Corangamite Shire Council reports $1.27 million budget surplus

Finance manager Jacqui Thomas disclosed the positive December quarter result at a monthly council meeting on Tuesday night.

"A large factor in this $1.27 million difference is due to the weather delays that we have had in our payments for capital works of $345,000," she said.

"We have also received additional income of $192,000 in the form of user fees from our landfill due to new customers.

"Investment interest was greater than expected by about $392,000 and that's due to a higher cash holding because we haven't spent that money on our capital works yet and also the interest market rates have just been increasing."

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Councillor Jo Beard praised the result, but clarified the money had already been allocated.

"We've got such a well-oiled machine here at Corangamite, every time we see a finance report there's hardly any issues we need to query or question," she said.

"We've always had no surprises, so it's a credit to the organisation we can continue to have such positive progress of finance reports coming to the table.

"It is however worth mentioning we've been investing our money, you always wonder what the risk will be like, it's not always a safe thing to do but we were really conservative in our risk appetite when it came to investing money and in this instance it certainly paid off.

"We came up with a windfall of over $300,000 which our ratepayers should be extremely proud of ... we're conservative in our spending but also conservative in our operations to the point that the whole organisation should be really proud of when these reports come to us."

Councillors also approved a $10,000 variation to the forecast budget as an allocation to the Camperdown Courthouse Committee.

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