PAYROLL COSTS account for as much as 42 per cent of Kerry County Council’s total expenditure.
More than €50 million is being set aside to pay staff costs this year, including travel, subsistence and pensions. This is out of a total projected expenditure of more than €120 million on roads, water, housing, waste management and other services.
The council’s new head of finance, Angela McAllen, told the annual budget meeting of the local authority that payroll costs continued to rise, despite the fact numbers employed had decreased significantly. Up to 300 people have left Kerry County Council in recent years.
In the planning department, in the 2004 Kerry County Council budget, for instance, at the height of the boom, €2.19 million was set aside for salaries and travel and office expenses of staff.
This was when hundreds of applications for single and large-scale housing developments were flooding the council’s planning department.
This year, applications are at their lowest level since the early 1990s, and both administrative and technical staff numbers have been reduced, as the 2012 budget report shows. Yet, almost €2 million has been set aside to cover salaries and staffing costs in planning.
Some of the staffing costs are quite stark. In one programme concerned with grant schemes for the housing of older people and those with disabilities, more than €465,000 is being set aside to administer just €3.5 million in grants.
The proportion spent on payroll has risen to the 42 per cent of expenditure set aside this year – in 2011 payroll costs accounted for 40 per cent of the overall expenditure and in 2007 salaries and payroll accounted for 38 per cent of overall council spend.
The council has agreed to freeze rates this year.