Kingston SE Jetty could close within five years

Councils across SA are being asked to repair jetties owned by the state government. But councillors say that’s like asking a tenant to ‘foot the bill for house repairs’.

The long-term future of one of South Australia’s most visited jetties is up in the air despite a multimillion-dollar state government pledge to help repair the historic structure.

Kingston District Council chief executive Ian Hart said elected members would decide this week how to handle a state government offer of $2.87m to help repair the town’s 148-year-old jetty.

Mr Hart said councillors needed to decide if they would accept the terms of the offer, which require the council to spend at least as much from its own coffers and extend its jetty lease agreement with the government for another 15 years.

“We’re appreciative of the government at least finding some money and realising that there needs to be further investment in our jetty, among several others,” Mr Hart told the Sunday Mail.

Kingston District Council chief executive Ian Hart, left, and mayor Jeff Pope at Kingston jetty. Picture: Jacqui Bateman

“But it’s one of those situations where we are the tenant, not the landlord, a lot of the work is structural and small councils like ours, we don’t have a great capacity.

“It’s a bit rich to expect a small council to share the cost of the structural repair – it’s a cost-shifting thing from the state government.”

Mr Hart said without repair, the jetty, originally built in 1884, would need to close within four to five years. He said the estimated $6m repair work the government had proposed to half fund might lengthen its lifespan by 10 years.

“That’s not best practice asset management,” he said.

“There are other options, which means a much higher investment, that mean you’ve got a much longer window of future-proofing the jetty for many, many more years.

“Let’s say you double the funding to $12m or $15 you might get 30 or 40 years out of it instead of 10 for $6m.”

A Local Government Association survey earlier this year found the Kingston SE jetty topped the list when respondents were asked to name the jetty they had most recently visited.

Of respondents who had visited a jetty in the past year, Kingston SE had 353 mentions.

The next highest was Tumby Bay, 185. Glenelg jetty was third with 173 mentions.

Mr Hart said council data suggested between 43,000 to 85,000 people visited the jetty each year – an average of between 120 and 200 people a day.

The same LGA survey found people visiting jetties injected more than $103m to the SA economy each year.

Mr Hart said that the jetty is not only a great resource for locals but is also popular with visitors.

“The other day I counted 31 people come and go and I asked several where they were from, they included people from Victoria, Toowomba, the Gold Coast and even a couple from Switzerland.

“It would be a tragedy to lose our jetty”.

There are 75 state-owned jetties in South Australia, 36 of which are leased back to local government on long-term contracts on the condition the councils pay for their maintenance.

But many councils have told the Sunday Mail this is an unfair arrangement and compare it to a landlord asking a tenant to foot the bill for house repairs.

Kingston’s $2.87m offer is part of a pool of $10m created in last year’s state budget to help repair jetties leased by local councils.

Another $10m was allocated to jetties owned and operated by the state government.

Mr Hart urged the government to increase the size of its jetty funding pool at this year’s state budget.

Transport and Infrastructure Minister Tom Koutsantonis encouraged Kingston Council to accept their “generous funding offer”.

“It’s strange to see the council CEO making public commentary, given he met with my department recently and requested additional time to consider the funding offer,” he said.

“The Kingston district council has been offered $2,870,000 for urgent jetty repairs – this is the largest funding allocation for a single jetty in the state.

“We always made it very clear that we expected councils applying for this grant to be willing to co-fund the repair efforts.

Kingston council knew this – whether they choose to accept the terms of this funding is a matter for them.

“The council currently has a long-term lease, expiring in 2051, to maintain and control the jetty.

“Under the terms of that lease, it is the council’s responsibility to maintain the jetty appropriately. Clearly this has not been done.

“If the council chooses to hand the jetty back to the State Government it is council’s responsibility, under the terms it signed up to, to return the jetty in the condition it was in when they took over its maintenance.

“I encourage the Kingston council to put the politics of complaint aside and accept this very generous funding offer so their residents and the broader South Australian community can continue to enjoy this asset into the future.”