KEY POINTS:
The Auckland water debate is turning sour with Auckland Regional Council chairman Mike Lee telling City Vision leader Dr Bruce Hucker to stop supporting big water bills or quit the centre-left ticket and stand on the right.
Speaking as a City Vision politician, Mr Lee said Dr Hucker should stop "thumbing his nose at a majority of his team members and trashing City Vision's election policies".
Dr Hucker has been one of the strongest supporters of 9.6 per cent and 9.1 per cent rises in water bills over consecutive years.
He has supported running the council-owned water company Metrowater along more commercial lines and the idea of the region's monopoly water supplier paying a dividend to councils.
This would lead to even bigger water bills.
Last week he voted with centre-right politicians and Mayor Dick Hubbard to stop an amendment from one of his City Vision colleagues, Glenda Fryer, to halve the 9.1 per cent increase.
A majority of City Vision-Labour councillors oppose the policy of putting up water bills for the council to take a $280 million dividend from Metrowater over 10 years.
A Green Party councillor has called it a hidden rates rise.
City Vision promised at the 2004 elections not to treat Metrowater as a "commercial commodity", to have "fairly priced" water and abolish user charges for wastewater.
Mr Lee said Dr Hucker was not sticking with City Vision policy, not being true to the people who voted City Vision and not working with the majority of City Vision councillors.
"Rather than being a spokesman for the community or a spokesman for the people who elected him, he has tended to be a spokesman for senior Auckland City bureaucrats.
"Unless he changes his ways ... he should stand with Auckland Citizens & Ratepayers Now and not with a centre-left group.
"All that can come out of this is growing cynicism about politicians and politics," Mr Lee said.
Dr Hucker, who has led the City Vision ticket of Labour, Progressive, Alliance, Green Party and community independents since it started at the 1998 elections, did not return calls to the Herald yesterday. But he did ring Mr Lee to express his disappointment at the charges.
Mr Lee also launched a blistering attack on the city council policy of putting up water bills to get a dividend from Metrowater.
"You can't have an absolutely unchallenged monopoly gouging prices from a captive audience that cannot possibly do without water and be treated as a slush fund for hiding rates increases."
Mr Lee said he still wanted the region's water supplier, Watercare, returned to the ARC - which owned it until 1998 - and was opposed to it paying a dividend to its current owners, six territorial councils.
"If Watercare is to be refashioned by its new council owners into a giant-sized Metrowater and treated the same way as Metrowater, that would fulfil our worst possible fears," Mr Lee said.
Parliament has launched an investigation into the 9.1 per cent rise in water bills.
