Far North District Council says sorry for error showing massive rates hike

Far North District Council has apologised for providing inaccurate rating projections. Photo / Peter de Graaf

Ratepayers throughout the Far North were mistakenly told they were facing extraordinary rates hikes of up to 70 per cent and beyond after a week-long blunder by the Far North District Council.

The heart-stopping increases came after the council’s automated “ratings calculator” spat out incorrect assessments of the rates homeowners would be paying next year.

Ordinary homeowners in the district who checked the council’s site - at its urging - were told their rates would go up by thousands of dollars.

That appeared to have occurred from May 18 when the council sent out a press release directing people to its Rating Information Database after updating it with new property valuation information received a day earlier.

In the week that followed, there was a growing roar from homeowners who used the database to see what their property was now worth, only to discover entering their address also produced a vastly inflated property rates estimate.

Then, on May 25, the council issued a new press release and on social media: “Far North District Council apologises for the inclusion of incorrect rating information on our online Rating Information Database.

“We sincerely apologise to all our customers for the anxiety this has caused in already difficult times.”

About the time the second press release was issued, the council appeared to have identified the error in its system and rates estimates were then produced showing a lower rate.

The actual rate for next year has yet to be set by the council and won’t happen until after the annual plan is adopted, with the next meeting on that being held on Thursday, June 1.

It is at that meeting Te Hiku general ward councillor Felicity Foy expects Mayor Moko Tepania will be explaining what went wrong.

“I heard from my mother [farmer and former local body politician Fiona King]. She rang in a flap.” Having heard what the projected increase was, Foy was so surprised she said: “That is ridiculous, that amount of rates. Are you sure?”

Far North district councillor Felicity Foy. Photo / Nicole Jecentho

The Far North District Council had by then apologised for the error, blaming its “ratings calculator” for the error.

“The algorithm has sent people into a panic,” said Foy.

Awanui Progressive and Ratepayers Association spokesman Russell Cantlay said he had heard of the rates blowout from someone who owned three properties.

“They had gone up and quite markedly. I think it’s disgusting. They’re there to do a job and do it properly. That’s what we pay these gits for. They should pick up things like that.”

Far North ratepayer Peter Boyd has a meeting with Tepania and Deputy Mayor Kelly Stratford after the “ratings calculator” sent his rates from $3143 for his Puketona Rd property near Paihia to $5100 - a 63 per cent increase.

Boyd was horrified. “It would work out at $100 a week. At that price, I might as well go renting.”

It is now at $3969, although - as with all other projected rates - it doesn’t reflect the actual rates people will be charged.

“Why would they put it on [the internet] if it wasn’t right? I’m just over them. They couldn’t run a bath,” said Boyd, an Ōpua sailmaker and former chairman of the Ōpua Business Association.

The Age contacted Tepania and Stratford to ask for interviews about the error. Tepania said: “Mistakes are made from time to time and this is an error that council is acknowledging and fixing so that accurate data is available for our residents.”

Stratford said she was unavailable at a Local Government New Zealand meeting. On Facebook on Wednesday last week, she said councillors were “doing our best to ensure that rates are not a massive increase” and the database would be updated once the annual plan was decided.

Shortly after, she posted: “At the moment the rating database is giving you an incorrect calculation for next year.”

In a statement, Far North District Council acting chief executive Janice Smith said there were several reasons for the publication of the incorrect information.

“Our rating and property teams have learned important lessons from this and we have put safeguards in place to ensure this does not occur again.”

Smith said valuation information from QV - which does valuation assessments throughout New Zealand - had been provided in an electronic file this year, meaning it could be easily shared online.

The inaccurate projected rates information covered the 40,000 rateable properties in the Far North. Photo / David Fisher

She said it was an “important” development because of delays in receiving the information that the council had previously attributed to QV staff “being diverted to emergency property assessments following the Auckland floods and Cyclone Gabrielle”.

It moved to publish the information after “public requests to immediately use the revaluation details... so that property owners could see how new values would affect their rates”, she said.

At that stage, she said, the actual rating information was not available because of delays in adopting the 2023-24 annual plan, which was next to be discussed at Thursday’s council meeting.

Until those discussions happened and a final decision was made on budgets, “we cannot confirm what rates for individual properties will be”.

“In hindsight, we should not have added the latest revaluations to the Rating Information Database as requested until we had certainty about 2024 rate factors.”

Smith said there was a message on the Rating Information Database page that told people the rates posted there “would not be a true reflection” of the new rates.

“Plainly, that detail should have been explained more clearly and displayed more prominently.”

The change in calculation producing lower rates had now been used to update the database, which would again be changed if Thursday’s meeting affected the draft plan.

The late arrival of the QV data also means ratepayers wanting to challenge their valuations have less time to do so before rates are struck. Council has said those whose objections are successful after the rate is set will receive an amended rates assessment.

QV national revaluation manager Tim Gibson said the three-yearly rating valuation was delayed by regulation changes, pandemic “complexities” and “the district’s fast-moving residential property market”.

Gibson said the extra time was used “to ensure the accuracy of the Far North’s nearly 40,000 rating valuations”. Those valuations were independently audited by the Office of the Valuer General before being certified, he said.