Local govt problems are now central govt’s problems
A lonely tomato plant in a puddle of water. Kitchen funnels and hoses siphoning leaking pipes to water edible gardens. Buckets in the (two-minute) shower for washing the car.
These are the very Wellington symbols of resistance from residents of a city drowning in seepage, while threatening to run dry.
As water purls from cracks in the pavement, resentment bubbles up through the online communities of the capital’s suburbs. It erupted in a geyser when another rates rise (15%) was signalled.
It’s not only water fuelling this anger. As he returned to his Beehive office last month, Local Government Minister Simeon Brown would have looked out the window over long lines of traffic stretching all the way from Karori to the parliamentary precinct.
Commuters in the country’s largest suburb reached boiling point over a series of poorly-managed roadworks to improve cycling and pedestrian safety. The council works are expected to last six months (and to be fair to Wellington City Council, it responded to the complaints and eased some of the congestion).
It’s not just Wellington.
In Queenstown, residents suffered through a cryptosporidium outbreak linked to drinking water, only to be hit by a horrific stench from a waste-water treatment plant.
The resort continues to be plagued with traffic and parking woes, and a well-publicised housing affordability crisis.
Auckland’s traffic congestion and long commute times are exacerbated by an unreliable transport system and never-ending roadworks. Over the summer,
swathes of beaches were closed to swimming because of sewage contamination. It’s one of the most expensive places to live in the world, but everything seems to be broken.
Inexperience, personality clashes and poor governance have plagued local authorities up and down the country, from Kaipara to Tauranga, Gore to Invercargill.
These are local government problems. Residents seethe as rates are hiked while budgets are crunched and services decline (or are scrapped altogether).
For now, ratepayers are directing their ire at their councils, which are ever-more disconnected from their everyday needs. But it won’t take long before they turn to the Government to solve them.
Anxious over paying higher mortgages and bills, these added stresses in daily life are making voters extra scratchy. They voted for change, and expect the Government to start delivering on promises to ease congestion and fix fractured pipes.
Councils are complex organisations with a bewildering array of responsibilities for roading, housing, facilities and amenities, tourism, infrastructure, planning, emergency management and local democracy services. Meanwhile the population continues to expand, while climate-change hazards loom large.
That’s too much to cope with on too shallow a funding base.
Upcoming 10-year budgets will show further deteriorating balance sheets, hefty rates rises and constrained infrastructure investment.
On water, National is in an ideological quandary of its own making. Its campaign against Three Waters reforms centred on co-governance, while knowing full well that the real issue is that many councils are up against their borrowing limits and cannot access the necessary capital to make even modest upgrades.
The smartest move would be for central government to take on the debt at the lowest interest rate that it can get. But that’s not tenable because of an insistence on keeping the debt-to-GDP ratio low, and a desire to keep it off their books.
The Government’s answer is to refine infrastructure financing, with value-capture funding, more development contributions and targeted rates to fund infrastructure for urban growth.
Also central to National’s plans for local government is the “city deal”, which is a policy idea transplanted from Britain and Australia. It’s too early in formation to assess how effective these partnerships will be.
One hallmark of the UK city deals was a concerted drive to encourage greater amalgamation to achieve economies of scale. If that’s National’s motive here, Simeon Brown is not saying so.
He insists these decisions be driven from within communities – so-called localism was another strand of National’s opposition to the Three Waters reforms.
The local government sector is likely to be just as hostile. Turkeys don’t vote for Christmas. This is a conversation that needs to happen, but it will have to start at the national level.
Labour could be forgiven for indulging in a little schadenfreude – it’s a debate that promises to be even more contentious than its scheme to fix water infrastructure.
As water purls from cracks in the pavement, resentment bubbles up through the online communities of the capital’s suburbs. It erupted in a geyser when another rates rise (15%) was signalled.