Cork County Council faces dissolution if it fails to approve budget within a fortnight

Cork County Council faces disillusion and the prospect of being run by government administrators if it doesn’t approve a budget within the next 13 days.

A marathon meeting on Monday featuring several adjournments rejected both an executive proposal to increase commercial rates by 8% next year and a counterproposal by a Fianna Fáil/Independents pact to reduce it to 7.5%.

The latter was defeated by 30 votes to 24 despite pleas from CEO Moira Murrell that it’s needed to counteract a near €12m deficit in the proposed record expenditure budget of nearly €538m for services in 2027.

It was eventually decided to reconvene on Wednesday.

Ms Murrell and other senior executives said the rates rise, just for 2027 and not for 2028/9, was necessary.

Significant inflation costs

They said the council faces significant inflation costs, more money for wages and pensions for its staff.

It also has to cater for its increased service delivery plans for population increases in towns and villages across the region.

As part of the horse-trading, it was proposed each of the eight cash-strapped municipal district councils would also receive a further €630,000 over the next three years. But that’s now also in abeyance.

Ms Murrell said it had been difficult for the local authority to try and balance the budget especially with the need to invest further in critical infrastructure development in the region.

“Construction inflation has had a very significant impact,” she said.

The largest spend in the budget was to be €120m for housing and this programme includes an additional €1.5m for next year to enable the council buy land for more developments.

“Our proposed (housing) targets are really significant and that’s why we have to buy more landbanks,” Ms Murrell said.

The second largest programme in the budget is for roads and transportation at €118m, which was earmarked to be increased by €1.5m on this year’s figure.

Significant gap

Ms Murrell signalled that charges for using civic amenity facilities are also likely to rise soon as “there’s a significant gap” between expenditure and income at these sites and there’s a need “for closing that gap.”

She also hinted there is increased costs coming for buying burial plots on the way, the income from which is to be used to pay for the purchase of more land for cemeteries.

While the Fianna Fáil/Independent pact voted for the amended 7.5% rates budget they were outnumbered by the ranks of Independent Ireland, Fine Gael, Social Democrats, Labour and Sinn Féin.

Fianna Fáil leader on the council, Gearóid Murphy, said if rates weren’t increased there would be a reduction in core services, which was unacceptable.

His Fine Gael counterpart councillor Michael Hegarty said he’d spoken to several businesses and “they’re all finding the going pretty tough” and therefore his party couldn’t support the proposed rates increase.

Aontu’s councillor Peter O’Donoghue said the shortfall should come from national government but was told that’s probably unlikely.