|
Send to a friend
NZCPR
Guest Forum
Opinion piece by Frank Newman
1 September 2007
Local Government,
for better or for worse?
I
guess I am in the unique position of having had two terms on
council, one before the introduction of the Local Government
Act 2002 (between 1995-98) and one after.
After
a six year break I went back onto the Whangarei District
Council with fresh eyes and an expectation that nothing much
had changed. Well that was not the case at all. The changes
have been dramatic. I was shocked to see how far our local
council - and I suspect all local authorities in New Zealand -
had moved in only six years. The shift is seismic.
In
‘95 it was easy. Probably 90 per cent of our time was spent
dealing with core services to property owners - the basics
like roads, water, waster water and rubbish. Our task was to
deliver those services as efficiently and cheaply as possible.
That’s certainly not the case today.
Today's Council is more like a
social agency that thinks it has to deal with every social
itch and scratch. Now virtually
everything is considered “essential
core business”,
including stadium, swimming pools, athletic tracks, libraries,
tree strategies, strategies for youth, positive aging
strategies, walking strategies, cycling strategies, disability
strategies, cultural strategies, heritage strategies,
strategies for Maori participation in the decision making
process, policies for immigrants, plans for civil defence, annual
plans, ten year plans (which are reviewed every three years), master
plans, structure
plans, coastal management plans, district
plans,
regional plans,
and on and on.
On
Wednesday for example, we will be discussing a motion “That
the WDC expresses its concern regarding the threat of
extinction of the Maui’s dolphin species” and “That
Council supports other Councils by communicating this concern
to the Ministers of Conservation and Fisheries.”
We
also have more than our fair share of issues arising from the
“politics of phobia”. Over the last three years we have
had to discuss the apparently imminent threats of genetic
engineering, global warming, bird flu, and tsunami. Remarkably
our district has managed to survive all of these crises, but I
am not sure our many hours of discussion on these issues can be
credited for our lucky escape. It is more likely the phobia
were never the threat some assumed them to be.
Unfortunately, while we have
been discussing such threats to mankind, sewerage has been
regularly spilling into the Whangarei Harbour, the most recent
resulting in a $10,000 fine from the Northland Regional
Council. I am reminded of a quote by J P O’Rourke, who says,
“Everybody wants to save the planet; nobody wants to help
Mom do the dishes.” (In
our case, that should read “clean the toilet” instead of
“do the dishes”!)
The
transformation from what it used to be to what it is now was
so pronounced at the moment of awakening that I realised how
Rip van Winkle would have felt after waking from a 20 year
snooze to find the world had changed. But unlike the fairly
tale, the revolution within local government has nothing to do
with a civil war – it’s got everything do with the Local
Government Act 2002.
This is the legislation that legitimises local authorities and
gives it direction on what it should do. Clause 10 for example
says,
The
purpose of local government is---
(a) to enable democratic local decision-making and action by,
and on behalf of, communities; and
(b) to promote the social, economic, environmental, and
cultural well-being of communities, in the present and for the
future.
Those
few words have had a huge effect on local authorities.
Firstly, the clause refers to communities, not ratepayers.
Nowadays, councils are not there to serve ratepayers, they are
there to serve communities. That’s a big difference.
Ratepayers are simply the funding mechanism.
The
second important difference is the inclusion of the four
well-beings: Social, economic, cultural and environmental. Now
everything Council does has to be measured against those four
well-beings and some interpret this to mean that everything we
do must advance one or more of those doctrines.
The
scary thing about this is that each of these well-beings is
supported by a Government ministry: Ministry for the
Environment, Ministry for Culture and Heritage, Ministry of
Economic Development and the Ministry of Social Development.
And each of these departments is actively pursuing its objectives
through local authorities!
The
other scary thing is that any activity (regardless of what it
is or the “well-being” of the mind from which it emerges)
can be pursued by a local authority on the basis of one or
more of these four well-beings. The effect is that there is
now nothing a local authority could not (and some say should
not) do. For example, the Whangarei District Council justified
funding a hip-hop concert on the following well-beings:
“Cultural:
Promoting cultural festivities for youth of the district. Environmental:
Educating youth about our environment and its cultural
heritage. Social: Empowering youth to achieve social
cohesion and cultural well being.”
