Our various councils ended their fiscal years by officially adopting the new rate structures they had laboured over in their LTP consultations and subsequent budget decisions.
Generally this last vote is perfunctory and unanimous. It just codifies the ‘sturm und drang’ that has preceded.
Not so at the Regional Council.
There, two Councillors – Will Foley and Neil Kirton – voted against final adoption and then issued a media release to underscore their opposition. Here’s what they had to say:
“HBRC has adopted a 3-year plan that does not address the concerns of our Hawke’s Bay community.
“Amendments to the recommendations were proposed to give the community confidence that we will address their affordability issues urgently if not at LTP adoption but at the beginning of this financial year commencing July and to be completed in the first few months. When put to the test, other Councillor support stopped short of making any adjustments, other [than] agreeing to an undefined review with no expectations or terms of reference which therefore leaves the strong possibility of no changes forthcoming that would give our ratepayers any level of comfort.
“So, what is set now is a budget of 16%, 18.3% & 8.5% rates increases in years 1, 2 & 3. The rates increase includes a $2.85 million withdrawal of investments to help fund HB Tourism & operational expenditures.
“Reasons for not supporting adoption of the 3-year budget include:
- Common theme from ratepayers across whole region of HBRC not listening to them.
- Rates are quickly becoming unaffordable to property owners across the region.
- No clearly defined commitment before now of initiating a meaningful review of organizational effectiveness and efficiency.
- As councilors we agreed not to borrow more money to fund operations but have agreed to sell investments for operations.
- The combination of both the Revenue & Financing policy and the long-term plan has meant untenable increases of 30% up to 500% for a considerable number of ratepayers in the current environment.”
Councillor Jerf van Beek had voiced similar concerns but was overseas on the day of this final vote. He told BayBuzz he was in “total agreement” with Foley and Kirton.
It’s not clear where this goes from here. At the least, it appears the trio plan to keep the spotlight and pressure on HBRC’s forthcoming reviews of “organizational effectiveness and efficiency”.
HBRC’s LTP consultation document reported that $4.6 million in savings for 2024/25 could be achieved by “cutting some internal costs, and by stopping and slowing down some community services”. Of course, the biggest chunk of that was the proposal to phase out HB Tourism funding, so presumably those ‘savings’ – as well as others touted during the consultation but not adopted – now need to be found elsewhere.
The consultation document added: “Over the next three years we will continue to look for savings across the organisation. We want to know we are delivering services and programmes as efficiently as we can. Especially during this recovery time, we need to consider what work we can and should do as a regional council. Should we narrow our focus even more? Or are there some services we should do more of?”
As adopted, the LTP decisions included this instruction: “Directs the Chief Executive to conduct reviews of efficiency and effectiveness in line with Council’s strategic priorities in time for the next Annual Plan.”
Usually, once the LTP has been adopted, the rhetoric is quickly forgotten and savings promises sink into the murk, just like those made by rate cuts warriors during their 2022 election campaigns.
Perhaps it will be different at HBRC in the months ahead. Stay tuned.
once more with feeling: if councillors were concerned about large rate rises for residents they might have voted against giving farmers and forestry (in particular) a huge reduction in rates at urban-dwellers’ expense as part of the financial review leading into the LTP decisions. but no. so nitrates will continue to flow almost-unimpeded into our rivers, and those rivers bring forestry slash down to be dumped on our beaches, and the ones who should be paying for adequate monitoring and enforcement of these issues (not to mention clean-up) are laughing while we “townies” pay their bills. and HBRC still wrings its hands claiming it can’t afford to fix things, when it only has it’s own policies and lack of spine to blame.
Thank you Bruce for your honest comments. The HBRC needs to have a major reshuffle and everyone who complains about their performance needs to consider standing on the council. I would like to see people with high standing in our area like Lawrence Yule and Tom Belford plus others who are community minded. I hope Wairoa can break away from the constraints of coming under the Regional Councils jurisdictions and make decisions for their area that will help the recovery process.
Dare I suggest that ugly word “amalgamation” (pause for screams from all directions!) – we have councils doing all things separately to manage the same things they could be doing jointly – but that doesn’t make sense of course – a region with, lets guess, about 300,000 people definitely needs at least 5 councils to run it….or could one council covering the whole region have better controls over spending and doubling up on assets. Of course not! That would be killing off so many little kingdoms – much better to have 5 entities doubling up on everything including decision making. Weirdly insular thinking!