MORNINGTON Peninsula Shire has reforecast an end of financial year surplus of $3.78m, which will be dispersed to fund the McCrae landslide emergency response, storm damage, and bolstering its emergency response reserve.
Councillors have approved a “2024/2025 mid-year reforecast” which will see $2m allocated to the recovery of last August’s storm events, $1.2m towards the McCrae landslide emergency response, and $580,000 to top up the shire’s emergency response reserve. Funding spent on the McCrae landslide response included a back fill of staff, technical experts, legal costs and traffic management.
According to a council report, this “will continue to be monitored and reported” but “given the unknown timeframe and potential costs,” shire officers had recommended that the remaining surplus be allocated to its emergency response reserve, which would bring the reserve’s total fund to $1.58m.
The storm event related to the days-long wild weather that hit the peninsula on 25 August including damage to structures, flooding, coastal erosion, damage to beach boxes and downed trees. The community was also impacted by power outages, roads closed and damage to houses. It required a massive clean-up and impact assessments by the shire with a portion of costs to be eligible under the state government’s Disaster Recovery Funding Arrangements, which the council will make an application to claim.
Councillors also decided to scrap an outdoor dining scheme launched during Covid to support the recovery of businesses who had been forced to close or reduce their patron capacities. The shire report noted there had been a “minimal uptake of ongoing parklets, and the budget remained unspent” with “currently no further demand for this program”.
Mayor Cr Anthony Marsh said the mid-year surplus was an opportunity to identify other projects in the community. “I think it’s financially prudent to not spend that money and to put it aside for that so-called rainy day,” he said. “McCrae is obviously an unforeseen event which has put a significant burden on the ratepayer. I think if you average it out across 106,000 houses, it’s about $29 per household so far in funding this event, so that’s substantial,” he said.
Cr David Gill said he was disappointed by the way the state government had particularly handled the McCrae landslide response with a “lack of input”, saying it was “very easy to point fingers at the council”, which had been “doing its best”. “I’m not arguing about us helping,” he said, but added additional support “should be more general”. “It seems to be lacking in a general sense, with perhaps mainly, the state government … I’ve been surprised that our ratepayers are carrying the burden.”
Deputy mayor Cr Paul Pingiaro agreed, saying “we can’t always shoulder the burdens of an emergency event – it’s not our area to step into typically, but we have, and we have stepped up, and we should as a council group and as officers all around the room be very happy in that way that we have responded, and we should be very proud of how we have stood up”.
In a 21 March update regarding the McCrae landslide, the shire said it was focussing on getting the remaining eight property owners safely back into their homes, investigating the 14 January incident, and identifying necessary works to make the area safe again. The state government has not contributed any funding to the emergency response but has established a $3.14m Board of Inquiry to “get to the bottom of” what happened and identify how to prevent similar incidents in the future.
First published in the Mornington News – 1 April 2025
