Ever wondered what community groups do and why we should support them? I haven’t. The work they do is critical to the well-being of our community, and they perform a role that council is often not able to.
Whether it be Lions, Apex, Rotary, the CWA or whichever group, our community owes you.
Yeppoon Rotary typified the great work community groups do this week. The club applied for a $50,000 grant through the Gaming Community Benefit Fund with the sole intention of buying a sophisticated driver simulator to teach our youth better driving awareness and safety skills. The club was successful in its application.
The simulator replicates urban, country, and highway driving conditions in a variety of weather types including rain and fog. It also simulates day-time and night-time driving situations.
The simulator is transportable and will circulate around our region’s high schools so that senior school students can practice their driving skills in the simulator rather than on a road, street or highway where risk to them and others increases.
Each school will host the simulator for a term before it rotates to another high school. Its role will be continuous as new senior school students pass through the system.
This gift from Yeppoon Rotary will potentially save lives, and it is their wish that this project will see similar simulators placed in other schools throughout Queensland.
In other news, Councillors met this week for rounds two and three of the capital works budget discussions for 2023/24. The capital works budget is the one that relates to construction or purchase of new infrastructure or new assets.
To say the coming budget is going to be challenging is like saying the universe is big. It’s an understatement!
Our perennial role as councillors is to attempt to match community expectations and demands for service with financial capability for delivery. Inevitably, a compromise occurs with both, and with inflation currently running at around 7.5 percent the challenge is made even more significant.
Consequently, we will be scaling back on the size of the capital works program this year so that we can deliver on a number of key projects that are intended to accommodate future growth.
Since the beginning of Covid-19, the Livingstone Shire Local Government Area has grown in population by approximately 11 per cent and continues to see more people moving to the area. This is fantastic news. Growth brings opportunities but also brings growing pain problems. However, these are problems we would rather have than the opposite.
Until next time.
