Dialogue: Leave Santa alone and beg from Uncle Jim instead

By TONY GEE

A cash-carrying Santa Claus has developed the habit of dropping in on many Far North residents towards the end of the year.

He's confidently predicted to make the same dollar-showering visit again this year, and probably next.

Santa is the Bay of Islands Electric Power Trust (for Bay of Islands, read Far North district). Santa's gift bag is stuffed full of dividend cheques made out to domestic and business consumers connected to power lines run by the creator of the dividends, Top Energy.

Far North power consumers, supplied on Top Energy lines, all have a shareholding stake in the company through the electric power trust and its trustees, who distribute Santa's $4 million bag of goodies.

Compared with similar gifting by other Santa-type outfits elsewhere in New Zealand, the financial generosity of the Far North version is modest, as befits a small, scattered district with just 25,000-odd power consumers and no town with more than 6000 people.

It's not surprising then that the $150 dividend paid to domestic power consumers a few days before Christmas is more than welcomed by the vast majority of households in a district which ranks as the country's second poorest in economic terms.

The next payout is expected to be about the same, with the dividend generator, Kaikohe-based Top Energy, continuing a diversified and profitable operation.

But looming on the Far North horizon and threatening to waylay Santa is a band of well-meaning bandits. Or are they modern-day Robin Hoods?

These community-minded fiends want to hijack our Christmas handouts for the next 10 years, leave us empty-handed, and use our $150, or whatever, each year to help to build a new sewerage plant somewhere. Or to seal a road that no one has heard of apart from the 100 or so vehicles that might use it every day ... yes, every day, not hour.

Or to dig endless drains and build stopbanks to reduce flooding that has occurred every autumn, winter and spring since the year dot because the area seeking relief has been deliberately developed on a flood plain.

What about a new rubbish dump, sorry, transfer station? Whoopee. A streetlight, perhaps? They're not thick on the ground in these parts.

These things go under the term of infrastructure, something the Far North has plenty of in broken-down and non-existent form. Ratepayers must foot the bill for repair, upgrading and building. But pushing up rates to improve infrastructure is not seen as politically palatable by the Santa-slayers who say, correctly, that this would hurt some ratepayers' finances.

So too would the disappearance of Santa's annual payout.

There's no doubt a lot of roads need sealing. Just 28 per cent of the district council's 2500km roading network is sealed, compared with the national average of 60 per cent.

This year, the council can afford to seal 9km, leaving almost 1800km metalled, dusty, potholed and corrugated, and costing a fortune to maintain.

The belief in the Far North is that if the district can't get its infrastructural development act together, it won't go any further in attracting significant new economic investment or development.

That's why the Kaitaia-based northern ward community board, supported by at least one district councillor, has called for Santa's power trust dividends to be poured into roads and the like.

It's getting a bit nasty, too. The wannabe redistributors have accused the five trustees of Santa's bag of being "lazy and immoral" for throwing $4 million at shareholding consumers for personal use, while the district thrashes about in broken-down or non-existent infrastructure.

The plotters want to raid the trustees' lair and decamp with millions of dollars a year, for 10 years, to put in council hands for a fund for developing infrastructure, through an inevitable process of task forces, priorities, reports and recommendations.

It is freely acknowledged by one or two would-be raiders that their idea to redistribute Santa's cash is not glamorous.

"Community-minded citizens" would, however, recognise that the district needs better infrastructure to prosper, they say.

Sorry, fellas. You'll have to do better than that to persuade Mr and Mrs Consumer Shareholder to agree to change the trust deed, under which the cash distribution is made, so they'll happily flag away their annual dividend in favour of beefing up someone's below-par water supply system.

Far better, surely, to adopt an already identified Plan B. Go to the Government. Plead a special case. Beg, bluster, browbeat, cajole and coerce. Give 'em heaps. After all, it's the credibility of Uncle Jim's regional economic development strategy that's at stake.

How else can we develop on a dusty road, with a septic tank, frequent flooding, collected rainwater, open drains, no footpaths, kerbing or channelling, and rundown reserve areas?

Identify a few big projects for special treatment, such as Russell's sewage system (still in the making after seven years), the Kerikeri bypass, Hokianga Harbour bridging and major road-sealing jobs. It's worth a try.

But don't touch the trust's cash dividend payouts. Consumer power rules. Okay?