Kerre Woodham: Regional councils need to be streamlined

Regional councils are being abolished – or are they? 

Thomas Coughan writing in the Herald makes a very good point, it's not the councils that are being abolished, it's the council laws. 

Under the Government's proposal, which was announced yesterday, regional councils would have their governance replaced by Combined Territories Boards, a group made up of a region's mayors, which would govern regional councils instead. The Government wants these new CTBs to decide the future of local government in their regions over a period of two years. They'll look at whether to share services across councils, form shared council-owned companies, whether there's a case to amalgamate into larger unitary authorities, as Auckland has. The government will have the final say after that two years. If they don't like what the mayors come up with, the Local Government Minister will provide a top-down blueprint for how the board will look and what its purview will be. 

Right now, there are 11 regional councils in this country, alongside 12 city councils, 54 district councils, and six unitary authorities. The unitary authorities act like a local council and regional council combined. If you have a regional council in your area, it's responsible for the land, water, and air resources, flood control, environmental monitoring, and public transport, things like that. And councillors are voted in by you and me to make decisions on behalf of ratepayers. Not that we care. Nobody seems to care particularly if you look at the voter turnout as Minister for RMA Reform Chris Bishop told Mike Hosking this morning. 

“Well, I think no one cares partly because they can't understand it, right? So you vote for your regional councillor, then they elect a chair. I mean, how many people out there listening could actually name the regional council chairs who don't live in Auckland? I don't think anyone, not that many people be able to name a regional councillor. And then of course you've got all the confusion, right?  

“So in Wellington where I'm from, for example, the regional council runs the buses, but the Wellington City Council basically works out where you can actually put a bus stop, for example, and they do all the road closures and things like that. So there's enormous levels of complexity and complication that people just don't understand. And people say, well, hang on a minute, why am I voting for all these people? I don't understand who most of them are. I don't know who they are. And so there's enormous duplication in the system. So I think that partly explains why voter turnout rates are so low.” 

He makes a good point. Chris Bishop argues that the changes will reduce the cost of doing business and lower the amount we pay in rates, or at least keep a downward pressure on rates, by removing layers of duplication and bureaucracy. And you would have to say, surely, rates would come down if you're not paying the salaries of hundreds of people per region, their vehicles, the fuel required to power the vehicles, the office space they rent. There's 300-odd in Otago, more than 500 full-time staff in the Bay of Plenty, in the regional council alone. What do these people actually do? And I'd really love to know, how is it that you make life better for the people in your region? 

As Otago Regional Council chair Hilary Calvert told Ryan Bridge this morning, staff at the Otago Regional Council have doubled in six years. Has life improved for Otago residents by 100% in the last six years? I would very, very much doubt it. 

You could look at regional councils as like a modern version of the Ministry of Works - a make-work scheme for people in regions. Is that a good enough reason to keep them? Obviously, you're going to have people retained by the Combined Territories Boards. You're not going to see the wholesale sacking of hundreds of people across the region, but it will be streamlined. I mean, it has to be. You cannot tell me that having 500 full-time staff in Bay of Plenty for the regional council can be justified and nor can the number of councillors. 

People don't care. They don't understand it. It's a whole other level of bureaucracy. It needs to be streamlined. 

Maybe you think that the increase in your rates, making a make-work scheme for councillors and staff in a regional council is a worthwhile proposition. It's a money-go-round. You pay to have an inflated regional council. And the money comes back to you if you're a retailer because they will spend. 

To me, it just seems completely and utterly redundant and unproductive, and the sooner it's streamlined into a territorial board, into a streamlined service, the better. 

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