Water rates will rise by 8 per cent plus CPI if the Administrator adopts the staff recommendation on Tuesday, May 28.
The rise, to take effect from July 1, is the third in a four year IPART determination and would see the average rate rise from July 1 of $166 per year.
in May 2022, IPART – the Independent Pricing & Regulatory Tribunal – decided how much Council could charge for water rates over the next four years.
After the first year, the water rates would increase by a set amount plus inflation.
The “plus inflation” changes each year.
# Year one saw a 17 per cent increase, no inflation added but a substantial increase of $183 on average.
# Year two, 2023-24 saw a 6 per cent increase plus an extra 7 per cent for inflation.
And now, in year three, 2024-25, the Coast is getting an 8 per cent increase plus an extra inflation, as outlined in the agenda for council-under-administration’s May 28 meeting.
The agenda explains it this way:
“As the final determination was made in 2022-23 dollars, annual CPI adjustments for inflation are applied to service charges.
“The CPI multiplier as per the IPART determination is the consumer price index All Groups index number for the weighted average of eight capital cities, published by the Australian Bureau of Statistics.
“The maximum prices in the determination are to be adjusted for inflation by multiplying the specified price in 2022-2023 dollars by the specified CPI multiplier.
“For 2024-25 the CPI multiplier is calculated as the percentage change from the March Quarter 2022 to March Quarter 2024, which equals 10.9% as published by the Australian Bureau of Statistics on 24 April 2024.
“This is a 2-year indexation rate comprising of the CPI increase for the March Quarter 2022 to March 2023 (7.0%) and the CPI increase for the March Quarter 2023 to March Quarter 2024 (3.6%),” the agenda states.
