Beware of rates mauling of your wallet
‘We’re in this together’’ trumpets the Christchurch mayor in her opening preamble to the council’s draft Long Term Plan (LTP).
Indeed we are – there’s no escaping the city council’s tentacular clutches as they line up your back pocket for a fresh mauling.
Before focusing on the grim fiscals, I do wish to acknowledge Mayor Lianne Dalziel’s clearlystated determination to reverse Christchurch’s crumbling Garden City status.
You may recall my rant about this over Christmas, duly amplified by scores of fellow residents – and the mayor has responded, assertively.
She has pointedly taken aim at the council’s dopey ‘‘No Mow’’ riverbanks policy, and a fresh commitment to improving the maintenance of our parks and riverbanks has been elevated to priority status in the LTP.
I have no problem with sensibly considered habitat-enhancing riverbank plantings – but allowing those banks to balloon out of control with weeds and grasses has been an ill-conceived act of mass-negligence.
Tomorrow, city councillors will formally approve opening up the draft LTP to public consultation. But short of a full-scale revolt, the thrust of the LTP won’t be uprooted.
Isn’t it cynical how the council’s contribution to reinstating Christ Church Cathedral has been fashioned as the fall-guy, a convenient punching bag, so as to act as a heat-deflecting lightening rod, to divert and distract public opprobrium well away from the central issue – rampant rates rises.
The council’s spin machine wants to corral your angst on the headline-grabbing ‘‘$7 a year’’ cathedral levy, while they downplay the proposed annual rates rise as just ‘‘$2.64 a week’’.
Don’t be sucked in – despite the best efforts of Cr Yani Johansen.
The $10 million contribution to the cathedral pales in comparison to the council’s proposed $4 billion spend up on capital projects over the next decade, let alone the $352m on planning and policy. And as the draft LTP documents confirm, it is equally disingenuous for the cathedral rating levy not to be incorporated into the overall rates increase.
The council would have you believe their proposed average annual rates hike is 5.5 per cent, yet their own documents tabulate the figure as 5.72 per cent. What the Dalziel-led council doesn’t want to admit is they have reneged on reining in rates. They have broken their own promises.
Back in 2016, the annual plan pledged to cap rates rises at 5 per cent. Last September, the council declared its LTP focus was on ‘‘keeping rate rises below 5 per cent – even if it means reducing services’’.
The mayor’s report gushed ‘‘the right thing for ratepayers must be a reduction in the percentage rates increase’’.
But the draft LTP lays bare the betrayal. Beyond this year’s proposed rise of 5.72 per cent, 5.5 per cent is slated for 2019 and 5.0 per cent in 2020. The council’s projected track doesn’t envisage annual rises falling below 4.5 per cent until 2026.
Last week, I referred to how my rates bill has exploded by 83 per cent since 2007 – now on-track to spiral to 135 per cent in five more years.
Many councillors blame all of this on the government, accusing them of short-changing the city in the horizontal infrastructure rebuild programme, despite the government paying the lion’s share of it.
Their bleating carries the whiff of unrealistic expectations, and a misunderstanding between reinstating infrastructure and ongoing maintenance.
Lax maintenance to our wellheads has arguably inflicted us with chlorination.
But if the post-quake infrastructure tail poses as such a colossal financial millstone, which the council calculates as costing ratepayers $66m a year, why hasn’t it curbed their penchant for mega-spending on non-essentials?
Hundreds of millions continue to be showered on the proliferation of a record number of pools, libraries and cycleways.
Council debt levels remain all but maxed out and council-owned companies have been loaded up with debt.
But still the council refuse to consider a partial selldown on any commercial assets to flatten the rates track and aggressively expedite the infrastructure backlog, like smoother roads, despite shelling out obscene executive bonuses to underperforming goliaths, like City Care.
Nor does the LTP factor-in the government’s promised $300m capital injection.
No, the council would rather dream up new ways to extract even more of your cash, with a regional fuel tax installed in the LTP, incongruously at odds with their giddy evangelising over electric vehicles.