Gisborne Chamber of Commerce hosted a Meet the Candidates event on Thursday night. Photo / Zita Campbell
Do Gisborne mayoral candidates believe rate increases have been sustainable?
The answer is a resounding “no” and they have offered their own solutions to the issue.
Candidates discussed the hot topic of rates at the Chamber of Commerce Meet the Candidates event at Midway Surf Rescue Community Hub on Thursday evening.
Chamber of Commerce president Ashley Fisher hosted the event.
The 21 candidates - five Māori ward and 16 general ward nominees - had 45 seconds to introduce themselves, followed by quick question rounds on rates, the economy, infrastructure and the environment.
Fisher said Gisborne’s regional rates had increased 30% over the past three years and asked candidates for their view.
Here is how the region’s three mayoral candidates responded.
Incumbent Mayor Rehette Stoltz, seeking her third term, gave insight into how the change of governments affected council plans.
Stoltz said questions to ask the Government would be what did “core infrastructure” mean, and did the council need to include the four wellbeing provisions (social, economic, environmental and cultural)?
Under Labour, the council was required by law to include the wellbeings in plans.
“Then the Government changed and then suddenly those are not actionable anymore.”
She had ideas to bring rates down, which included investigating how the council spent money, sharing services with other councils, and partnerships with private partners and iwi.
“We cannot carry on this way ... we do need operational efficiencies and we do need to focus on core [services].”
Stoltz said 80-85% of the council’s three-year plan focused on essential and core services.
She had approached other councils on how to share services.
“We’ve already spoken to Wairoa. I’ve spoken to all the mayors in the north. How can we do waters better? How can we have shared services like waste?”
Challenging her for the mayoralty and also running under the general ward are Jono Samson and first-term councillor Colin Alder.
Samson said rates were unsustainable - “a bit too hefty, a bit too much.”
He believed the way to reduce rates would be to increase the population of Gisborne and focus on the region’s talents.
Samson said there was an expression in America: “Don’t worry about today, it is already tomorrow in New Zealand.
“We have an opportunity here ... to take that seriously. We have manaakitanga, we have our culture, we have our wonderful talent that we could export online through the internet, and there are millions of subscribers just waiting to bring outside money into this region, and bring people in.”
Samson said it was 2025, but it still looked like the last century. The region needed inventive solutions to its problems.
“Like the exporting of waste. There are recycling and reprocessing plants and things happening all over the internet with waste, and we are shipping ours off to another city.”
Alder, who is bald, joked he had been tearing his hair out during his time as a councillor because of the rise in rates.
“Totally not sustainable and it’s compounding ... It affects the elderly and people on fixed incomes the worst.”
Alder said there was “so much waste in the council”, including increases in staff numbers during this term, and “so much wastage” in roading projects.
“They were putting cones up on the road the other day and going to put traffic lights on. I spent five minutes with a spade and cleared the problem,” he said.
All they could do was make policy, he said.
“We are going to have to lean on the fence ... between policy and where jobs get done.”
Councillor candidates also believed the rate rises were unsustainable.
Māori ward candidate Raawiri Gilgen said he wanted to help people who were entitled to rates rebates get them.
“A lot of people I talked to have never heard of that,” he said.
Māori ward candidate Mateawa Keelan said rate differentiation needed to be investigated.
As a farmer, she paid eight separate rate charges for eight small Māori land blocks that she ran.
“I pay eight uniform annual general charges. I don’t think that’s fair. And I know that other farmers and other Māori landowners out there will be paying rates for their multiple land blocks and not know why they are doing that.”
Incumbent general ward councillor Larry Foster, seeking his fifth term, said rate rises were unsustainable, but each term the council tried to keep them down.
Foster said under a previous mayor, there was a 2-3% rate rise promised for three, maybe four years, and “it absolutely caned us”.
“We spent so much money after that trying to catch up because we could not keep up with the infrastructure needs of this region.”
General ward candidate Jordan Walker said reinstating the railway could help reduce rate increases, as it would reduce the strain on roads.
First-term councillor Teddy Thompson said he was the only councillor who voted against the 2025/26 annual plan because of the council’s borrowing.
Since he had been in council, the loans had increased, which would affect future rates, he said.
“That’s going to come back and hit us.”