Mayor Wayne Brown proposes slashing number of Auckland local boards

Auckland Mayor Wayne Brown says fewer local boards would allow staff and financial resources to be better spread across the city. Photo / Michael Craig

By Finn Blackwell of RNZ

Auckland’s local boards could be set for their first major overhaul in 13 years after a proposal from the city’s mayor.

Council has been consulting with local boards on potentially reducing their numbers from 22 to 13.

The proposal was put to council’s Joint Governance Working Party by Auckland Mayor Wayne Brown earlier this month.

It was his belief that more effective engagement between Auckland Council and the people of Auckland would be achieved with fewer, more powerful local boards.

Part of the proposal said the structure of local boards in Auckland made it difficult to make large-scale decisions and carried significant running costs.

A model of 11 mainland boards, plus the two island boards, was presented to the party, to be funded through a reallocation of some existing funds, alongside new funding through the Long Term Plan for 2024-34.

Brown said if there were fewer local boards, staff and financial resources could be better spread across the city.

He said this would give the local boards the choice of where to invest funding for their communities, rather than funds being spread more thinly across the existing 21 boards.

The mayor told RNZ he was looking closely at parts of the council that had not changed since its inception in 2010.

He said the proposed cuts would give the local boards more meaningful control over their budgets.

“We thought, ‘what would be a more sensible number, and could we have it so that they actually had more ability to make more local budget decisions?’,” Brown said.

Brown said he wanted to give the boards more authority and responsibility.

“If we’re going to have them we may as well use them and make them more effective,” he said.

Brown said local boards were mostly supportive of the proposal.

“We wouldn’t have carried on any further had they not but they all see the wisdom of that,” he said.

Proposals for fairer funding of local boards, including the feedback from the Joint Governance Working Party, are expected to feature in the mayor’s proposals in the Long Term Plan.