Tamworth council borrows $30 million for new pool
Mayor Russell Webb explains Tamworth Regional Council's decision to borrow $30 million to build a new aquatics centre in Hillvue. Video by Gareth Gardner
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00:00Look I think the community at Hanworth, whilst there is some mixed feelings, we've been waiting since probably the mid-90s to actually make a decision on an aquatic centre and a health and wellbeing centre for our region.
00:13Last night was a very momentous decision that we made in terms of actually agreeing to fund that new facility.
00:21I think the telling thing last night was that we had nine councillors all agreeing, we don't always get that, but we had nine councillors last night all agreeing that this is the wise thing to do.
00:33Good financial management over the past 10, 20 years has put us into that position and because we're in that position we are able to do what we're doing and we're able to move a motion last night to borrow the money and move forward with the swimming pool.
00:47Based pretty much on the fact that we've got a $15 million grant from the State Government and if we don't act on that pretty well straight away there's a strong possibility we'd lose that money.
00:56And I don't think there would be anybody in our community that would say we're a wise council if we don't act on the fact that we've got $15 million there.
01:04If we lose it we'll never get it again in our lifetimes.
01:09The loan situation for us, we'll manage that, but we'll be certainly talking to the Federal Government now and into the future about what opportunities there are there for us to get further grants into the future for our swimming facility, but also our health and wellbeing facility.
01:27The SRV money was in two parts. One was for, and two thirds of that was aimed at roads and roads infrastructure. That doesn't change.
01:39The other third was in terms of asset renewal and asset repair.
01:43So in this case we can either use some of that money, not all of it, but some of that money for repairing the old pools in four or five years time or we can use some of it for asset renewal in terms of building a new pool.
01:56Now there are some people in the community who are going to say we're borrowing more money. Well let's think about that.
02:01We build nothing without borrowing money and there's been nothing built in this city or any other regional city without grant funding and without heavily borrowing to do these projects.