Waitomo District Council
THE Local Body Elections have delivered four new members and three returnees to Waitomo District Council. This gives us a good “refresh” around the table. I look forward to working with this new team. To those members from the last council who retired or who lost out, thank you for your service. If the last council term was notable for the impact of Covid, this next term is shaping up to be just as challenging for different reasons. The ugly spectre of wage and price inflation is here. The lesson from previous inflationary times is clear — the Reserve Bank and central government need to implement policies that support one another. It does not feel like they are doing so. Until inflation is brought under control there will be considerable hardship on many families. For the council, which itself is facing pressures from cost increases, we will need to be mindful of the pressure on households when we set rates for next year. Secondly, we have a backlog of maintenance work on our roads arising principally from the February storm events. To get much of this work done we need the drier summer months. We also need our principal funding partner, Waka Kotahi NZTA, to approve the works. They are struggling with their own budgets. Thirdly, we have a major project in the making to attend to risks around Te Kuiti’s drinking water – its configuration, its deferred maintenance on underground pipe network and reservoirs, and its back-up storage capacity. If the Government’s Three Waters reforms progress, this work will be taken over by the new water provider. Three Waters is but one major reform facing the local government sector. Just coping with this change is challenging enough. But so too are other reforms imposing costs and disruption on our council. The Resource Management Act is on its way out and replacement legislation is in the making that will increase the influence of national and regional bodies, and decrease that of local government. And now, just released last week, is the first draft of a review report into the future of local government. For elected members and for council staff coping with all of this is challenging. But more importantly, I have grave concerns over the drive by central government towards the centralisation and regionalisation of public services. In addition to removing local voice, the associated bureaucracy accompanying centralisation throttles local enterprise.
