Replacement of the Dublin St Bridge will take place within the next LTP period. Photo / Bevan Conley
Replacement of the Dublin St Bridge will take place within the next LTP period. Photo / Bevan Conley
The deadline for Whanganui District Council’s next 10-year plan is fast approaching and around $500 million worth of potential projects need to be whittled down.
Chief executive David Langford said the process was different to how the council had ever done it before.
It had taken “a huge amount of work” but it was worth it.
“For every project, we have written up a short business case - what the project is, why it’s important, why it’s worth investing in, what are the benefits our community would get from doing it and how much would it cost.
“Then, they can be scored and ranked. If it’s really expensive but isn’t going to deliver very much benefit, it will score low.”
Every case will be ranked in order, helping bring structure to “the chaos of working out what projects to do when you’ve got so much calling on ratepayers’ funding”.
Langford said the full list would be published as part of public consultation on the long-term plan (LTP).
Since then, the list of cases has been removed from the council’s website.
Langford said he had asked for it to be put back online.
“It’s about being transparent and saying ‘here as all the things council could do’.
“From my point of view, it would be good if the community was aware council was taking a new approach. We are looking after how we spend ratepayers’ money and we are prioritising what we spend it on.”
The system was not new or particularly innovative because the private sector did it all the time, he said.
Whanganui district councillors were given 10 criteria to judge the projects and asked to choose the most important.
Risk management ranked highly, as did the tradeoff between costs and benefits and alignment with the council’s core purposes.
Whanganui District Council chief executive David Langford. Photo / Bevan Conley
“In the short term, the cost of living crisis is still going on for some in our community, inflation is only just starting to come down and interest rates are still high,” Langford said.
“The pressure’s on and we don’t really want to be adding to that problem for our people by putting our rates up too much.”
High could mean a 14.8 per cent increase for the 2024-25 year, with medium at 9.5 per cent and low at 5.8 per cent.
“We need to take some action in the short term to keep our rates increases as low as possible - possibly even cutting some services and selling assets - but in the longer term, we don’t want to be going backwards,” Langford said.
The Dublin St Bridge replacement was “firmly in contention”.
“There are options - you could close one bridge and use the other two but I‘m not sure the community would be in favour of that,” Langford said.
A cultural design could end up on a new Dublin St Bridge instead.
“If we are going to build a new bridge, it would be far cheaper to incorporate that into the design work with our iwi and hapū partners from the get-go, rather than trying to retrofit it into something that’s already been built.
“Again, none of these things are cast in stone yet. They are all up for debate.”
He said the council owned around $1.3 billion of assets on behalf of the community.
‘We spend tens of millions a year fixing potholes and replacing pipes underground, but once we’ve been and gone and done the job, there’s barely any evidence we are even there.”
Langford said the formal consultation process on the LTP would begin in the first week of April.
After that, detailed business cases on selected projects will be formed.
The LTP for 2024-2034 comes into effect on July 1.
Mike Tweed is an assistant news director and multimedia journalist at the Whanganui Chronicle. Since starting in March 2020, he has dabbled in everything from sport to music. At present his focus is local government, primarily the Whanganui District Council.
