“I believe all the councillors acknowledged that in their final speeches at the meeting,” Cr McCulloch said.

“This year the Council has had to make a couple of very big decisions which were difficult at the time but councillors do understand why they are sitting as elected councillors.” The Mayor said it was important to look at the long-term strategic vision for the city.

“We need to know we are going to be leaving Mount Isa community plus the organisation (Council itself) in a very good place,” she said.

“In 20 years time the decisions today will impact the community positively.”

Cr McCulloch said she stood behind the two biggest decisions of the year – the changes to water rates and the horse paddocks.

“We have to, those decisions were legislation-bound,” she said.

Cr McCulloch said they had “really good” outcomes with the horse paddocks.

“We’ve managed to increase the number of horse paddocks we’ve got,” she said.

“We thought we’d finished off the last stage a couple of months ago and we found we had another waiting list so we’ve had to go into a third stage of developing these horse paddocks to be able to home horses.

“That comes back down to making Mount Isa a liveable city – if we want to encourage people to come here and they want to bring horses they have to somewhere to keep them.”

Cr McCulloch said they were tracking well against the items in the economic development plan.

“We’ve got the Australian Mining Cities Alliance working together to lobby the federal government on resource issues and we’ve got the Tennant Creek Cross Border Commission with a lot of joint business ventures in tourism and mining.”

Cr McCulloch said they also gained state funding for the Transport and Logistics Centre business case which held a lot of opportunity. “The feasibility study has been put out to tender.”

READ ALSO: Update with Deputy Mayor Phil Barwick

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