I guess I am in the unique position of having had two terms on council, one before the introduction of the Local Government Act 2002 (between 1995-98) and one after. After a six year break I went back onto the Whangarei District Council with fresh eyes and an expectation that nothing much had changed. Well that was not the case at all. The changes have been dramatic. I was shocked to see how far our local council – and I suspect all local authorities in New Zealand – had moved in only six years. The shift is seismic.
In ‘95 it was easy. Probably 90 per cent of our time was spent dealing with core services to property owners – the basics like roads, water, waster water and rubbish. Our task was to deliver those services as efficiently and cheaply as possible. That’s certainly not the case today.
Today’s Council is more like a social agency that thinks it has to deal with every social itch and scratch. Now virtually everything is considered “essential core business”, including stadium, swimming pools, athletic tracks, libraries, tree strategies, strategies for youth, positive aging strategies, walking strategies, cycling strategies, disability strategies, cultural strategies, heritage strategies, strategies for Maori participation in the decision making process, policies for immigrants, plans for civil defence, annual plans, ten year plans (which are reviewed every three years), master plans, structure plans, coastal management plans, district plans, regional plans, and on and on.
On Wednesday for example, we will be discussing a motion “That the WDC expresses its concern regarding the threat of extinction of the Maui’s dolphin species” and “That Council supports other Councils by communicating this concern to the Ministers of Conservation and Fisheries.”
We also have more than our fair share of issues arising from the “politics of phobia”. Over the last three years we have had to discuss the apparently imminent threats of genetic engineering, global warming, bird flu, and tsunami. Remarkably our district has managed to survive all of these crises, but I am not sure our many hours of discussion on these issues can be credited for our lucky escape. It is more likely the phobia were never the threat some assumed them to be.
Unfortunately, while we have been discussing such threats to mankind, sewerage has been regularly spilling into the Whangarei Harbour, the most recent resulting in a $10,000 fine from the Northland Regional Council. I am reminded of a quote by J P O’Rourke, who says, “Everybody wants to save the planet; nobody wants to help Mom do the dishes.” (In our case, that should read “clean the toilet” instead of “do the dishes”!)
The transformation from what it used to be to what it is now was so pronounced at the moment of awakening that I realised how Rip van Winkle would have felt after waking from a 20 year snooze to find the world had changed. But unlike the fairly tale, the revolution within local government has nothing to do with a civil war – it’s got everything do with the Local Government Act 2002.
This is the legislation that legitimises local authorities and gives it direction on what it should do. Clause 10 for example says,
The purpose of local government is—
(a) to enable democratic local decision-making and action by, and on behalf of, communities; and
(b) to promote the social, economic, environmental, and cultural well-being of communities, in the present and for the future.
Those few words have had a huge effect on local authorities. Firstly, the clause refers to communities, not ratepayers. Nowadays, councils are not there to serve ratepayers, they are there to serve communities. That’s a big difference. Ratepayers are simply the funding mechanism.
The second important difference is the inclusion of the four well-beings: Social, economic, cultural and environmental. Now everything Council does has to be measured against those four well-beings and some interpret this to mean that everything we do must advance one or more of those doctrines.
The scary thing about this is that each of these well-beings is supported by a Government ministry: Ministry for the Environment, Ministry for Culture and Heritage, Ministry of Economic Development and the Ministry of Social Development. And each of these departments is actively pursuing its objectives through local authorities!
The other scary thing is that any activity (regardless of what it is or the “well-being” of the mind from which it emerges) can be pursued by a local authority on the basis of one or more of these four well-beings. The effect is that there is now nothing a local authority could not (and some say should not) do. For example, the Whangarei District Council justified funding a hip-hop concert on the following well-beings:
“Cultural: Promoting cultural festivities for youth of the district. Environmental: Educating youth about our environment and its cultural heritage. Social: Empowering youth to achieve social cohesion and cultural well being.”
Eleven of the fourteen councillors considered funding a hip-hop concert to be a core role of council. Fortunately, there have been occasions when councillors have said “no” to funding requests but these have been rare – like the application to fund a contest to see who could stuff six American hotdogs into their mouth the fastest. I mention this to illustrate the nature of the requests that local authorities are being asked to consider.
The result of the new-age of well-beings is that the “business” of a council is now a community wish list as diverse as the community itself and, in the absence of tight fiscal budgeting, this results in spending without boundaries and rate increases like those we have seen in the last five years (14.2% for the Whangarei District Council last year for example).
In this regard I disagree with the intimations of the Report of the Local Government Rates Inquiry when they say (in paragraph 30 of the Executive Summary) that they could find little evidence to support the view that giving councils the power of general competency was a major driver of expenditure. I am not surprised they could not find the evidence because, as they say, there are “data limitations”.
Certainly the evidence from my own council is that expenditure on “soft” infrastructure now ranks higher than it did prior to the introduction of the “well-beings” in 2002. Since that time there has been a +$100 million increase in council debt from $32 million to a projected $136 million by 30 June 2008, and a change in spending priorities as illustrated below.
|
General rating dollar spending – By rank |
||||||
|
2001 |
2002 |
2003 |
2004 |
2005 |
2006 |
|
| Parks, reserves & library |
2 |
2 |
1 |
1 |
1 |
1 |
| Roading |
1 |
1 |
2 |
2 |
3 |
6 |
| Policy & monitoring (net ratepayer funded) |
5 |
6 |
6 |
6 |
4 |
3 |
| District promotions & community support |
3 |
3 |
3 |
3 |
2 |
4 |
| Local government process |
4 |
4 |
4 |
4 |
6 |
5 |
| Interest |
6 |
5 |
5 |
5 |
5 |
2 |
(1 being the highest spending area, 6 the lowest)
This trend has continued since 2006, even accelerated. For example, this year 36% of general rates will be spent on parks, reserves and libraries, and 22% on community services. Only 13% will be spent on roading.
This is contrary to what our council and many other councils claim. The Whangarei District Council points to increased spending on roading to prove their case (and they are right) but they overlook the fact that this additional spending comes via central government and is “flushed” through the local body. In other words, as central government has increased infrastructure funding, councils have diverted general ratepayer funding into other projects.
It is therefore not correct for the Whangarei District Council – and I am sure many other councils – to claim that rate increases are necessary and are as a result of greater investment in infrastructure. There has indeed been a good deal of infrastructure spending in the last five years, but that is not the cause of rate increases.
It is council spending that is causing the rate increases. I agree with the Report of the Local Government Rates Inquiry that “Local Government needs to show more restraint in its expenditures…” However, I doubt that this will happen unless ratepayer protest forces it as none will want to admit that they are not showing fiscal restraint.
If councillors were to give ratepayers an informed and clear choice about rates and spending, I think most (75% is my guess) would say do the basics and keep rate increases to a level that bears some relationship to changes in household incomes.
Unfortunately the consultation mechanism given to councils as a result of the Local Government Act 2002 requires councils to engage with the community via Long Term Council Community Plans. It was intended to be a vehicle to “enable democratic local decision-making and action” but in my experience the LTCCP process is expensive (ours costs about $250,000 a year), cumbersome (some +300 pages), time consuming, and totally useless as a means of engaging the public in the decision making process (staff often outnumbering the public at the so-called community engagement meetings). The Rates Inquiry recognised these shortcomings when they state in paragraph 13 of the Executive Summary, “In general local government is not adequately presenting key choices or alternatives in its LTCCPs to facilitate useful input by citizens and to enable councillors to adequately manage and prioritise expenditures”.
Having straddled the before and after divide of the Local Government Act 2002, I am of the view that sometimes new is not better.