Council urges minister to reduce ratepayers costs

WDC Mayor Stan Semenoff, CEO Mark Simpson and Strategic Communications Manager Pauline Rose have met Local Government Minister Rodney Hide to suggest a working party be established to overhaul the Long Term Council Community Plan (LTCCP) process.

The trio, with the support of the wider Council, want to see the LTCCP streamlined to allow for excellent long-term planning, but do away with unwieldy processes that require thousands of hours of costly staff time that could be better spent "getting on with the job".

Mr Simpson said Council believed the involved and complicated LTCCP process had created hundreds of bureaucratic roles and significant, unnecessary costs, such as a $111,000 audit fee, for both local and central government.

"We agree with the need for robust planning, particularly in major asset areas, but the LTCCP has gained a life of its own that provides little benefit to ratepayers over and above standard planning processes.

"We have met Mr Hide to outline areas where we think things could be done more simply, effectively and still provide ratepayers with input into the process.

"We think it is unnecessary for Community Outcomes to be re-done every six years. The consultation process is confusing for ratepayers, residents and groups; regional and district and city council areas overlap, but each must consult separately and report separately," Mr Simpson said. In the end the outcomes for each Council were so similar to each other that they didn’t really help to provide a distinct direction.

"We also think it is clumsy that Central Government has been unable to come up with a straight forward format for all councils to follow. At the moment the documents are so customised that every new LTCCP requires us to reinvent the wheel. "Multiply that by the 85 Councils in New Zealand and you can imagine the level of waste.

"We really think we should be directing those resources toward practical work and building capacity and economic growth, rather than toward repetitive, long-winded consultation processes," Mr Simpson said.

He said the Resource Management Act should also be revamped to take account of impacts on individual property rights, enable major infrastructure projects to go ahead and to facilitate development.

"We also need to review the way several regulatory processes have been devolved from Central Government to local government to ensure the right organisations are carrying out the work now in the most cost effective way," Mr Simpson said.