Editorial: Process hiccups unhelpful

The process to decide whether or not Hawke's Bay's five local councils should amalgamate was always going to be tricky.

With so much at stake and such entrenched viewpoints, the Local Government Commission - the government body tasked with proceeding through this political minefield - was always going to have a difficult time.

It was always going to be imperative that the commission acted in a way that its actions could not be questioned and its findings were above reproach.

Unfortunately, one has to say that the commission probably has not achieved this.

Last week the commission released a report on Hawke's Bay councils' assets and debt as the basis for recommending council debts and financial assets be "ring-fenced" until 2021 under its proposal to amalgamate Hawke's Bay's five councils into a single local authority for the region.

The report found that two of those councils, Napier City Council and Wairoa District Council, had underspent on infrastructure and would need to spend tens of millions of dollars to bring their roading and water networks up to a comparable standard with Hastings and Central Hawke's Bay District Councils'.

Napier and Wairoa councils say a consultants' study the commission's report is based on contains significant errors, including over-valuing the replacement cost of the region's local roads by almost $1billion, which skews the conclusions it reaches about the state of their assets.

The commission asked consultants MWH to review their study this week and has come back saying it is satisfied it "based its decisions on the best available information".

It is important in this process to work through the inevitable howls of protest from either side when things don't go their way, but at the heart of it all the commission needs to be very clear and correct in its assessments.

It has allowed its report to be questioned because of ambiguity in the language used in a pamphlet it is circulating to all Hawke's Bay households. Unfortunately there is also, from some quarters, a perception that it has a predetermined position to amalgamate the councils.

This is not helpful, because any decision on amalgamation needs to be made by the people of Hawke's Bay and not by government bureaucrats or squabbling politicians.

The commission now intends carrying out a survey of 2000 Hawke's Bay residents to gauge support for its amalgamation proposal. If there is enough interest, after a few more steps a referendum will be held.

Hopefully then all of us will finally get to decide what local government structure we want.