In her letter, Lawrie said Ōpōtiki council receives $120,000 each year to collect rates for the regional council. Without this income, Ōpōtiki ratepayers will be facing a 1.2 per cent increase in their rates bill to cover the shortfall.
She said the regional council will also have to staff an office building in every district to collect rates from the community, a cost she said will outweigh what it pays district councils to collect rates.
"Ōpōtiki has challenges around connectivity and use of internet banking among a significant number of ratepayers," Lawrie wrote.
"We receive a lot of payments across the counter in many different forms … cash, eftpos, credit card, sometimes mussels. If the BOPRC does not intend to provide the same level of service to the Ōpōtiki community, there should be sufficient consultation with communities to ensure that ratepayers are well aware of the changes and have an opportunity to provide feedback to the council."
Lawrie said if the regional council does not do as she suggested then the Ōpōtiki community will suffer a reduction in its levels of service.
"Our communities are some of the poorest in the region and have gone without, or with less than many others for a long time," she wrote.
"Councillors should be very clear around what they want to achieve through this and understand the full implications of the changes before they make a decision that will negatively impact on Ōpōtiki residents, ratepayers and communities."
Ōpōtiki District is not the only one which will be affected by these changes. Whakatāne, Kawerau, Western Bay of Plenty, Tauranga, Rotorua Lakes and Taupō councils all collect rates on behalf of the regional council.
Regional council general manager corporate Mat Taylor said the decision would not cost regional council ratepayers more.
"While for many years having the district and city councils collect the regional council's rates worked well for both parties, recently the mahi required of the regional council has expanded, and circumstances have changed to an extent where it is now more appropriate for the regional council to collect its own rates," Taylor said.
"We don't expect to be opening up new service centres. Instead, we will be looking at alternatives, such as using NZ Post as a payment agency, like many other councils already do. Therefore, when the service starts customers and ratepayers could be able to go into the NZ Post shop in Ōpōtiki to pay their rates over the counter, if they would rather do that than use online services."
Taylor said there were three main drivers for the change.
The first is to ensure a consistent approach for rates remissions for all regional council ratepayers.
The regional council's policy is to adopt the rates remission and postponement policies of the district councils in each rohe. However, as these policies are all different, regional council ratepayers are having different outcomes.
"Consistent region-wide rates collection provides the opportunity for us to standardise remissions and postponements that apply to regional council rates to achieve better equity and fairness across the whole region, rather than only applying some remissions within individual areas," Taylor said.
"It also provides the opportunity to provide new remissions policies to address demographic and environmental issues such as climate change.
"The regional council has legal responsibilities relating to setting and collecting rates within statutory rules and statutory timeframes. Collecting our own rates means we are no longer tied to the process and timeframes set by other councils giving the regional council more control over this critical source of revenue that is used to provide services for our community like flood protection and public transport."
The second reason is that the regional council is working to increase public awareness of the work it does. At the moment, many ratepayers don't realise their rates bill from their district council includes rates from the regional council.
Collecting its own rates will increase visibility of the regional council's services, and result in more community connections, feedback and engagement, Taylor said.
The third reason is that the regional council will achieve cost efficiencies.
"The cost of collection through the district and city councils changes each year as it is based on a percentage of rates collected," he said.
"The percentage for collection is between two per cent and five per cent, depending on individual arrangements with each council, and whether the commission includes other associated administrative costs or not (such as the share of the valuation fees, printing and postage, which may be charged in addition to the commission in some cases).
"While the value of the commission paid to the other councils for collection has been increasing each year, the cost of collection does not generally increase proportionately. This increasing gap means the cost of collecting regional council rates ourselves is expected to be lower than the costs of the current arrangement."
"We are currently defining detailed costs for in-house collection (and associated forecast savings) as we're in the process of defining the required resourcing levels, and the methods and associated costs of new payment options for ratepayers," Taylor said.
"We are also in the process of procuring the rates collection technology system Nevertheless, the annual cost of in-house rates collection is expected to be significantly less than the current cost of approximately $2 million per annum."
"We're meeting and working with the region's city and district councils so that the transition is smooth for both them and for our ratepayers.
"We expect that regional ratepayers will receive their first invoice from us at the start of the 2022/23 financial year.
"We're planning an extensive campaign to run in the lead up to this next year so that all ratepayers are aware of the change and we'll make sure it's available via many different methods and channels," Taylor said.
