THE TAX on holiday homes has ensured Kerry County Council is one of the few local authorities to have cash reserves without cutting services.
Kerry now has €2.5 million in reserve, councillors were told yesterday.
The council’s head of finance, John O’Connor, revealed the figure when he presented the 2010 annual financial statement.
More than €4 million had been collected on the tax on “nonprincipal private residences” in Kerry in the two years since it was introduced, and the principal towns in Kerry had netted an additional €2 million in that period.
Multiple properties owned by individuals were the focus of the council’s inquiries to net yet more money, Mr O’Connor said.
In 2010, €2.186 million was collected, most of which was returned to Kerry to the benefit of the local economy, he said.
“This is significant additional income and meant that our works programmes were retained at a level which would not have been possible otherwise owing to the decreases in other income sources,” Mr O’Connor said.
The meeting heard the council had also reduced the money paid to consultants to under €1 million, one-tenth of what it had been.
“A decade ago when I began pursuing this, the bill for consultants was €8 million,” Councillor Paul O’Donoghue (FF) said.
Mr O’Connor said the council’s intention was to train people, and he claimed its scientific laboratory was saving the council more than €300,000.
Just under €50 million of the total spend of €121 million by the council in 2010 was for wages, pensions and gratuities. Staff travel and subsistence costs amounted to an additional €2.1 million.