Whitby Sections – A great place to call home

By David Bradford, former Mayor, Queenstown-Lakes District 1989-1995,  

Businessman and Land Developer in Porirua City since March 1996                                                  23 June 2011

 

I was invited to speak on this matter at the Community Forum organized by Porirua City Council on the 23rd June, 2011.  I accepted because of my past experience and opinions on council amalgamation.  The following submission is based on my speech notes for the meeting.

 

I became Mayor of Queenstown-Lakes in 1989 when 700 councils and special purpose bodies like Harbour and Drainage Boards and were amalgamated to create 86 local authorities. 7 out of 8 organisations disappeared that year.

6 years before that I had decided to stand for Council because of my interest in growing the Queenstown tourism economy. Instead of being able to concentrate my part-time efforts in the community I lived in, I suddenly found myself Mayor of Wanaka and Hawea as well, a 1 hour drive northwest and Glenorchy and Kingston, another half-hour in the other direction.

 

Each of these communities had their own strong local character and at the time were very concerned that amalgamation was going to take away their identity and their ability to influence decisions. In my view the new arrangement did just that, as the council organisation grew and became increasingly corporate and bureaucratic.

Many long term employees with an enormous knowledge of their own communities left or were kicked out, with the loss of valuable information that had previously contributed to the cost effective management and operation of Council’s activities. 

I don’t believe the general public and ratepayers understand that there is a huge gap between the public face of local government (the elected members) and the day to day operation of Council by its employees and managers. As a person dealing with Regional and District Council officers on a regular basis, I am not sure even the elected members of these organizations understand it either.

You do know that Mayors and Councillors have zero executive powers. You cannot contact council employees and tell them to fix a pothole, or solve a resident’s building permit problem. You are not legally allowed to. The Chief Executive is the only person you employ, and the only person you have some authority over. 

So what we are really being asked to comment on is not the political impacts of amalgamating the region’s Councils, but whether we should be creating an even bigger organisation to manage thousands of local problems and issues. 

What is the Wellington Region? – is it one giant community with a single set of values and standards? Or is it a group of connected villages with their own character, local values and individual ideas? My view is that it is the latter. And I continue to believe that almost all Councils in New Zealand are already too big and remote from the day to day issues and problems in their communities. 

So why isn’t one of the 6 options that we have been asked to comment on a return to smaller local government units that represent the actual communities we live in? There are plenty of examples around the world that this might be a better form of ‘local’ government. 

 

An example is Paris, the capital of France, a city of two million people. It is divided in twenty arrondissements or city districts that are demographically, ethnically and socioeconomically diverse. That is an average of a district council for every 100,000 people.

 

Parisians do not elect their Mayor directly, but vote for 518 District Councilors in twenty separate elections, with one of their responsibilities being to elect a mayor for each city district. The highest ranking 163 councillors also sit on the City Council on top of their local responsibilities. These 163 people are the ones who elect the Mayor of Paris. And Paris is one of the most attractive and desirable cities in the world to visit, so obviously the residents and tourists like it.

 

France itself has 37,000 municipal councils (communes) for a population of 62 million. That is a Mayor and Councillors for an average of 1,600 people!  This small median population of French communes can be compared with Italy where the median population of communes in 2001 was 2,343 inhabitants, Belgium where it was 11,265 inhabitants, or even Spain where it was 564 inhabitants.

 

Despite enormous differences in population, each of the communes of the French Republic possess a mayor (maire) and a municipal council (conseil municipal) who jointly manage the commune from the mairie (city hall), with exactly the same powers no matter the size of the commune. 

 

But interestingly there are only six water agencies to manage all the water and wastewater resources for all of France. They plan the management of water resources, collect fees for the abstraction of water from rivers and aquifers as well as for the discharge of wastewater to the environment, and use the proceeds to subsidize investments in water supply and sanitation.

Could it be the best infrastructure management and planning is done by single-minded entities who only have to deal with that specific task? I believe so. So why aren’t we investigating a return to regional harbour and drainage boards as an option to having a Regional Council? I think we should be.

This drive to amalgamate Wellington into a ‘super city’ is driven largely by the false belief that we know how to plan large systems, and the bigger the entity the better. If this were so, the Soviet Union would have been a raging success. But it wasn’t. All proposals like this cite ‘cost savings’ as a primary reason for amalgamation. Invariably they fail to deliver on this promise.

What about the Auckland ‘experiment’?
Given that many of the great cities in the world are made up of a multitude of local governments, it seems that mega-amalgamation is unlikely to be the correct solution to whatever problem Auckland is deemed to have.

A casual visitor touring all the former cities in Auckland would probably conclude that Auckland's Central City is the failure while the peripheral cities have the look and feel of success. However all eight of the Councils of Auckland (seven councils and the ARC) disappeared and the new Super City was a massive over-response to the need to solve Auckland’s roading congestion.

I believe this problem could have been easily solved by simplifying the planning and implementing of the region’s primary roading networks through a dedicated regional Transport Board. Other infrastructure problems could also have easily been resolved by matching a new dedicated Board to the scope and territory of the engineering skills needed.

It should be recognized that there are tensions between regional and district councils throughout New Zealand.  The biggest tension is caused in larger cities because Regional Councils tend to promote a mono-centric model of the city where all roads lead to the central area, with the peripheral development being repressed to maintain the ongoing viability of the central areas.

Peripheral towns and cities like Porirua should resist this model because the reality is that modern cities are multi-nodal and the central areas are becoming less and less significant in the overall scheme of things, even though they may – but not always – remain the largest centre of population and employment.

So the lesson of recent history is clear. The way to transform counterproductive conflict into productive competitive behaviour is not to dissolve the cities and districts and to create a Leviathan but instead to revert to a model where the Regional Council or new, special purpose Boards have one set of clearly defined tasks, responsibilities and practices, and the District and City Councils have another.

In my opinion the Super City for the Auckland region will severely constrain growth for a decade or more. Investors, developers and entrepreneurs are all involved in taking risk, and while we can never eliminate risk, we all attempt to manage the level of risk as best we can.

 

The Auckland Super City involves massive changes in the legislative, administrative, and legal environment of the region as well as massive changes in the network of people with whom Auckland investors, developers and entrepreneurs have built up working relationships over the years.

The last major amalgamation in 1989 generated a major and extended pause in investments while Councils wound themselves up, disposed of their assets and cash, and developed new structures and staffing. This pause extended the 1987 recession for some years.

The impact of the mega-amalgamation on the Auckland region will be even greater this time round because potential investors will have to cope with much greater uncertainties arising from the combination of reforms to the RMA and the new law governing the Super City.

Investors will simply put everything on hold and wait for the dust to settle. It will be a long wait and while they wait the recession will drag on – and on – and on.

Wellington needs to be smarter than Auckland. We should either stick with the status quo or even better, search the world for the best example of smaller local government, not bigger ones.
 
Acknowledgement.  I would like to acknowledge that a number of my comments are influenced by information sourced from Owen McShane and the Centre for Resource Management Studies