KEY POINTS:
The One Auckland Trust is proposing a reformed local government structure which gives local communities more power as well as a strong single council for the whole region.
The trust says a one-council-owned company should be set up to manage assets and deliver services for the region.
In a submission to the Royal Commission of Inquiry on Auckland Governance, the trust advocates setting up 26 community boards, with four members in each, which would control budgets of about $2 million.
Councillors elected to a single Auckland Council of 26 members would be appointed to each community board to act as a link to the whole region.
Trust chairman Grant Kirby said the Mayor of the Auckland Council should be elected by the region's voters rather than by council members.
"We need transparency, accountability and leadership, and believe the mayor should have some executive authority so that he or she is not at risk of merely being a figurehead," said Mr Kirby, who is a former chairman of the Local Government Commission.
The trust says combining eight councils with 264 elected politicians and 6000 staff would cut operating costs of these councils, which eat up 80 per cent of the $2.5 billion raised each year in rates, fees and charges.
The trust says a saving of just 10 per cent of combined operating costs would trim $200 million a year - enabling rates cuts or finance for works projects.
Another trust wants the Auckland Regional Council dumped, saying an over-zealous green bias is holding back the district's growth.
Rodney Economic Development Trust says the council has failed to grasp the importance of business growth projects to rural areas. Trust secretary Mike Smith said ARC management and policies gave greater weight to environmental effects than the need to create jobs.
Yet social and economic wellbeing were important arguments in favour of projects in Rodney, which grows by 40 people a week.
In its submission to the royal commission, the trust complains of high costs of consents, poor service, negativity and rules that place barriers to business growth.
A push for land use rezoning to create more business sites was met by the ARC's insisting on an expensive process of shifting metropolitan urban limits.
"It will take three or four years [and] thousands of dollars and in the meantime overseas investors continue to move to other countries."
The trust wants an Auckland ombudsman appointed as an independent vehicle for people who are having issues with local government and resource consent processes.
It says Rodney and the region would prosper if infrastructure services were only matched to economic development.
Water and transport provision should be assigned to two public companies, which would include community council appointees.
The trust believes savings will result from folding the environmental responsibilities of the ARC into a new regional organisation, which would produce a single planning document, one set of bylaws and one resource consents hearings structure.
This body would absorb many of the functions that are duplicated in city and district councils.
The trust is contracted to the Rodney District Council, which has spent $5000 on creating a billboard in Wellington's Lambton Quay, as close to the Beehive as possible.
Council communications manager Mike Isle said the aim was to inform MPs and public servants that Rodney did not want to be "gobbled up" into a super city.
The council is also calling for the abolition of the ARC.
