Mr. John McCarthy:

There was some discussion on this issue when we were here back in March, but it mainly involved our colleagues in the Department of Transport, Tourism and Sport and concerned how they distributed the roads money.

On the local government piece, the fund for 2018 will now primarily be a fund through which the local property tax is taken in and then paid out to local authorities. There was some discussion on that issue in March. That distribution of local property tax funding to local authorities is on the basis of what we call an 80:20 model, where 80% is retained locally and 20% goes into a central fund to assist local authorities with lower property tax bases. That has been built on historical baselines, and I indicated in March that we were establishing a process to review those historical baselines of funding for local authorities. That process has just got under way and is scheduled to be completed, I believe, in August.