Waipa dairy farmer Garry Reymer on farm
One of the main workstreams since my last report was to complete our annual plan. While it looked as though there would be a rates’ increase of 3.4%, a lot of work and careful decisions, has seen this figure land at an annual rate rise of 1.4%.
Garry Reymer
That is a total budget of a little over $157 million. Before the final meeting, whereby the full council grant sign-off, sub committees do a lot of work on their respective budgets.
The more conservative increase was managed by scrutinising where surpluses currently existed, or where we were able to draw on reserves. Regional transport and catchment management are the two big ticket items, at around 65% of the budget.
The Te Huia commuter train to Auckland has been given one more year of trial, to see if it can improve both passenger numbers and fare box recovery, currently at about 18% of running costs.
Catchment management is the other very important area of responsibility for the council. The recent flood events have brought this home to the people of Waipā and King Country.
For a long time, we thought that floods, slips and road closures only happened in the Coromandel. We need to be sure that we budget well to make certain our infrastructure is fit for purpose, and we can handle what nature throws at us.
A discussion we need to have is: what level of protection are we willing to fund?
To build stop banks for the more regular but less extreme events, is less of a financial burden than building to the protection levels for a 1 in 200-year event. The difference can be billions of dollars as we saw with the Cook Strait ferry debacle. I don’t believe any council or government can ever give its citizens a guarantee that they will be fully protected from natural disasters. However, we have a responsibility to deliver quality infrastructure to a level and price that ratepayers can afford. This is done by ensuring that we invest wisely on things that produce tangible results.
I feel that as a council, the best investment is to focus on the effects of climate (climate change protection) rather than climate change prevention. To do the latter is somewhat futile, as despite our best efforts to reduce emissions in our regions, the global nature of this challenge means our investment would have a negligible impact on improving our position.
