The Council held one its scheduled public meetings on the local body amalgamation process at the Lost Springs last Thursday, 9 July. The meeting was well attended – about 50 people turning up on a chilly winter night to hear detail on the Council’s preferred options and to voice their views.
The meeting saw strong representation from Mercury Bay Community Board members along with Councillors John Grant (Deputy Mayor), Flemming Rasmussen, Tony Brljevich and making his way from over the hill, Robert Ashman from Coromandel.
Richard Shelford-Woodcock as Chair, got the meeting underway, then handed the speaking stick to John Grant who gave a 30-minute presentation on the history and timeline of the amalgamation process and a summary of where things were at currently.
The amalgamation process has been decreed by central Government and as such there is no ability to decide if we want to do it. Our decision is how we want to do it. This was made clear by the presenter, ably assisted by Councillor Rasmussen who explained the legal nuances from time to time as demanded by those attending. The purpose of the amalgamation is to simplify local government while retaining local voices.
There were three options presented to the meeting and the rationale behind the selection of these three from an original list of nine was explained. A concern of many in the audience is the risk of merging with other fiscally weaker councils and the scope for this happening was outlined with TCDC having a borrowings per household figure of slightly over $2000 whereas most other councils were three times that number, the worst being Hauraki at over $13,000 per household. Issues such as ring fencing the borrowing and asset values of the individual councils was explained. Many aspects such as this, as well as the important matter of genuine community decision making will be subject to an amalgamation negotiation stage once the option route has been determined.
Upon completion of a professional and informative presentation, the questions came in, thick and fast but ably handled by the Chairman. There were too many questions for this old scribe to write down but the general flavour of many questions was disappointment with the speed of process; why we had to do the process at all; the lack of detailed information; why we couldn’t look at other options and challenges to the legal aspects.
These were all handled well by the Council team although many questioners would have not been satisfied. For example, questioning the lack of detail was answered by statements along the line of there not being much detail, ‘you know what we know – as good a response as could be given but not very satisfying.
The meeting ended with a show of hands on the audience’s preference. On my quick count up, it would appear the preference was to merge with the Northern Bay of Plenty with the option of doing something else (any thing else?) being a close second.
◾️Editor’s note: Please see the other articles in this section on ‘Which way should we go? – all are important.
