Angus Council will find £10 million of savings by shedding 170 jobs and introducing a charge for picking up garden rubbish and a review of food waste collections in rural areas.
Council chiefs said the staff reduction will be achieved without compulsory redundancies, but ahead of Thursday’s budget-setting meeting have warned residents they may face increasingly stark choices of whether or not to pay for some council services.
The council has scheduled just over £10m of savings for 2016 in the biggest single-year cut to its budget since the authority’s inception two decades ago.
But finance spokesman Alex King criticised a “very disappointing” Scottish Government settlement which he said had left the cross-party budget-setting group having to find around £4 million of additional savings beyond what they had expected.
Opposition plans to put forward an alternative spending programme were torpedoed by the scale of penalties that would have been imposed by the Scottish Government in the event of Angus breaking the decade-long council tax freeze which will peg the district’s Band D rate at £1,072.
Councillor Iain Gaul, leader of the SNP-run authority, admitted: “At present, the council tax system, as is, is not sustainable.
“What we need to get across is that in Angus, only 14% of the income comes from council tax.
“Two years ago that wouldn’t have paid for the bill to clear the snow that fell over a very short period of time.
“We continue to work smarter and get leaner but it will be a choice in the future probably for people to decide which services they pay for and which services they will do without.
“We all agree we are in a really difficult place.
“We will manage going forward because that is our remit, to make difficult decisions and come up with alternative ways of doing things.”
Since the introduction of a three-year budget programme in 2014, Angus has made savings totalling more than £21m.
Around £30m of further savings could be required by 2019-20.
The package going before Thursday’s full council meeting in Forfar also includes proposals to reduce finance devolved to schools by £360k and cut the music service subsidy by £15,000.
An additional £2.3m of investment has been identified for adult care services and high priority capital projects include the Brechin business park extension, Arbroath Academy synthetic pitch, the Mill of Dun to Stracathro route action plan and the replacement of the Gables residential unit in Forfar.
£1m has also been set aside to fund capital repairs required as a result of the devastating end of year floods.