ES to review forecasting

HAVING found the organisation to be in a better financial position than expected, Environment Southland (ES) staff will take a harder look at how they forecast.

At a committee meeting yesterday, councillors heard draft financial results covering the year to June 30 and found the council was doing better than they had thought. Finance manager Tanea Hawkins said the cost of flood damage and the two states of emergency this year had been a moving target.

‘‘Financially, it’s turned out to be a very good result.’’

On July 22, a loss of $1.5 million was anticipated, but a $400,000 surplus was achieved.

Originally, the ES share of the Emergency Management Southland loss was expected to be $400,000, but it was $116,000.

‘‘The forecast was very conservative on what we could earn in the way of income in the last part of the year . . . our teams were able to get out there.’’

During the past month there had also been a lot of income from ‘‘local contributions’’ on river works that ‘‘swung’’ the numbers.

Cr Lloyd McCallum congratulated Ms Hawkins for the work.

‘‘I’ve looked at the numbers and we’re pretty close to expenses and income as budgeted for.’’

He asked what could be learnt from this year and whether everything had been forecast correctly.

The answer was a lot of work was being done on risk management, and understanding gained.

‘‘A large focus of that is on recovery and understanding what we’ve learned from what we’ve been through. Financial resilience is a huge part of that and we’ll address that,’’ Ms Hawkins said.

Independent appointee Bruce Robertson said the council would ‘‘look harder at how we’re forecasting’’.