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Sukulwenkosi Dube Plumtree Correspondent
BULILIMA Rural District Council has drafted a $2,1 million budget for 2015, a $200,000 drop from this year’s $2,3 million. Presenting the first draft of the 2015 budget statement at a full council meeting on Tuesday, finance committee chairperson Tapson Hanyane said the local authority had resolved to maintain most of this year’s tariffs.

He said next year the council would not get the Public Sector Investment Programme provision of $400,000 from government.

Speaking on the performance of this year’s budget, Hanyane said council had failed to settle bills backdated to 2009 because of the poor budget performance.

He said as at October 31 council had collected 23 percent of the projected revenue.

“It has been next to impossible for council to effectively offer services to the communities as shown by the 2014 budget performance,” said Hanyane.

He said council had collected 30 percent of the expected unit tax, 11 percent of budgeted development levy and 16 percent of the budgeted stand rentals.

Hanyane said the council was therefore forced to introduce an intensified revenue collection strategy for next year.

He said the council was going to start the year with a shortfall of about $1,7 million as they had managed to collect $539,756 of this year’s budget.

Hanyane said they had budgeted $460,445 for workers salaries but they had only raised $229,059.

He said the projected council expenditures for the year were at $2,3 million but only $533,139 had been raised because of poor revenue collection.

Hanyane said this deficit was because rate payers were not responding well especially in payment of development levies, stand rentals, mobile stations used by Net One, Zesa and unit tax owed by commercial farmers.

“In the 2015 budget we have allocated $28,300 towards the council farm to ensure that we generate income to complement other sources of revenue.

“This year the farm was not performing well but we would introduce poultry in order to improve the performance of the project,” he said.

Hanyane said they had set aside $38,800 to cater for health and education projects within the district. He said the $2,1 million budget would serve wards in terms of roads and social service allocations.

Hanyane said employee salaries would gobble $455,734 of the budget while recurrent expenditures would take up $1 million and capital expenditures $636,010 of the projected budget leaving a surplus of $8,401.