Fees for council aquatic facilities like Baywave will cost swimmers more from July 1. Photo / NZME
Fees for council aquatic facilities like Baywave will cost swimmers more from July 1. Photo / NZME
Fees are set to rise at council-operated facilities in Tauranga, but the city’s commission felt the proposed rises weren’t high enough.
Bay Venues chief executive Chad Hooker presented the proposed fee rises at a Tauranga City Council meeting on Monday.
Hooker said they had compared fees for Tauranga’s amenities toother cities around New Zealand and Tauranga’s were “well below” the benchmark with the exception of the Baywave aquatic centre.
A child or senior wanting to use the Greerton pool currently paid $2.60 compared with Wellington at $3.40, Auckland at $4.30- $5, or Hamilton at $4, according to the report to the council.
“We are aware that by increasing fees that will have an impact on some sectors of the community and some community groups,” Hooker said.
“But equally we’re aware that we’ve also got a responsibility to try and make sure we get that balance right between user pays and also council ratepayers paying for that from the public good perspective as well.
“We’d like to think that we’ve come up with a fair and reasonable balance.”
Under the proposal, fees for the city’s council pools, excluding Baywave, would range from $2.80 - $6.40, up from the current fees of $1.30 - $5.50. A community hall user would pay 65c - $1.61 compared with 34c to $1.53 currently. This is for one person per hour based on a 20-person group using a hall.
Commissioner Stephen Selwood said he was in the camp of trying to get user fees as “fair and representative of the level of service as possible”.
“If we fail to increase the fees then there’s not enough money to invest in the facilities. “They [the users] end up with a substandard service and you end up in a never-ending cycle downwards.”
Selwood said he was “a little bit dubious” as to whether the review into the fees had gone far enough.
Tauranga City commissioner Stephen Selwood. Photo / Andrew Warner
“We are only catching up to the average of those comparative councils, and in many respects, some of these fees are going to be below the average.
“On the other side of the coin, some of the services are below the average. If we don’t change the fees, we’ll never improve them.”
Selwood suggested the fees be reviewed again and brought back to the next meeting on March 20. He said people would be impacted by the fee increase but the margin of increase was “relatively small”.
“If you’re going to rip the plaster off, I’m saying rip it off properly and make sure that we get the right fee structure in place.”
Hooker said they ran a range of scenarios but there was “no issue” relooking at the fees and reporting back at the March meeting.
Greerton Hall. Photo / NZME
He said a “note of caution”, which Selwood had raised, was the quality of some of the facilities.
“The quality of some facilities is lower. Particularly things like our community halls and some of our sports facilities.
“There are areas where we probably have to be a little bit mindful of not pushing that too hard.
“So we were careful not to push some of those things up to that national benchmark.”
The commissioners opted not to adopt the proposed fee structure but to discuss it at the March meeting after staff had reviewed it further.
If the council adopts the fees it will run public consultation in late March and April. The general admission fees would likely increase from July 1, but for regular user groups fees will change from January 1, 2024.
Public Interest Journalism funded through NZ On Air.
