Dargaville residents support merger with Whangārei District Council over Auckland

Kaipara District Council is Northland's smallest council with 26,800 residents, while Whangārei District Council has about 100,000.

By Pretoria Gordon - RNZ

Residents in the Northland town of Dargaville believe their best option is to merge with Whangārei.

Local Democracy Reporting said Kaipara District Council had backed a proposal by North Rodney Action Group to merge with part of the former Rodney District Council, now part of the Auckland Council.

Dargaville Ratepayers and Residents Association chair Rose Dixon questions whether that is politically motivated.

She told RNZ that most of the Kaipara District Council lived in Mangawhai, which was far closer to the Rodney Ward than Dargaville.

“It doesn’t make sense fiscally or economically. It would be very expensive to create a whole new unitary authority in that region.”

The Dargaville Ratepayers and Residents Association has written a letter to Whangārei District Council Mayor Ken Couper and Local Government Minister Simon Watts, as well as NZ First MPs Shane Jones and Winston Peters, to express their concerns.

Councils have been given three months to come up with an amalgamation plan or have change imposed on them.

Local Government Minister Simon Watts and RMA Reform Minister Chris Bishop announced the deadline on Tuesday.

Auckland Council is excluded from that edict, as it already amalgamated in 2010.

Dixon said most Dargaville residents were in favour of disestablishing the Kaipara District Council.

“Over 90% of respondents said they supported joining up with Whangārei,” she said. “They didn’t feel a connection with North Rodney.

“They felt that, if we moved in that direction, we would just get completely lost and ignored.”

The northernmost town of Auckland, Wellsford is twice as far from Dargaville as it is from Whangārei.

“We aren’t an Auckland suburb,” Dixon added. “Our borders ought to reflect where we actually live.

“It doesn’t make sense for a farmer from Tangowahine to drive all the way down to Warkworth to sort something out with their council, when Whangārei is just down the road.”

Dixon said it would also make more sense financially for Kaipara to merge with a larger ratepayer base.

Kaipara District Council is Northland’s smallest council with 26,800 residents, while Whangārei District Council has about 100,000.

A combined Kaipara-North Rodney Council would have about 80,000.

“We recognise that Whangārei District Council has done a good job managing their region’s infrastructure, whereas our council hasn’t.

“They’ve got a really poor track record when it comes to our infrastructure and, yeah, I’m not so sure about North Rodney’s, but my understanding is that they need and require a lot of investment as well. It doesn’t make sense for us to align ourselves with a North Auckland region that also, like us, needs a lot of investment.”

Dixon said that Dargaville had been neglected by the current Kaipara District Council.

“I think a lot of residents are keen to say goodbye to the Kaipara District Council and hello, hopefully, to a Whangārei District Council, and maybe a Far North District Council that might actually take better care of our region and the environment and our infrastructure.”

Kaipara District Mayor Jonathan Larsen told RNZ it did not back North Rodney Action Group’s proposal as such.

“All that the Kaipara District Council did was attach, as an appendix to its submission on the initial proposal from government, a document that the North Rodney people had written, simply as a matter of having all of the options being presented early on in the reform,” he said. “Auckland is not included in the reform, so any further extrapolation of that idea is not on the table for anybody.”