By WAYNE THOMPSON
A super city to serve the Auckland region is again being mooted as a way to meet the challenges posed by growth.
The proposal is one of seven floated yesterday for public debate by the Auckland Mayoral Forum.
The single city - at 1.16 million residents it would be the country's largest local authority - would swallow the functions of the Auckland Regional Council and the four city and three district councils created in the last shake-up in 1989.
It would give Auckland greater clout with the Government and be better placed to compete internationally for investment.
Other variations envisage one city but retaining the regional council; dividing the region into three cities covering north, central and southern parts, with the regional council; or four cities, with Waitakere City left intact.
A further variation is to divide Rodney District between Waitakere and North Shore Cities.
Franklin District could annex rural parts of Papakura, Manukau and northern Waikato.
Local Government Minister Sandra Lee said last night that she had only just received a copy of the report and looked forward to studying it.
She said the Government would pay close attention to its findings and would discuss them with the mayoral forum.
Concerns at the number of councils and lack of public say in special purpose bodies such as Infrastructure Auckland are laid out in the discussion paper prepared by the forum, whose members represent the local bodies.
The paper calls for future examination of the role of the present local government set-up.
The main question is whether the system is adequate to meet the complex demands of metropolitan Auckland in the way they make decisions, are funded, and deliver services.
The question was one of the most important strategic issues facing not only Auckland but also for the country, says the report.
A single authority for the region has good and bad points, according to the report.
It would remedy present flaws such as the difficulty in coordinating the collection and distribution of the funding to meet growth.
"The management of growth, land transport and water/wastewater are key regional problems that are not well supported by the current local authority governance or service delivery arrangements."
These needed regional solutions and some of the smaller local authorities faced funding pressures that could be better approached regionally.
Any final proposal would probably be tested at the polls.
Recent votes in Hawkes Bay and Canterbury preserved the status quo.
But the report suggests it might be preferable for councils to consider seeking a law change to establish a new structure, or to stagger any amalgamations across the region.
The Herald's records show that the single super city idea has been around for 30 years.
Back then it did not stand a chance.
An official proposal to replace the region's then 30-odd councils with four cities and three counties failed under a storm of protest.
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