RUAPEHU District mayor Don Cameron. FILE PHOTO
THE Ruapehu District Council has decided to apply for the $4.12m Tranche 1 ‘Better Off’ Funding available to it under the Government’s Three Waters Reform package. Ruapehu Mayor Don Cameron said the council would only submit the $540,000 Waimarino Social Housing Upgrade out of the nine proposed Tranche 1 projects it had asked for community feedback on. “The remaining $3.58m available in Tranche 1 will be used to establish a new discretionary community fund for the remaining Tranche 1 and other project ideas,” Don said. “The new discretionary community fund will enable all the excellent new project ideas submitted as part of the Tranche 1 Better Off Fund engagement to be tested with the community.” “It should be noted that the circumstances and timeframe around which the council needed to make some difficult decisions on the Tranche 1 ‘Better Off’ Funding has been far from ideal,” he said. “With the term of the current council coming to an end we had limited time to seek community and iwi feedback on what to do about the $4.12m available in Tranche 1 and any project ideas. “Besides the time constraints the discussions were complicated by some misunderstandings around the funding with some people seeing accepting it as support for the Government’s Three Waters reform model.” The $2 billion ‘Better Off’ funding package is not for supporting Three Waters reform but to help councils position themselves for the future by investing in projects that enable growth and housing development, build resilience to climate change and natural hazards and/or improve community wellbeing. “The Waimarino Social Housing Upgrade project is a good example of this where the council has been given responsibility for social housing where elderly tenants are living in cold, damp and mouldy conditions.
