried in the same region.

Mr Riordan said he would need refuse companies to pay €50 per tonne and bury 120,000 tonnes annually in order to break even and without the legislation he couldn’t guarantee that.

A lack of proper overall funding for local authorities from Government is another problem for the council.

During the days of the Celtic Tiger, Cork County Council earned up to €50m per annum in charges it imposed on builders in the form of development levies. Such monies assisted the provision of a number of services.

However, development levies have almost dried up. Council sources said these charges were likely to amount to €3.8m in 2011.