Councillor Cathal Rasmussen Welcomes reduction in Local Property Tax

As some of you may know, we agreed in Cork County Council today to cut the Property Tax for next year by 10%.

We had an extended meeting of the Council where we discussed the possibilities in detail. I was very keen that we try to relieve the pressure on people who have had to take significant pain in the last 6 years. Now that things are starting to pick up, I think it’s only fair that people get something back. At the same time, I was determined that we try to protect funding on local housing, roads, footpaths etc. As an example, the council is already running out of money to upgrade and maintain council houses. Large cuts in our funding will mean less for those vital services. In the meantime, we have to continue to keep pressure on the council to continue getting more and more efficient.

Fine Gael councillors felt that there should be no cut in LPT and use the extra money to fund services, where on the other extreme Sinn Fein and some others felt that we should cut the full 15% despite any impact it would have on services. In the end, I felt that we should cut by 10% and continue looking for efficiencies to minimize the impact on services.

We all have to make choices like these every week in running our own households, even if we’d love to have a magic wand that allowed us to avoid them. For people in the county having gone through the worst recession in memory, I felt it was more important that they get as much relief as possible while maintaining services as best we can. I’d be interested to hear if anyone else has come up with a more novel way of having your cake and eating it, but I’m happy that the 10% reduction was the right decision for where we are now.