Newcastle councillors offered a virtual rerun of their debate over last year's budget when they approved their spending program for 2019-20 on Tuesday night.
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Just as they did 12 months ago, independent councillors Kath Elliott and John Church criticised the budget for insufficiently addressing the council's "infrastructure backlog ratio", a measure of the organisation's maintenance bill.
Reducing this backlog was one justification for the council's 2015 deal with the Independent Pricing and Regulatory Tribunal to raise rates by 46.9 per cent over five years.
They argued too much was being spent on "sexy" projects such as the council's move to new offices and not enough on maintaining existing footpaths, pools, drains, cycleways and halls.
And Labor councillors, led by lord mayor Nuatali Nelmes, again defended a budget they believe is delivering the new infrastructure projects ratepayers want, such as Bathers Way, the Summerhill tip expansion, better shopping precincts and park upgrades, and the surpluses required to reduce the maintenance backlog in the future.
They also accused the independents of playing politics, just to complete the sense of deja vu.
The debate might have been the same, but this year's budget document is not.
Last year's edition included warnings from staff about the council's obligations to "sustainably maintain our assets in the condition expected by the community" and "achieve a more desirable level of infrastructure backlog in a shorter than anticipated time frame".
It said the council's backlog, an "extremely important sustainability metric for council", was "above 10 per cent", well above IPART's "prescribed backlog level" of 2 per cent for councils.
It also contained other passages warning the backlog was an "area of risk" to the council and a graph showing it was not likely to fall below 10 per cent by 2030.
Almost all of that detail, including the graph, is absent from the 2019-20 budget, which forecasts an $11.9 million surplus. Instead it offers a broad definition of asset renewal without describing the council's position.
The 2019-20 budget includes spending $14 million less on existing infrastructure than in 2018-19.
Council chief executive officer Jeremy Bath told the meeting the council had reduced its infrastructure backlog from "well over" $100 million "just a few short years ago" to $89 million.
"Yes, next year we're proposing to spend less on our infrastructure backlog," he said.
"Frankly, our hands are tied because this council has unanimously agreed to support a number, or award a number, of contracts for new infrastructure, which means ... something has to be deferred."