MAYOR Paul Harmon admitted he and the council does not yet know how much the Town Centre Renewal Plan will cost.
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His comments followed a meeting of the Concerned Inverell Ratepayer’s Association, which was established by Caroline Wilson because of her concern about how many people were against certain aspects of the draft plan, adopted by Inverell Shire Council at its June meeting.
Ms Wilson said the association’s concern is that council has embraced every aspect of the plan without being selective.
“One of the reasons why we’ve named ourselves the ratepayer’s association is our concern that although the mayor, Paul Har-mon, said initially that $525,000 was put up to implement this plan, clearly a lot more is required,” Ms Wilson said.
“The council now acknow-ledges that.
“They’re now talking about staging this over a number of years, maybe eight to 10. Clearly this is going to cost into the millions, and we’re concerned that this money could be better spent elsewhere.”
Cr Harmon said part of the implementation strategy was that council staff were to provide detailed engineering plans and put together a costing plan for council to vote on. “We’ve always said the final cost had not been determined yet, and that has been because we have not had detailed plans drawn,” Cr Harmon said.
“That has been made quite clear from the outset. At no point has anyone said ‘this is what the cost will be to implement the CBD renewal plan’; there’s been figures bandied around by certain people saying this is what we think it is going to cost. Where they’re getting those figures from I’m not entirely sure.
“Until we’ve got detailed engineering plans we don’t know the final cost of that.”
Ms Wilson said it had become clear that there are a lot of people out there who are very concerned.
“We’ve come together to form an association with the idea of encouraging the council to rescind the motion,” she said.