The role of free lunches in $295m hole
ANALYSIS: There’s an old saying, take care of the cents and the dollars will look after themselves.
There are a lot of cents in a proposed $6.4 billion Auckland Council budget and it is easy to dismiss any focus on small spending as inconsequential or trivial.
That could include the $195 spent by mayor Wayne Brown’s office on a freelance photographer to capture his November 2022 meeting with National Party leader Christopher Luxon.
Or the $206 spent on food for councillors at the most recent Governing Body meeting, even though most had brought their own lunch following Richard Hills invoking a ‘‘no free lunch’’ rule for the Planning, Environment and Parks committee he chaired.
Meanwhile, communities in the Waitākere Local Board area found the council would no longer supply traps or native plants for environmental work they were doing after a budgetfocussed decision to curb all ‘‘discretionary spending’’.
For Anzac Day events there will be only one council wreath per event, rather than past practice where one was provided for each local board.
If the mayor or a councillor also attended, a second wreath was laid.
The sums are miniscule but important. The council must close a $295 million deficit in its next budget, which will challenge councillors to decide which spending is the most important to Aucklanders.
The public’s opportunity to have a say ended on March 28 and the collective views will be analysed and debated behind closed doors at the end of April, as the politicians start to take their respective stances.
Anecdotally, those who have turned out for community budget feedback sessions have not been strongly in favour of the relatively low rates rise (4.66%) and big spending cuts proposal.
Part of the mix also includes the sale of part of all of the council’s $1.9b stake in Auckland
Airport, with the proceeds intended to reduce debt and the associated interest costs.
If the feedback, which includes more than 10,000 individual and group submissions, leans that way, councillors will need to start looking for the million dollar versions of either the ‘‘free lunch’’ or the personal promotion photography.
Within a broad proposal to cut $20 million from community programmes lies pain via a thousand cuts to groups whose activities help weave the fabric of a healthy city.
A feedback meeting in tāhuhu heard of a sports club whose hire cost for council facilities would rise from hundreds of dollars to thousands.
Public views will strengthen arguments against deep and widespread community spending cuts, but also highlight the need to find a means elsewhere to balance the budget.
The mayor’s proposal pitches an average rates rise of 7%, discounted to 4.66% by temporarily reducing two environmental target rates, a modest rise when compared with Wellington City’s proposed 12.8%.
From feedback meetings across the city have emerged varying support for paying more to cut less, with each extra 1% costing an average value home less than 60 cents a week and bringing in $20m.
It is a formula not spelt out in the most public version of the budget material, but is now being publicly canvassed by Orākei ward councillor, and deputy mayor Desley Simpson.
The budget, as proposed, is the work of Wayne Brown and his office – but now proposed, the process belongs also to the 20 councillors and 149 local board members on behalf of those they represent.