John Roberston
North King Country councils are unlikely to cop unexpected costs in the wake of the Government’s Three Waters reforms, officials say.
Waipā District Council revealed cost of upgrading Te Awamutu Wastewater Treatment Plant had more than doubled from $19 million to $48 million earlier in the month and it was adding a $9 million wastewater reticulation upgrade for Leamington to its plans.
“I can’t put my hand on my heart and say it won’t happen here, but there’s nothing like that in the foreseeable future,” said Ōtorohanga District Council chief executive Tanya Winter.”
Speaking on Friday after a multi-day Local Government New Zealand rural and provincial sector meeting in Wellington, Ōtorohanga district mayor Max Baxter said: “There’s nothing that we can see in the immediate or mid term that will cause a budget blow out. We think we are in a very good space.”
Waitomo district mayor John Robertson told a similar story for his district.
“I am totally confident in the forecast that Waitomo District Council has of Three Waters,” Robertson said. “There’s no blowouts.”
Ōtorohanga District Council, whose annual operational expenditure is about $25 million, borrowed about $10 million in 2021 to upgrade the Ōtorohanga Water Treatment Plant, Ōtorohanga Wastewater Plant and Kawhia Water Treatment Plant over three years.
“Our 2021 Long Term Plan accelerated 10 years of capital upgrades in three years,” Winter said. “We needed to give it a nudge.”
The “resilience work”, as she called it, was “pretty technical”.
“We are really pleased that we did that and invested that money.”
Waitomo District Council is in a very similar position, according to Robertson.
“Some councils have got the huge pressures of growth,” he said.
“Councils like ours don’t have that. We are in quite a different environment.”
Waitomo district’s population was 10,050 in June 2024, according to Statistics New Zealand, up from 8,907 in 2013. Comparatively, Ōtorohanga’s population grew to 10,900 from 9,138 over the same period.
Roberston said Waitomo District Council had spent about $10 million building a new sewage system in Te Kūiti in 2013 and $8 million building a new water plant in 2018. The council has budgeted $8 million for a new reservoir and water pipes in the town.
Ōtorohanga and Waitomo district councils are exploring co-designing an asset-owning council-controlled organisation to manage water and wastewater with Hauraki, Matamata Piako, Thames-Coromandel, South Waikato, Taupō and Waipā district councils. Hamilton City Council and Waikato District Council are creating their own council-controlled organisation.
“No decisions have been made yet, but it probably will head towards a Waikato council-controlled organisation,” Baxter said.
