Better road-funding deal required

A109 Light Utility Helicopter flight with mayor Gisborne City from the air in November 2023.

Opinion

Re: Editorial on log levy.

Great to see the investigation by the council into other options to fund the spiralling costs of maintaining our roads. There has been a lot of focus on the $25 million required to upgrade rural roads, to better facilitate log extraction, but what about the increasing cost of maintenance that is spiralling in tandem with the increased tonnage of logs being carted on our roads?

The National Land Transport Fund’s (NLTF) 2016 annual report states that of the $30m spent last year on our region’s roads, $23.4m, or 78 percent was for maintenance. Also of interest was that the NLTF gets its revenue of $3.3 billion from fuel tax ($1.8 billion), road user charges ($1.4 billion) and vehicle registration ($20m) — taxes we should have every right to expect will be available to fund our roads.

The report also points out that local government rates contributed a further $1.5 billion, or 27 percent, to the national road investment of $5.4 billion.

Gisborne District Council’s annual report 2016 tells a slightly different story with only $24.4m spent on our roads and with only $14.6m coming from the NLTF. Ratepayers contributed $9.8m, or 40 percent, which is much higher than the national average indicated above.

This suggests that as a region, we only received 0.4 percent of the $3.3 billion NLTF funding when we represent 1 percent of the population.

Should we not be receiving at least $33m as our fair share of contributions to the NLTF?

Perhaps we need to be lobbying a lot harder for a better road funding deal from this government.

Was Tairawhiti Roads established to achieve better outcomes for our region’s road network or to enable government to further reduce its contribution?

By allowing logging trucks to now carry over 50 tonnes on our rural roads, this government has imposed a huge additional cost on our region to upgrade many of our bridges. If this investment is primarily to better facilitate log extraction for the forestry sector, then surely a log or weight levy must be given serious consideration.

Rick Thorpe