Council rates collection down 8%

Published on 07/02/2013 08:38

Leitrim County Manager, Jackie Maguire has admitted that she is very concerned over the continuing decline in the collection of commercial rates over the past 12 months.

Speaking at Monday’s Council meeting, Ms Maguire said that the collection rate for Co Leitrim had fallen from 72 percent in 2011 to 64 percent in 2012.

She added that the Council had not struck off as many debts last year as they had in 2011 and said that despite a number of payment plans being in force for businesses throughout the county, there was a substantial shortfall in the amount brought into the Council coffers.

“The fact that collection rates have fallen by a further 8 percent in the last 12 months speaks for itself. This figure is deteriorating year on year and the affect this is having on Leitrim County Council’s cash flow is now begining to become quite apparent,” she said.

“Simply put we need the funds that this brings in. It is our major source of funding along with the Local Government funds and the fact that the collection rate is continuing to drop is a matter of great concern.”

Councillors slammed the high valuations set out by the Valuations Office and called for a major overhaul of the system.

They also slammed the lengthy delays and high costs involved in appealing current valuations with one councillor noting a business had appealed a rate and the appeal had simply resulted in the confirmation of the original, extremely high, rate of valuation on the property.

Councillors warned that unless major changes were brought into play more and more businesses would be forced to close their doors in the coming year.

They said that a payment based on profit rather than square footage would be a much more equitable system.

The County Manager said the Valuations Office was looking at changing the current system and she said the Council would contact them for an update on the current status of this review.

News

Looking for...

Featured advertisers

Jobs

Search for a job

Motors

Search for a car

Make Model Price from Price to

Property

Search for a house

Buy Rent

Bedrooms Price from Price from Price to Price to

What is a Cookie?
What is a Flash Cookie?
Can I opt out of receiving Cookies?
About our Cookies

Cookies are small data files which are sent to your browser (Internet Explorer, Firefox, Chrome etc) from a website you visit. They are stored on your electronic device.
This is a type of cookie which is collected by Adobe Flash media player (it is also called a Local Shared Object) - a piece of software you may already have on your electronic device to help you watch online videos and listen to podcasts.
Yes there are a number of options available, you can set your browser either to reject all cookies, to allow only "trusted" sites to set them, or to only accept them from the site you are currently on.

However, please note - if you block/delete all cookies, some features of our websites, such as remembering your login details, or the site branding for your local newspaper may not function as a result.
The types of cookies we, our ad network and technology partners use are listed below:
- Revenue Science ►
  
  A tool used by some of our advertisers to target adverts to you based on pages you have visited in the past. To opt out of this type of targeting you can visit the 'Your Online Choices' website by clicking here.
- Google Ads ►
  
  Our sites contain advertising from Google; these use cookies to ensure you get adverts relevant to you. You can tailor the type of ads you receive by visiting here or to opt out of this type of targeting you can visit the 'Your Online Choices' website by clicking here.
- Webtrends / Google Analytics ►
  
  This is used to help us identify unique visitors to our websites. This data is anonymous and we cannot use this to uniquely identify individuals and their usage of the sites.
- Dart for Publishers ►
  
  This comes from our ad serving technology and is used to track how many times you have seen a particular ad on our sites, so that you don't just see one advert but an even spread. This information is not used by us for any other type of audience recording or monitoring.
- ComScore ►
  
  ComScore monitor and externally verify our site traffic data for use within the advertising industry. Any data collected is anonymous statistical data and cannot be traced back to an individual.
- Local Targeting ►
  
  Our Classified websites (Photos, Motors, Jobs and Property Today) use cookies to ensure you get the correct local newspaper branding and content when you visit them. These cookies store no personally identifiable information.
- Grapeshot ►
  
  We use Grapeshot as a contextual targeting technology, allowing us to create custom groups of stories outside out of our usual site navigation. Grapeshot stores the categories of story you have been exposed to. Their privacy policy and opt out option can be accessed here.
- Subscriptions Online ►
  
  Our partner for Newspaper subscriptions online stores data from the forms you complete in these to increase the usability of the site and enhance user experience.
- Add This ►
  
  Add This provides the social networking widget found in many of our pages. This widget gives you the tools to bookmark our websites, blog, share, tweet and email our content to a friend.
- 3rd Party Cookies ►
  
  We use Advertising agencies to provide us with some of the advertising on our websites. These include (but are not limited to) Specific Media, The Rubicon Project, AdJug, AdConion, Context Web. Please click on the provider name to visit their opt-out page.

Council rates collection down 8%

Top stories

News