​An overview of council’s long term planning process

Over the coming weeks and months, you’ll be hearing more from your mayor and councillors about our long-term planning, the services and facilities council provides and the cost to provide these services and what that means for rates.

The role of your councillors is to represent their communities, and provide governance and strategic direction for the long-term wellbeing of the Ōpōtiki District. My job, as the head of the organisation, is to turn the will of the elected representatives into action. We are the engine house, carrying out day-to-day operations. It is an important separation of duties.

Councillors have been working on their Long Term Plan – providing direction for how the council will operate for the next ten years or more. The process has been long and technical. In short, it went a little like this:

• The process started with a paper to councillors that gave them a figure for how much it would cost to keep doing what we are currently doing, a few unexpected but vital new costs (like harbour running costs), and projects we already had underway or promised to do in our last Long Term Plan back in 2021. To be able to do that, we would have needed to raise rates by 34%.
• That got a very fast and firm ‘no’, and we started the process of looking for savings. We are a very lean council and we had very few places to reduce costs without impacting on service levels.
• Councillors directed us to make savings in several places including pulling back on capital works and delaying or reducing revaluation and depreciation. But those cost savings didn’t get the rate rise low enough.
• To reduce the rate burden further Councillors directed us to investigate specific areas of isite and events, parks and reserves, economic development, and Te Tāhuhu o Te Rangi. Reduction in spending would result in a reduction in service levels. The sorts of examples that have been discussed include reduced operating hours of Te Tāhuhu o Te Rangi, holding just one main community event each year, mowing some areas less frequently, having fewer plantings and gardens, fewer public bins, less maintenance in some outdoor spaces, and no longer being part of the shared economic development agency, Toi EDA.
• At the February meeting, council directed us to draft our Long-Term Plan with that guidance, keeping the rates rise to 10.5%.

The next steps are to draft a Long Term Plan document and bring that to the community so they can have their say on whether council have the balance and priorities right. We will be doing that in June and July this year.

This is later than usual because we have delayed the adoption of our LTP to allow time to bring the three waters back onto our books as directed by central government.

We welcome feedback and views at any time and Connect | Hono Mai has plenty of information about our LTP and asks a few questions so you can help councillors shape this document. www.connect.odc.govt.nz. You can also get in touch with your mayor and councillors directly as they draft their long term vision for the District.

However, this is not a formal submission process yet because we do not have a document to submit on. So feel free to leave your details so that we can email and let you know when the formal consultation process and public hearings happen later this year.