Garth George: For what you get, council rates cheap at twice the price

It's a long time since anything got so many Aucklanders so wound up as has the ARC rates controversy. I've discovered that mine go up from $130-odd to $200 and a bit, which won't even be noticed in the family budget.

I know the amount only because I looked it up on the ARC's website; I haven't got a bill yet although it should have arrived more than a week ago. Nor have some of my neighbours, whose mailing addresses, like mine, differ from the official lot numbers and have done so since the subdivision was completed more than a decade ago.

I have emailed the ARC (and neighbours have phoned) but so far with no result, which I suppose is par for the course for a local authority bureaucracy. They can read and understand spoken English, but translating that into some sort of action seems beyond them.

Not to worry. In my email I served notice that I would not permit the inability of the ARC to get my rate demand into my mailbox to deprive me of whatever prompt-payment discount I might have qualified for, and certainly would not pay any penalty.

My $200 is really a gift to the regional council, whose services I do not and am not likely to use and which I would like to see abolished, with its activities shared among territorial local bodies.

Now territorial local bodies - in my case the eccentric Waitakere City Council under its delightfully loopy mayor, Bob Harvey - are a different matter altogether.

The $1400-odd a year I pay to Waitakere City, considering what I get for it, is cheap at twice the price and life would surely be difficult if the services the council provides weren't right there at my fingertips, day in and day out.

Not that there isn't probably a much fairer system for local bodies to collect revenue - user-pays experts could surely come up with something - for it has always seemed to me that those of us who sacrifice to obtain our own homes are penalised.

Yes, I know that folk who rent pay indirectly through their rents but there are a lot of others who daily use a city's services and who pay nothing towards them.

So it might not be a bad idea, now that our Dear Leader herself has taken an interest in the matter, to use this ARC furore as an excuse to start looking at different ways of financing local bodies and, indeed, at the constitution of local bodies themselves.

For I wonder if the tradition of electing fellow citizens to operate the parish pump for us hasn't had its day. Perhaps in these times of increasing complexity we should consider doing away with elected amateurs and appointing, by some means, a board of commissioners, for instance, to run our cities and districts for us.

These would be proven professionals in administration, finance, engineering, law (unfortunately) and so on who would be paid whatever the private-sector going rate is to get the job done with maximum efficiency and minimum cost, which is what business is all about, surely.

Remove the politics from local authorities and the efficiency rate would rocket all by itself.

Meanwhile, I take advantage of all the good things that my local authority provides for my wife and me at a cost of something less than $4 a day.

I drive on tarsealed streets, most of which are kerbed and channelled and provided with footpaths, although mine isn't. (A whole bunch of us petitioned the council to pipe and fill in the open drains and provide a footpath down both sides, but we were told quite bluntly that the council had more pressing things to do with our money.)

When I turn on the tap I get water, which at $1.48 a cubic metre (1000 litres) is as good as giving it away; bodily wastes disappear instantly when I flush the toilet; and every week the household rubbish is carted off at a cost of $1 a bag plus a $17 annual waste collection charge that is part of the rates.

I go for a walk early in the morning on an expensive concrete footpath laid right round a spacious park that is immaculately maintained by the council. It is the only sporting facility of the council's I use, but tens of thousands of my fellow citizens derive huge benefit from the city's parks and sportsgrounds and indoor facilities.

There have been years when the free public libraries run by the city have provided the full value of my rates and much more. I read three novels on average every week, sometimes more and never less - 150-plus books a year. To buy them would cost me at least $3000, probably nearer to $4500.

Everything is always going up, even wages, although they never seem to go up nearly as much or as often as everything else. So you'll hear no complaints from me if I have to pay a few dollars extra this year to the pretend eco-city in which I live.

For all its faults, it contributes hugely to my quality of life.

* Email Garth George