Anna Lorck: Hawke’s Bay Regional Council’s new rating pie has been served cold

Anna Lorck says the council needs to say who will benefit the most from its services that a switch to capital value rates will pay for.

OPINION

The Hawke’s Bay Regional Council needs to immediately extend its submission deadline on its new rating switch given the very little time people are getting to feedback.

For 18 months now the regional council has been cooking up what it calls a new “rating pie”.

Just before Christmas, the council served it up to ratepayers - cold.

The council posted its new recipe, filled with money on capital values, to its Facebook page and a link to its website seeking public feedback by the end of January - right through the school holidays.

Alongside this, it has apparently written directly to some ratepayers to get their own tasting, so be sure to check your mailbox.

Timing-wise, the council is using what feels like one of the oldest tricks in the consultation playbook - going out when most people have switched off for their summer break - or as some call it “the silly season”.

There can be no other excuse used as a reason for its new rates recipe out before Christmas - especially, when according to the council it has been reviewing its “revenue and funding policy” for the past one and a half years.

This was to make sure it sat outside the three-year cycle of its Long-Term Plan so ratepayers could distinguish between the “split” and “size " of its new rating pie.

Now this type of work would have required a big project team and expert advisors, there would have been council meetings, workshops and discussions and documents - nothing in this policy review has been last minute - setting the agenda, planning, the “pie” messaging, recipe and timing would have been put forward, sampled and approved well in advanced.

It would be interesting to get all the information around this through a public information request - but it is likely by the time anything is released the deadline for submissions will have closed.

It’s also worth noting that the regional council’s investment pie still has more than $450m, through HBRIC and its majority shareholding in Napier Port.

The council justifies switching to capital values as a “fairer more equitable and stable solution”.

According to the council, the only downside is it could stop more affordable housing development.

But it is not in charge of servicing housing infrastructure, the regional council’s role is the management of natural resources including land, air and water, supporting biodiversity and biosecurity, providing regional public transport services, and building more resilient communities in the face of climate change and natural hazard.

So the questions the regional council should answer for ratepayers is who exactly benefits the most from its services that a switch to capital value rates will pay for?

Unfortunately the way the regional council is going about it most ratepayers probably won’t realise it’s even happened until they open their new rates bill.

By then it will be too late and the council will turn around and say to Hawke’s Bay it told ratepayers the plan, it asked for feedback, it did its job.

Timing-wise, it may say the consultation process is tied to others’ requirements and use every excuse as a reason to justify its position.

But there are some basic and important questions that I believe it needs to answer:

- What cost cuts are being made to save ratepayers money?

- How big will its rate pie be?

- And how much more will that pie need to grow next year and beyond?

The best pie the council could eat right now is a humble one.

Anna Lorck is the former MP for Tukituki. She has 30 years of experience in communications and public consultation after a post-graduate certificate in Public Policy. She is also a regional council ratepayer.