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LIVERPOOL Councillor and former Deputy Mayor, Peter Ristevski has called on the newly announced CEO of Liverpool City Council, Jason Breton, to stop the outrageous expenditure and address the dire budget issues created by the big-spending Mayor, Ned Mannoun.

Councillor Ristevski, an award-winning accountant and Director of Investment Plus Accounting Group, said it is a disgrace that the Council sits outside the Office of Local Government benchmarks set in 2023, which sanctioned Liverpool Council for its poor performance.

"Mr Breton has been given a mandate to urgently stop the rot and reform this Council basket case,” Councillor Ristevski said. “We need urgent steps to be taken to get us back into a balanced budget because we are running millions of dollars in deficits. The new CEO needs to cut wasteful spending and “jobs for the boys” by sacking all the Mayor’s Liberal mates, who are sitting in Council jobs on huge salaries. It’s a disgrace that meanwhile, our residents are being denied basic services.

“One of these friends of the Mayor, who is in a cushy, lucrative job is his personal lawyer, who is supposedly his personal assistant. She attends Council meetings, but no one knows why she is there and yet her salary is $300,000. Then we have the Council’s media department, whose job appears to be solely to boost the Mayor’s personal profile.

“The Mayor will have to face the music because he wanted to sell Council assets to hide the budget deficits. He had his eyes on a Council building which would have solved his budget deficit with an injection of $50M. Now, he faces a dilemma because the new Councillors won’t allow him to dig himself out of a hole by selling an asset like that, which is delivering good returns and capital gains.

“What’s needed is for the Council to cut spending, cut costs and tighten its belt to deliver a balanced budget. Our community of ratepayers deserves better than what this poor excuse of a Mayor has been delivering and he needs to be reined in,” Mr Ristevski added.

“We need to make the tough decisions quickly. Our long-suffering community deserves much more than this.”