The members were treated to stark reality at County Hall this week when financial controller John Dempsey spelt out the current financial situation for Kilkenny County Council for the year ahead.
Members listened intently to the news that there is ‘no leeway’ this year within the budget and even at that, some services may need to be dropped in order to foot the bills.
Mr Dempsey told the members at this month’s meeting of Kilkenny County Council, “service cuts are the only option to avoid deficit. We don’t know what government funding allocation we are going to get this year but we are bound to have a reduced budget again this year. We’ve had to adjust our spending this year when comparing to 2009 and next year there will need to be further adjustment. We’ve had €2m of budget cuts this year already and we have been successful in-so-far as we haven’t exceeded our budget as a result,” he said.
Mr Dempsey also outlined the main areas that were dramatically affecting the income to the council to the members.
“Capital sources of funding to local government are down everywhere and Kilkenny has had a 14 per cent reduction in funding since 2008 from €81m to €70m. Development charges which were the main source of local capital projects are a huge loss and the projection of €11.5m worth of development charges has turned out to be completely unrealistic and now we are in a situation where instead of €11.5m we have €1m-€1.5m to work with, which is a drop of an unprecedented 90 per cent.
“The capital budget is constrained in every service area but the biggest pressure area for local funding is water services as roughly 30 per cent of the spend on water services was coming from development charges. In 2011 there is simply no room for manoeuvre — we just don’t have the same scope. We are down to basic service provision at the moment and we still don’t know what government funding allocation we are going to get as of yet for 2011. We expect a substantial reduction on an already very tight budget and service cuts are really the only option,” he predicted.
