Wellington mayor hits out at regional mega-council plan
‘‘Been there, done that.’’
That’s Wellington mayor Andy Foster’s view on the discussion around a single body running the region’s major projects, an idea he dismissed as an almost-total waste of time.
‘‘You really need to think about which projects would benefit from doing something like that,’’ Foster said.
His comments follow a claim from former mayor Dame Fran Wilde that now was the perfect time for a major shake-up of the
Greater Wellington region’s local government.
She suggested a single body could oversee region-wide initiatives such as transport and infrastructure, while local councils focused on their own backyards.
The idea would be a variation of the super-city idea Wilde advocated a few years ago, which proposed the region’s nine councils merge into a single entity.
It would require a change to the Local Government Act, something Wilde said should be considered again in the wake of the coronavirus pandemic.
But Foster said it was hard to understand how a regional body could make any meaningful difference to how the region was governed.
‘‘I’m not sure exactly what it is Fran is suggesting but if it’s to strip out a large part of what councils currently do, I think that’s going to go down very badly.’’
Wilde did not specify which projects would benefit from regional oversight but said it could help streamline responses to issues such as resilience and climate change.
Foster said that was already the case in many areas. ‘‘Major roading projects, for example, are essentially NZTA projects anyway because they’re state highways, and we already have a mechanism for regional transport decisionmaking through the regional transport committee. So that structure exists.’’
The region had submitted co-ordinated funding bids to the Government for projects to help boost the economy following the coronavirus pandemic, Foster said. Those included a Naenae pool rebuild, and water projects in Wellington City, the Hutt Valley and Porirua. ‘‘It doesn’t take a regional body to deliver that.’’ One area that would benefit from a more streamlined setup was regional planning, such as targeting particular areas for population growth, Foster said.
However, that did not necessarily need to be done through a separate entity. ‘‘It is a place we do need a joined-up approach.
‘‘At the moment, that is done in the interests of each city but there are questions like: where does it make sense to have more people living, and where does it not make sense not to have more people living? At the moment, that isn’t joined up, and we need to do that at a regional level.’’
The super-city proposal was scuppered by the Local Government Commission in 2015 because of a lack of public support.