Editorial: Super City's subsidiaries taking shape

Ever since Auckland's local government was to be united in a single city council, there has been justified concern for the survival of the "local" element. To meet that concern the Local Government Commission was given the task of redividing the city into subsidiaries of the council, to be known as local boards. The commission's draft design, now published, will raise some eyebrows.

Residents of Orewa and Whangaparaoa will be surprised to find themselves sharing a supposed community of interest with East Coast Bays and Albany. Residents of Mt Eden will notice they have been divided between an inner city board (called Maungawhau) and a Mt Albert board that extends to Epsom.

But broadly the commission has drawn new boundaries that fit recognisable communities of interest, albeit large ones. Its brief from the Government allowed the Super City to be divided into 20-30 local boards, including one each for Waiheke and Great Barrier islands. The commission has aimed for the least number, proposing just 17 boards on the mainland.

Their powers have yet to be determined but the commission has clearly designed them for significant roles. It wants boards to be large enough to command sufficient resources for decision making, attract capable people to stand for election to them, and to be able to engage effectively with the Auckland Council, which will have to draw up individual agreements with each of them.

They will cover areas that are about a quarter the size of the four cities to be displaced by the single city at next year's municipal elections. Each of the boards will be big enough, the commission estimates, to be able to ask the Auckland Council to raise a targeted rate income from its area to fund a particular local amenity or function.

Some of them will be particularly strong. The board combining the Hibiscus Coast and East Coast Bays-Albany will have a population of 120,400. Waitakere will have 166,000, Howick-Pakuranga-Botany, 121,700. At the other end of the scale, Papakura's desired independence has been recognised with a board for just 44,000 people.

Equality of population matters not at all for the local boards but it matters very much for the electoral wards of the 20 seats on the Auckland Council. The wards now drawn by the commission contain a surprisingly wide population variance. The ward for the inner suburbs and Gulf islands will have one council member for 88,000 people while Rodney's single member will serve just 53,590.

But the most interesting element of the commission's wards is that most of them will return two council members. Only the mainly rural areas of Rodney and Franklin, the inner city and Avondale-New Lynn, will have a single seat. The commission believes large wards with two seats apiece is better suited to the natural communities of interest in the region.

It also believes two-member wards likely to produce a more "diverse" representation of communities and give residents a choice of who to approach with local concerns. It is hard to see how "diversity" would be served; in most wards the voters are likely to fill their two seats with similar candidates.

The two-member wards should satisfy the main concern that electorates be small enough for independent candidates to be able to afford to contest them, and large enough to avoid undue parochialism on the Auckland Council.

Strong, united government remains the over-riding aim of Auckland's reconstitution. The local boards have been designed to be subsidiaries, not rivals, but the scale now proposed for them should permit the Super City to express different suburban aspirations.