Eleven
of the fourteen councillors considered funding a hip-hop
concert to be a core role of council. Fortunately, there have
been occasions when councillors have said “no” to funding
requests but these have been rare – like the application to
fund a contest to see who could stuff six American hotdogs
into their mouth the fastest. I mention this to illustrate the
nature of the requests that local authorities are being asked
to consider.
The result of the new-age of
well-beings is that
the “business” of a council is now a
community wish list as diverse as the community itself and, in
the absence of tight fiscal budgeting, this results in spending
without boundaries and rate increases like those we
have seen in the last five years (14.2% for the Whangarei
District Council last year for example).
In this regard I disagree with
the intimations of the Report of the Local Government Rates
Inquiry when they say (in paragraph 30 of the Executive
Summary) that they could find little evidence to support the
view that giving councils the power of general competency was
a major driver of expenditure. I
am not surprised they could not find the evidence because, as
they say, there are “data limitations”.
Certainly the evidence from my
own council is that expenditure on “soft” infrastructure
now ranks higher than it did prior to the introduction of the
“well-beings” in 2002. Since that time there has been a +$100 million increase in council
debt from $32 million to a projected $136 million by 30
June 2008, and
a change in spending priorities as illustrated below.
|
General
rating dollar spending
- By rank
|
|
|
2001
|
2002
|
2003
|
2004
|
2005
|
2006
|
|
Parks,
reserves & library
|
2
|
2
|
1
|
1
|
1
|
1
|
|
Roading
|
1
|
1
|
2
|
2
|
3
|
6
|
|
Policy
& monitoring (net ratepayer funded)
|
5
|
6
|
6
|
6
|
4
|
3
|
|
District
promotions & community support
|
3
|
3
|
3
|
3
|
2
|
4
|
|
Local
government process
|
4
|
4
|
4
|
4
|
6
|
5
|
|
Interest
|
6
|
5
|
5
|
5
|
5
|
2
|
(1
being the highest spending area, 6 the lowest)
This
trend has continued since 2006, even accelerated. For
example, this year 36% of general rates will be spent on
parks, reserves and libraries, and 22% on community services.
Only 13% will be spent on roading.
This
is contrary to what our council and many other councils
claim. The Whangarei District Council points to increased
spending on roading to prove their case (and they are right)
but they overlook the fact that this additional spending comes
via central government and is “flushed” through the local
body. In other words, as central government has increased
infrastructure funding, councils have diverted general
ratepayer funding into other projects.
It
is therefore not correct for the Whangarei District Council -
and I am sure many other councils - to claim that rate
increases are necessary and are as a result of greater
investment in infrastructure. There has indeed been a good
deal of infrastructure spending in the last five years, but
that is not the cause of rate increases.
It
is council spending that is causing the rate increases. I
agree with the Report of the Local Government Rates Inquiry
that “Local Government needs to show more restraint in its
expenditures…” However, I doubt that this will happen
unless ratepayer protest forces it as none will want to admit
that they are not showing fiscal restraint.
If
councillors were to give ratepayers an informed and clear
choice about rates and spending, I think most (75% is my
guess) would say do the basics and keep rate increases to a
level that bears some relationship to changes in household
incomes.
Unfortunately
the consultation mechanism given to councils as a result of
the Local Government Act 2002 requires councils to engage with
the community via Long Term Council Community Plans. It was
intended to be a vehicle to “enable democratic local
decision-making and action” but
in my experience the LTCCP process is expensive (ours
costs about $250,000 a year), cumbersome (some +300 pages),
time consuming, and totally useless as a means of engaging the
public in the decision making process (staff often
outnumbering the public at the so-called community engagement
meetings). The Rates
Inquiry recognised these shortcomings when they state in
paragraph 13 of the Executive Summary, “In general local
government is not adequately presenting key choices or
alternatives in its LTCCPs to facilitate useful input by
citizens and to enable councillors to adequately manage and
prioritise expenditures”.
Having
straddled the before and after divide of the Local Government
Act 2002, I am of the view that sometimes new is not better.
If you
would like to comment on this issue please click
>>>
Skip to top |
Send to
a friend:
|
