A $20 million fund to help Tauranga property owners cope with the aftermath of serious floods has received cautious support from residents in some of the city's worst-affected areas.
The city council has agreed to gather $2 million a year from ratepayers over the next 10 years which, if unspent, would accumulate into a $20 million fighting fund.
A public meeting of the council on Monday will debate the all-important details of how the money should be spent following floods that damage houses.
The fund was set up after the council changed the priority for stormwater capital works to avoid a huge blowout in loans. New infrastructure spending was now aimed at reducing the risk to life and safety rather than protecting private property from flooding.
Monday's meeting will decide the final draft of the Stormwater Reactive Reserve Fund before public consultation.
The policy said the funds would be allocated to areas that had flooded more than once in the past 10 years. Funding criteria included the ability to reduce the risk to life and health, reduce the flood risk to "habitable" floor areas, and co-funding to reduce the flood risk to habitable floors.
Other proposed fund uses were emergency clean-up costs and emergency response and recovery. The fund was not to protect land from flooding.
Gary Bishell, a Mount Manganui resident, whose Commons Ave house has been flooded three times, said the fund sounded like a good idea if it was dealing with an emergency.
Looking at the big picture of where the council was focusing its stormwater capital spending, he said the emphasis should be more on residential than industrial.
After the last big flood two years ago, his insurance company proposed increasing his flood-damage excess to $20,000 but he negotiated it down to $2000.
Remedial work carried out by the council after the last floods had yet to be proven to have worked because the Mount had not experienced a similar-sized storm. Flood waters had entered the ground floor of his house from the street.
"The stormwater system could not cope - that is why our property flooded."
Matua Residents' Association chairman Richard Kluit said he was curious to see the practicalities of how the fund would work: "We need to understand how it will assist people whose properties had been affected in the past."
For instance, how would the emergency response and recovery provisions work in with the role of insurers and the Earthquake Commission. The association would hold a public meeting on the draft policy.
Proposals for how to spend flood relief fund
* Emergency response and recovery
* Clean-up costs on private or public properties
* Initiatives to allow stormwater to be taken away from at-risk areas
* Reducing the risk of flooding
* Potential property purchases
* Joint public/private infrastructure improvements