The civic leader was responding to criticism which flowed from a community meeting held at Coreen on Wednesday afternoon to discuss the council's long term financial plan.

About 100 people attended the Federation Ratepayers Discussion Group forum including Cr Bourke and fellow councillors David Fahey, Rowena Black and Aaron Nicholls.

Gripes centred on rundown roads and planned annual rate hikes of 19 per cent, 17 per cent, 14 per cent and 10 per cent from 2023-24 if permitted as special variations.

Farmer David Bott, son of former Corowa Shire president Bill Bott, told The Border Mail on Thursday the overarching concern was rates rising to maintain current service levels rather than improve them.

He said there had been "a lack of fiscal management and lax productivity" from the council with "$1 income for $21 of expenditure".

"We're not broke but the direction of the travel is pretty bloody ordinary and there's got to be a recognition of unsustainability," Mr Bott said.

Fellow farmer and agronomist Rosie Dye said many dirt roads were unusable when wet and an ambulance had become bogged when travelling along McKenzies Road to attend a callout recently.

Canns Bus Lines manager Mark Chandler said school coaches were travelling on "not ideal" dirt routes.

"There's definitely roads that need work done and with the wet weather they're getting chopped down but we're still using them," Mr Chandler said.

Cr Bourke said when Corowa and Urana shires merged to become Federation in 2016 they both had a backlog of rural road projects.

"Our income is around $9 million and our spending is about $8 million on roads at present, so we're relying on grant funding, but we need to spend about $12 million to get the roads back in order," Cr Bourke said.

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He said there was a misconception in the community the council had a pile of money to spend on roads after the merger.

"I don't think anyone can blame the council's financial management, because any funds we've received in the merger have been purpose funding such as the Corowa pool, Howlong community hall, Murray River bike track and Purtle Park at Mulwala," Cr Bourke said.

"We weren't allowed to spend any of that on roads."

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