Is Albury Council efficient?

As a new Councillor (only been going 4 months) I ask myself how does this council compare with other similar councils in NSW and elsewhere for that matter.

The Division of Local Government publishes annual comparison reports in which they give statistics for such things as number of employees, rates, expenditure on various things.  They group similar councils together and we are in group 4.  The comparisons are interesting but don't give me a real feel for how good we might be.  We are certainly towards the top with respect to the number of employees and the cost of rates in all categories.  But perhaps we provide better services than other councils and that costs more?

TCorp also published annual reports in which they give a lot of ratios such as debt service ratio, operating deficit, infrastructure backlog and so on.  Useful but I still don't feel that I have a feel for how good or bad the council is. 

Perhaps we should be involved in some meaningful benchmarking with other councils such as Wagga Wagga, Tamworth, Bathurst, etc.  I'd be happy to hear your suggestions on this one.

I did a quick exercise last week looking at lost time injury frequency rates and what this means for employee health and workers compensation premiums.  Our LTIFR is 12 – 15 and we pay almost $1.5 million in workers compensation insurance premiums (as well as having significant injuries to our employees).  By comparison, Melton City Council in Victoria has an LTIFR of 5, Wodonga’s is currently 2 and Norske Skog’s is 0.  The paper nill has not had a lost time injury for 2 years.  A huge opportunity to save money and to look after our employees. 

I was not able to get the actual figures from councils so I used a proxy which is the annual amount of salaries and wages divided by the workers compensation premium amount.  The higher this ratio is the better is the council's safety record.  It's a bit crude but it gives an idea of the issue.  The ones I calculated are Albury 18, Wagga 26, Bathurst 14 and Tamworth 40.  On this basis we are not doing too well.

If you have any other ideas of what we should be benchmarking I would like to hear from you.