Bay of Plenty Regional Council to save $7m in rates collection

The Bay of Plenty Regional Council's offices on Elizabeth St in Tauranga. Photo / George Novak

Collecting its own rates will save the Bay of Plenty Regional Council an estimated $7.1 million over 10 years.

This is $1.2 million more than the $5.9 million council originally projected.

In 2022 the regional council collected its own rates for the first time.

Since 1989, Toi Moana Bay of Plenty Regional Council (BOPRC) contracted rates collection to the regions’ seven councils, Whakatāne, Ōpōtiki, Kawerau, Western Bay of Plenty, Tauranga, Rotorua and Taupō.

The councils were paid a commission, and for the administrative costs of collection.

The regional council paid between two and five per cent in commission per year, to each of the councils.

In 2020, the council decided to collect its own rates from the region’s 150,000 rating units, starting from the 2022/2023 financial year.

Special projects manager Annabel Chappell provided councillors with an update at the BOPRC monitoring and operations committee on Tuesday.

Chappell said 97 per cent of the rates had been collected, which was just below $80 million in funds.

The council would also benefit from around $400,000 in additional funds through interest for the 2022/23 financial year, according to Chappell’s report.

It wasn’t just a financial benefit gained through the rates collection, it also increased public awareness of council, the report said.

”One of the key objectives of this project was to have a more direct relationship with our customers,” Chappell told the meeting.

”That can be seen in terms of the evidence there [in the report] with the customer interactions through this process.”

As of the end of February, the council received close to 32,000 rates-related calls, had 26,403 rates service requests logged on its website and 7,252 customers visited service centres with rates-related enquiries.

In terms of increasing customer awareness of the work the council does, around 75 per cent of people who visited the rates pages moved on to other pages within the website, according to the report.

Committee chairman Kevin Winters said it had been a big project for Chappell and the team.

”The benefits far outweigh the costs that we’ve incurred in terms of better engagement with our community.

He said the project was a “real risk” if it had gone badly, but it hadn’t.

”We can prove to the community why we went down this path because we can collect our rates cheaper, much, much cheaper than going through the TLAs (territorial local authorities) on a commission basis.”

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