Dairy farmers in the Eastern Bay are paying up to $150,000 a year in targeted rates to Bay of Plenty Regional Council for river schemes.
Dairy farmers in the Eastern Bay are paying up to $150,000 a year in targeted rates to Bay of Plenty Regional Council for river schemes.
Some Rangitāiki Plains farmers are paying as much as $150,000 in targeted rates to the Bay of Plenty Regional Council, but feel they’re not getting a fair representation at the council table.
This was among the points made in a Federated Farmers’ submission on a representation review, with the organisation pushing for the regional council to increase the number of councillors in the Eastern Bay constituency.
The regional council voted on Tuesday to stick with the status quo of three of the 14 councillors - two general and one Māori - from constituencies in the Eastern Bay, despite five of the 29 submissions asking for greater representation for the sub-region, including Federated Farmers and Trust Horizon.
Federated Farmers senior policy adviser Jesse Brennan was the only speaker at the hearing.
Constituency maps show that Eastern Bay makes up 62 percent of the Bay of Plenty Regional Council area. Maps courtesy of Bay of Plenty Regional Council.
The submission asked for one extra Eastern Bay constituency councillor, bringing the number to three, and one less Tauranga councillor, dropping the number from five to four. She said over a quarter of the council’s rates came from the Eastern Bay, and it made up the majority of the region geographically.
The targeted rates for the Eastern Bay river schemes alone totalled over $14 million.
The submission said a residential rating unit in Central Tauranga paid approximately $560 in regional council rates.
“One farmer on the Rangitaiki Plains pays $150,000 on targeted rates for the rivers and drainage schemes alone. We’ve got other examples of people paying similar sums. I acknowledge that there are benefits that the farmers and wider communities get out of these schemes but there’s a wider public good,” Brennan said.
Many farmers located in the Eastern Bay constituency felt as if decisions that might impact their farming operations and rural communities were being made by people who might not fully understand what happened at a practical level on their farms, she said.
Western Bay councillor Ken Shirley said greater numbers of councillors from the Eastern Bay would not necessarily guarantee someone with a better understanding of farming.
“You could get a townie who has no understanding of farming whatsoever coming out of the Eastern Bay,” he said.
Tauranga councillor Stuart Crosby said rates collection was only one metric, but expenditure was another.
“Have you put much thought into what expenditure goes into the Eastern Bay?” he asked Ms Brennan.
Councils are bound by legal constraints to have even populations, plus or minus 10 percent, for representational areas, and workloads of councillors were also considered.
Crosby said the river schemes each had their own committees which added to the local input to governance in the Eastern Bay.
Brennan said she fully supported the river scheme committees.
“The point we are trying to make with this submission is that we want to see [representation] across all levels through the breadth of all the activities that we have across the Bay of Plenty.”
The council’s governance manager Steve Groom said Tauranga was about 11 percent underrepresented by population and the Federated Farmers proposal would bring it to about 30 percent underrepresented.
“There are three regional councils, by my reckoning, that currently do that. Those only have one councillor in those seats. They’re much smaller regional councils.”
Eastern Bay councillor Malcolm Campbell acknowledged what his colleagues had said and that being on the regional council had been a learning curve for him.
“After 27 years of battling to get better representation in the east, I think we’ve come to a really good place here.”
The Trust Horizon submission said the charitable organisation did not consider representation by population a fair or equitable approach when considering the issues relevant to the region.
The submission included information from the Ministry for the Environment which indicated issues were primarily production-based rather than consumption-based (population-based) and also “the sheer size of the Eastern Bay”.
Whakatāne District Council submitted in support of the current representation, stating the Eastern Bay needed three councillors as it made up 62 per cent of the region’s land area. However, the council’s submission shared concerns about what further population growth in Tauranga might have on future reviews.
