KEY POINTS:
The Auckland City Council cannot fully account for the cost of providing Land Information Memorandum (LIM) reports, despite charging up to $284 million and collecting $2 million a year from the monopoly service.
Anyone can go into the council and look at a property file for $13, but
the council charges $221 for a standard LIM and $284 for an urgent LIM.
The main difference is that a LIM report is a legal statement by the council of all the information known about a property.
The cost of LIM reports rose 5 per cent last year and the council plans to put up the price by 4.9 per cent in July. Other regulatory fees will rise 4.9 or 7.8 per cent.
The Herald has been trying for a month to nail down the cost of providing LIMs after the planning and regulatory committee rejected the idea of making the information freely available on the internet. The committee decided to stick with the policy of full cost recovery of charges for private services.
The group manager of Auckland City Environments, Jenny Oxley, denied the council was overcharging for LIM reports.
"The information is such that the price is fair and sits appropriately in comparison with LIM costs ... at other councils."
Auckland City's standard charge of $221 compares with $300 in Wellington, $200 in North Shore and Tauranga and $150 in Christchurch.
After asking on February 9 for a detailed breakdown of the costs of providing LIMs, the Herald received a generalised breakdown with no costs on February 16. When Ms Oxley finally provided some figures on Tuesday, she said they were "not the true cost".
The figures showed the budgeted cost for LIMs in 2007-2008 was $1,235,685 with a projected revenue of $2,015,468. Ms Oxley said the $1.235 million figure only covered the team who produced the reports and did not include the costs of building up and maintaining information on properties, and technology costs. She said these costs were not easily identifiable and could not account for the $780,000 difference between the budgeted cost of providing LIMs and projected revenue.
She said LIM fees reflected the price of providing the service and not the value of the information. If the fee reflected the value of information, LIMs would be "significantly more expensive".
Consumers' Institute chief executive David Russell said there was no problem with the council charging a reasonable fee for LIMs but it should justify its costs and provide full information to ratepayers.
He said there was a public good to record-keeping by councils. People should be charged for the cost of accessing records, not the work involved in maintaining or keeping them.
