Council last week voted for an average 11.4 percent per annum increase to rates for the next three years — mostly to pay for cyclone repairs and recovery, including payouts to the worst-affected property owners.
Perhaps designing and fixing roads and bridges needs to come back under core Council services so we take the profit margin out of the equation?
The Auditor-General’s recent report into the “shovel-ready” projects funded by central government shows how infrastructure companies manipulate these opportunities to get windfall profits at the expense of taxpayers and ratepayers. We’re seeing that in this region with big international companies muscling in and lobbying central and local governments to spend big on fundamentally unsustainable projects.
The whole system needs a major review and rethink locally.
Manu Caddie
