RETROUVAILLES
The happiness of meeting someone again after a very long time
Our year commences with a focus on our next annual work programme. We are at the tail end of a period of significantly high capital investment, with spends in wastewater, potablewater, road sealing, new walking and cycling projects and maritime assets. All of which sit alongside the largest land acquisition and development programme this district has seen for new parks, reserves, sports and recreational facilities.
That old saying ‘dreams are free, but reality has to be paid for’ has never been more relevant as the spray and walk away cash injections into the region, via the provincial growth fund and economic stimulus packages are now being operationalized and we are starting to see the maintenance and depreciation costs appear on the spread sheets for the first time.
Add in the recent High Court decision which imposes National Environment Standards on every intermittent or permanent wet area (read all freshwater areas excluding coastal waters and geothermal water) – which one can only hope inadvertently and not deliberately captured every single culvert, pipe and bridge into a default regime of environmental impact statements and the resource consent process!
The Government continues to roll out a very ambitious reform agenda (which we are legally compelled to respond to) capturing changes in the three waters, Resource Management Act, Climate Change Response Act and Building Act. Concurrently Councils have been tasked with managing supply chain disruption as it impacts on the delivery of goods and services as well as proactively respond to the Governments call for an increase in the social housing stock and associated looming infrastructure deficit.
It is unlikely that any council has sufficient staff capacity to address these reform programmes in a meaningful way. Recruiting and retaining staff is becoming extremely challenging as the Crown and its agencies are shopping in the same market and offering significantly higher taxpayer funded salaries and perks. We are currently comfortable that we have the ‘right-sized’ council to deliver on our agreed and planned infrastructure services and regulatory functions. We are not confident however, that we have capacity to keep responding to the Crowns insatiable desire for reform and add on’s. It is only fitting in my view that the if the ‘piper plays the tune’ then, as the old proverb goes, the piper needs to provide the wherewithal to support the dance, without requiring the ratepayer to foot the cheque to implement policy change and election pledges.
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