Carlow councillors were “hoodwinked” into making a decision to hike the local property tax (LPT), so says a local Labour politician.
It appears the County Council’s in line for an extra €450,000 from the revaluation of Irish Water & Will Paton says he & fellow elected representatives were not told about extra income coming when they made the decision to increase the LPT.
At Monday’s monthly meeting of the local authority he questioned why members were not informed of this income when they held their local property tax meeting as he says it would have made “a substantial difference”.
A Council spokesperson said they weren’t aware of this change until the week after the LPT meeting, adding that the “Council budget is still just about enough to survive”.
Cllr Paton is one of those who had objected to the Fianna Fail / Fine Gael decision to increase the property tax by 5pc & speaking to KCLR News noted “It turns out that a couple of days after the Local Property Tax meeting the council was advised that there would be an additional €750,000 income coming in in the form of additional rates from the utility companies in County Carlow and even when you take out the lost money from the commercial rates, the €300,000, there’s a sum of €450,000 left, it came as a bit of a shock to me to learn this, we weren’t even told directly by the council executive, we had to work it out for ourselves”
He adds “Personally I think that the members of Fine Gael & Fianna Fail have been totally hoodwinked, the worst part is the people of County Carlow, the householders now have to face a 5% increase in the charge for Local Property Tax compared to last year, a completely & utterly unnecessary rise in the Local Property Tax”.
However FG’s Fergal Browne says their vote was based on the information in hand at the time and he’s happy that the council’s in a better financial position for it noting “Well obviously when we’re doing our budget meeting the property tax we thought there maybe a deficit of 300,000 euro, that by the way should never have arisen anyway in the first place, but now it appears that won’t be the case and in fact we’ll have a small surplus which is good news but the main thing is for the council to be on a sound financial footing and it now looks like we will be where we thought we would be with a small bit of extra cash in the bank but that’ll be much needed to keep up with inflation and to meet the needs that we need as well in terms of climate change & everything”.
