Four Auckland local boards vote to fund keeping all their public rubbish bins

By Katie Fitzgerald of RNZ

Four local boards have taken matters into their own hands to keep their public rubbish bins after Auckland Council opted to remove thousands.

The council is removing bins across the city, but there are some pockets where they’re staying as is - for now.

Manurewa Local Board chair Matt Winiata said fewer rubbish bins would be bad news for his community.

“Waste, rubbish dumping, fly tipping is something that Manurewa struggles with as a ward.

“The last thing that we need in an area struggling with how it looks and people’s perceptions of it is to see rubbish and in amongst the areas that are either hard to get to, which a number of these bins were deemed as being.”

For the next year that won’t be an issue for the board, after it voted to fund keeping the bins that were to be removed.

Manurewa isn’t the only local board that made the call. To the south, Papakura and Franklin local boards are also funding to keep all their bins. In the north of the city, Rodney local board is keeping all its bins too.

The waterfront at Devonport now has fewer bins for dog poo, fish and chip wrappers - and everything else.

Auckland Council general manager parks and community facilities Taryn Crewe said the boards will get yearly updates about the cost of keeping the bins.

“They will be provided the advice annually to look at whether they want to continue.

“Some local boards had wanted to wait and see the rollout across other areas, and I suppose, make an assessment about the impact of that before they made that decision.”

She said the cost depended on the area.

“Some of them, we’ve taken more bins out or proposed more bins to be taken out than others.

“With the four local boards that I mentioned that have funded the retention of their bins, that’s cost them about $270,000 collectively across the four local board areas.”

Winiata said his area gets 790 calls about dumped waste every month. That worked out to be close to 30 every day, and they needed the bins.

But funding the bins meant money was lost from other areas.

Overflowing rubbish in Avondale's Eastdale Reserve. Photo / Avondale - Let's Clean Up Our Act

“We have to find that $66,000 from other avenues and it’s just taking away from other things in the community.

“That can come from contestable grants that the community applies for. In lower socioeconomic areas we do pride ourselves on what we can try and help the community with, but that certainly cuts into that budget ...”

Winiata said the money could come from the parks budget too.

“We’ve had our budgets for two parks and playgrounds being renewed cut as it is. “It’s really just like trying to find the scraps amongst the scraps to fund these things.”

Further south, Brent Catchpole from the Papakura Local Board said he wanted more information about what effects the bin removal would have, and it would take around a year to work that out.

“We need to know that that is actually viable to be able to remove those without causing any fly dumping or illegal dumping and creating rubbish in the parks and public areas.”

For that time, they have to come up with $54,000 to pay for keeping them, and another $58,000 if they decide to fund keeping the bins next year too.

“We obviously haven’t worked out what we’re going to have to reduce for the next year. But we had to trim back our grants to the public to the community groups that we often give grants to, and so there’s a starting point.”

The bin reduction is set to save an estimated $1.4 million a year.