Council rules 18 sheep are a farm

A family's lifestyle block with three horses and 18 sheep has had a $380 rates rise because the Rodney District Council deems it to be a working farm.

"The horses are for riding pleasure and the sheep follow them around keeping the paddocks trim - we don't make money from them," said owner Philippa Warhaft, of Kaukapakapa.

Her four-legged lawnmowers have started a ruckus which the rural council is handing over to its successors in the Super City to sort out.

Last year, the council set a differential rate for rural properties which varied according to whether they were classed as rural residential or rural farm.

It was a targeted rate based on a property's capital value - an attempt to get more money from farms towards roading costs on the basis that farming generates more heavy traffic than a block used for residential purposes.

The council's approach was that a property with more than 4ha of pasture was a rural farm.

The Warhafts' block is 10ha of steep, stream-gouged countryside.

"We don't try to make money from it; we have to work fulltime off the property," said Mrs Warhaft.

A request to be reconsidered as a home rather than a farm was rejected.

The rates went up by 15 per cent instead of the district's average of 4.9 per cent and the Warhafts have gone to the Ombudsman.

So, too, have Helen and Clyde Mitchell, who face paying $1600 extra in rates over the next three years when compared with owners of neighbouring properties in Kumeu.

"Our property is classified as rural farm," said Mrs Mitchell. "It is a lifestyle property, the same as our five neighbours. One adjoining property is larger than ours and classed rural residential with a lower transport rate."

Mrs Mitchell said the council rejected their appeal, although she had shown indiscriminate apportioning of rates to about 3000 properties and a flawed rating information database.

"Rates are supposed to be fair and equitable, in which case we should all have it or none."

Council finance director Kevin Ramsay said the first step had been to reclassify those properties which could be readily identified as passing the threshold for rural farms and likely to require extra roading services.

Partway through the exercise, the council had decided that four months before the transition to a new rating authority - the Auckland Council - it should stop changing the rating information database.

Existing classifications would stay for the 2010-11 payments. It would be up to the new council to decide whether to keep the rural farm rate.