Wollongong councillors queued up on Monday night to praise staff and external auditors for the city's 2025–26 financial statements, but were delivered a swift reality check.
In her presentation the council’s financial services manager, Marsha Ma confirmed that a series of one-offs - land sales, advance grant payments, and developer assets - bumped the day-to-day operating surplus of $13.9 million to $106.5 million.
As councillors endorsed the 2025–26 annual financial statements after receiving a clean bill of health from external auditors EY Canberra and the NSW Audit Office, they were warnings aplenty.
Councillor Ann Martin urged residents not to assume the council is “rolling in vast sums of money”.
“Please don’t jump in the air and click your heels together, thinking, ‘Well, now we can maybe subsidise state government agencies or whatever,’ because that’s not our gig, and it’s certainly nothing to get too excited about,” Cr Martin said.
Lord Mayor Tania Brown welcomed the strong financial position but warned that inflation continues to threaten the council’s $500m four-year infrastructure pipeline.
“Once the price of concrete goes up, it never comes down again,” Cr Brown said. “So inflationary pressures will continue to influence our overall position, making our sustainability tenuous.
“We’re not going out celebrating and spending frivolously. We are being very cautious as we move forward.”
The meeting also acknowledged the recent abandonment of the NSW Local Government Grants Commission’s contentious funding review that would have cost the council $16m in annual funding. But it, too, came with cautious foreboding.
Cr Brown noted the immediate threat has passed, but reminded the meeting the commission plans to revisit the methodology after the next state election: “But while we have fended off that threat, for now we cannot drop the ball and drop our guard.”
From the public forum …
Hoon help is needed, says city resident
Wollongong’s 2023 Citizen of the Year, Sally Stevenson wants the council to take stronger action against hooning.
Stevenson put four requests to last night’s public forum: recognise hooning and vehicle noise as a public health and safety issue in the council’s Community Safety Plan; fund a user-pays NSW Police operation in known hotspots at night and on weekends; push for more enforcement by the EPA and state government, including noise cameras in Wollongong; and publicly report on action taken.
“Residents are not the enforcement system,” Stevenson told the council, arguing people were being left to police the problem themselves.
She mentioned excessive noise over the recent October long weekend when noise continued on Sunday night from about 10.30am until almost midnight, with noisy vehicles passing every 15 to 20 minutes.
The disruption was affecting residents’ sleep, she said, citing World Health Organisation guidance recommending night-time road noise levels of 45 decibels. A single revved engine, she said, could exceed 90 decibels.
She also cited NSW’s noise camera trial in Wollongong and Rockdale last year, which found 55 per cent of noisy events came from the same group of vehicles.
In NSW a vehicle that exceeds the noise limit by 15 decibels or more while stationary can be fined as much as $1200.
‘Quietways’ proposed for Corrimal
The Illawarra Bicycle Users Group (IBUG) wants to work with council on a low-cost network of 30km/h “quietways” around Corrimal, ahead of expected population growth near the suburb’s train station.
Speaking at the public forum, IBUG committee member Jonathon Williams said most neighbourhood streets around the Corrimal transport-oriented development lack footpaths or cycling infrastructure, with many still 50km/h. He said there was no planned active transport work for the area and that the suburb was “seriously unprepared” for the increase in density.
Quietways, he said, wouldn’t replace separated cycleways and footpaths but would link homes to them while those routes are funded and built. Williams said idea had been endorsed by Healthy Cities Australia and University of Sydney’s Associate Professor Jennifer Kent.
