Super city weekend

Rod Oram has an interesting piece in the SST on the Government’s plan to reduce costs and put in place lower, uniform regulatory fees across the region for  building and resource consents, land information memorandums and dog registrations. He says the costs could be as low as 10% less than the lowest benchmark charged by current councils. This would undoubtedly be popular with Aucklanders. The cost of building and resource consents is one of the biggest gripes against local government, and not just in Auckland.

But my guess is Aucklanders will take some convincing. The Herald’s digipoll released Friday says 49.5% of Aucklanders do not believe the Government’s main selling point for its super city – that the amalgamation of the 8 councils would improve management of the region.

Oram seems to think the plan to reduce costs is smoke and mirrors anyway. He reports “operating costs for regulatory fees was $102 million across the eight councils in the latest financial year. Of that, fees covered $89m while ratepayers picked up the balance.” Under the new modelling the Government intends to recover $80 million in user fees, but has no accurate projection for operating costs.  The likely outcome?  A greater share of the bill will be picked up by the ratepayer.  Oram says Hide must be hoping no one will notice until after the general election,

At the Herald on Sunday, Matt McCarten writes the Government’s mishandling of the super city reforms has catapulted Len Brown ahead in the mayoral race.  Yesterday the Herald released the rest of its digipoll results: 58.8% opposed the Government’s imposition of CCOs on the Auckland Council (32.4 supported).  53.5% said the Government had not handled the reforms well. 32.3% said they had.  Bernard Orsman and Geoff Cumming do a useful summary of the arguments on the CCOs and the lack of powers for local boards ahead of the third and final bill coming back to the House on May 24.