Infrastructure services can be divided into grid-owning infrastructure services

Grid-owning infrastructure services

Grid-owning infrastructure services are services that require the ownership of a grid of land that interlocks across the area. This includes roads, railways, electricity, telephone, water, sewers, and the like, but not services that depend on these (such as garbage collection depending on roads). (such as electricity, water, and railways), and non-grid-owning infrastructure services

Grid-owning infrastructure services

Grid-owning infrastructure services are services that require the ownership of a grid of land that interlocks across the area. This includes roads, railways, electricity, telephone, water, sewers, and the like, but not services that depend on these (such as garbage collection depending on roads). (such as garbage collection, buses, and the like). This article is concerned solely with the grid-owning variety of services.

Grid-owning infrastructure services

Grid-owning infrastructure services

Grid-owning infrastructure services are services that require the ownership of a grid of land that interlocks across the area. This includes roads, railways, electricity, telephone, water, sewers, and the like, but not services that depend on these (such as garbage collection depending on roads). are provided in two ways:

• Privately (in Victoria, this includes electricity, telecommunications, and railways)
  
• Publicly (in Victoria, this includes roads, water, and sewerage)

Infrastructure Taxes

The government needs to build infrastructure and services, and it needs to get the money to do it from somewhere. But the current scheme could probably be improved.

The current government solution is to charge people for connection to a service (often whether they want it or not). I think a preferable solution would be to increase rates enough to cover the expansion of the grid-owning infrastructure services. However, the use of grid services should still be charged.

Infrastructure Services

One thing that makes local and state government reluctant to rezone (thus bringing down the price of land) is that people from high service areas (such as the city) move to low-service areas (such as the country), and then begin demanding the services that they are accustomed to receive in the city.

It would probably be useful for councils is to come up with a "service levels definition". This would mean that they would specify what services go with what population density. Then, if the people complain about their level of services, they could be told to either subdivide enough to increase the density, or move to a more populous area. This would control runaway services fever.

Conclusion

The best idea in this document was that, while "user pays" works well for grid-delivered services, it doesn't work quite so well for the initial connection to the grid. The government should reconsider this.