A regional South Australian council has been hit with a $110,000 per month power bill for its new $63 million state-of-the-art sport and recreation centre.
Key points:
- The Wulanda Recreation and Function Centre’s power bills have been twice as high as expected
- Mount Gambier Council says it will save money with a new electricity contract from next month
- CEO Sarah Philpott says the centre has also attracted twice as many visitors as expected this year
The Wulanda Recreation and Convention Centre opened in December in Mount Gambier, after construction started in 2020.
Its final cost was more than $18 million more than first expected.
Now, the City of Mount Gambier has revealed the monthly power bill for the site has been more than $110,000 each month since January — around double the expected amount.
This includes around $75,000 in usage and $30,000–$35,000 in monthly connection fees.
“It comes down to that it’s a brand new centre, it’s larger than other centres, and so we’ve worked on an estimate of costs,” CEO Sarah Philpott said.
“Certainly that’s the case … when you’ve got something brand new you’ve got to put a bit of a line in the sand somewhere.
“This is a brand new centre, we’re getting used to the way it operates, we are understanding how the equipment and so on operates.”
Ms Philpott said the council had a new energy contract starting from July that it expected would lower its power bill by around 40 per cent.
She said the council deliberately only signed a six-month contract starting in January due to the high electricity prices at the time.
“We’re certainly not alone with electricity prices; as we know everyone is experiencing the impacts of utility costs,” she said.
“We do budget adjustments as we go along and last year we did budget adjustments generally for utility bills.
“Certainly next year in the budget we’ll look to continue to adapt that budget as we go along since we’ve got a new contract and prices are going to be a little different than we originally anticipated, but certainly not as high as we’ve seen in previous months.”
Ms Philpott added that the centre’s solar panels had saved $92,000 in power so far this year.
Centre exceeding visitor goals
The recreation centre includes outdoor and indoor swimming pools, a gym, several function rooms, and is the home of the Mount Gambier Pioneers, a semi-professional basketball team that plays in the NBL1 South competition.
While the power bills had exceeded council expectations, centre membership had been greater than expected.
“The centre’s been a huge success on many fronts,” Ms Philpott said.
“We’ve exceeded our intended annual attendance figure. We were hoping to get more than 100,000 attendances over the year and we’ve already peaked that at 104,000.”
Ms Philpott said the council would not be cutting services or spending to help cover the centre’s electricity bill.
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