The incumbents hold a huge advantage.
They not unreasonably tend to rely upon what they have achieved in the past, and promise more of the same, while those who want to succeed them paint a rosy picture of how the council could function if they were part of it.
Some genuinely extraordinary claims were made over recent weeks, but many of the candidates had no specific goals or aspirations.
The problem for those who want to get inside the tent is often that they have very little understanding of what the council, or community board, can actually do.
They tend to promise transparency and to reduce rates, by means that remain unenunciated.
It would seem a given that the incumbent councillors would already be reducing rates if they could, and not one candidate heard by the writer offered any suggestions as to how rates might be held, let alone reduced to an 'affordable' level, a fairly nebulous concept at best.
Those who wanted to reduce rates had a point though. The fine print on rate demands reveals that claims over recent years that increases have been modest isn't quite true, but the fact is that ratepayers are largely in the dark regarding what the council really needs to spend on our behalf, and why.
It's all very well for councillors to assure the people they represent that their annual rates increase has been held to something akin to the rate of inflation, but that's not been the case in the Far North over recent years.
The rate in the dollar of a property's value, which has only a small influence on the size of most final demands, is largely irrelevant.
Rates have actually been increasing in this district at a rate of knots over recent years, thanks in large part to add ons, like a sewerage capital Kaitaia connected rate ($287.24 this year, on top of what used to be called a pan fee, now a sewerage operating connected rate, of $433.58), and a water capital Kaitaia connected rate of $237.80, on top of an already exorbitant charge per metre of water).
The council doesn't increase its charges for the hell of it, and we can probably accept that it doesn't charge more than it believes it has to. The problem is that ratepayers cannot continue paying more and more, while the council has no clear idea of what it needs to do and what it doesn't need to do.
Three years ago then brand new Mayor John Carter undertook to conduct a stocktake of the Far North's infrastructural situation.
We were told that the council would identify, and cost, what really had to be done to restore infrastructure that Mr Carter said had become run down, that it would discuss the result of that review with ratepayers.
Mr Carter said the Far North was in a financial hole, and that the council would reveal the depth of that hole so it, and ratepayers, would know exactly what was required and how the work would be funded. We're still waiting.
While Mr Carter has not delivered on that promise, the reason for that isn't clear. The writer isn't privy to what goes on behind closed doors in Kaikohe, but the need for that to do list is greater now than it was three years ago.
The reality is that local government is becoming a luxury that many in the Far North cannot afford.
That view would not surprise, and would probably please Finance Minister Bill English.
It is he, almost certainly, who is driving the government's not so secret agenda to reduce the number of councils in this country, and to give the Local Government Commission the power to achieve that by compulsion.
The commission is also charged with encouraging councils to share resources and responsibilities, sort of amalgamation without actually amalgamating, and to divest core roles to unelected council-controlled organisations.
There is undoubtedly some merit in the former, and the establishment this year of the Northland Transport Alliance shows that the region's councils recognise that.
If that can be achieved by the councils themselves, then all well and good, but they, and their ratepayers, need a much greater understanding of what needs to be done, and what can realistically be done, than they currently possess.
Central government has a role in this above and beyond its ability to coerce councils into doing what they are told.
It is time to clearly and publicly define the boundaries between central and local government, and who will pay for what. Wellington understands that in Auckland, but nowhere else.
It's also time for the government to reassess the costs it has heaped upon ratepayers, for example by way of the new Building Act, which had transformed what used to be a relatively simple, and cheap, process into a complicated, enormous expensive one that offers no obvious benefits to anyone.
The Resource Management Act, which replaced the old Town and Country Planning Act, is another example of a law that is predicated on finding reasons why something cannot be done as opposed to how it can be done, swamping councils with what John Carter has described as bureaucratic crap.
Fundamental responsibility for better defining what councils can and cannot do lies with the councils, but it would be helpful to know just how much Far North ratepayers have to stump up to do what really must be done, and then have a conversation about how they are going to pay for it. We need to separate the nice to haves from the must haves.
The days of ad hoc spending have to end, if we don't want to go bankrupt. And that prospect might not be as remote as some would like to think.
It's a given that the Far North will resist any government-imposed reform, but we cannot continue as we are.
Once the government, this one or the next or the next, decides that the Far North cannot function to an acceptable standard with its own local government it will take control, in one way or another.
If we don't want that to happen we must demand a much greater willingness on the council's part to sit down with us and make some very basic decisions are about what we need/want and how we're going to pay for it.
That process has to start now.
