THE Airlie Beach Lagoon is expected to cost about $400,000 to fix and it's money the local council hasn't budgeted for.

In fact how much Cyclone Debbie was going to cost, how much would be covered by insurance and National Disaster Relief and Recovery Arrangements payouts and what the shortfalls would be was a topic for deliberation at council's regular meeting last week.

Chief Financial Officer Matthew McGoldrick explained "some of our assets are not going to get covered... so council needs some funds from somewhere".

Mr McGoldrick's answer was to create a capital works restoration reserve comprising $5 million from revenue previously set aside for capital works in the 2016/17 budget, operational savings of $1.3 million and $3.9 million transferred from "other reserves".

"The total here would be about just a touch over $10 million. I know to the public it might sound like a lot of money but our asset base is about $1.3 billion," he said.

"This will go a great way to getting us started but it may not be able to finish or stretch far enough to give us enough monies to put things back exactly the way we want them to be."

Some councillors baulked however, at the thought of "repurposing reserves".

With the memories of the former Whitsunday Regional Council's debt crisis spawned from previous NDRRA works still fresh in his mind, Peter Ramage asked the CFO "What's the urgency on this?"

"Because I'm telling you I don't like playing around with reserves," he said.

"We got ourselves into trouble once before with something similar to this... and just looking around at the body language of some of my fellow councillors I think that this thing should be tabled for further discussion to be quite honest."

But Mr McGoldrick explained without funds at their disposal there were currently urgent projects the council would not be able to complete - including the lagoon.

During Cyclone Debbie the lagoon buildings and structure were damaged and the pool filled with sewerage overflowing from the nearby pump station and toilets on the evening of March 29.

The lagoon pool consequently had to be drained and disinfected, but once emptied issues not caused by the cyclone such as concrete cancer and problems with pipes came to light.

Mr McGoldrick said it was these things that wouldn't be covered by insurance "and there will be many other projects of that nature. Some of them just simply won't qualify".

Mayor Andrew Willcox said it was very important to get the lagoon "fixed up and running as fast as we possibly can".

"We've got a lot of damaged islands out there and we need as much mainland based tourism attraction as we can possibly get - so have we got money to go on with that project?" he asked.

Mr McGoldrick's response was brutally frank.

"In terms of how council works and legislatively - no, we wouldn't have any funds at all to do that because the way that those funds are allocated is through a budget," he said.

Mr McGoldrick went on to explain the transfer of capital works from 2016/17 to 2017/18, which would potentially give the council $5 million to play with, was simply about deferring certain non-urgent projects for a couple of months.

He said one example was almost $1 million set aside for an off-street parking project.

"(But) I'm not aware that there is an off-street parking project that you want to allocate that to right now, so in terms of urgency, that's what I'm trying to refer to," he explained.

Council's chief executive officer Barry Omundson suggested it might alleviate councillors' concerns if officers were restrained on the amount they could spend without council approval, proposing a $50,000 cap.

But Cr Willcox said now was not the time to be "hamstrung".

"We've got a lot of damage throughout our whole region. $50,000 is not a whole lot of money. At the end of the day, if my directors and exec managers can't handle this sort of amount of money then I don't want them. I want to put my trust in the people I've got in this organisation to do the job and to do it properly," he said.

"The rationale behind this is the officers have been through the budget and had a look at these things. The CFO has been through and had a look at those things that can be moved."

While no-one would agree to the transfer of the $3.9 million from "other reserves" five of the six councillors present last week did vote for the creation of the new restoration reserve, consisting of the revenue from non-urgent 2016/17 projects and operational savings.

At this stage Whitsunday Regional Council's Cyclone Debbie insurance repairs are estimated to cost $15 million.

The amount of NDRRA repairs is not yet known.