It’s going right down to the deadline. On Sunday, about 48 cities and districts will submit proposals to merge into fewer than half that many councils. But others, like Rotorua and Nelson, have been left crying at the altar.
Nelson mayor Nick Smith has joked that he’s been jilted by the mayor of neighbouring Tasman, Tim King: “He says, look, I’m happy to live de facto but I don’t want to get married because you’re a bit of an ugly bugger.”
Wellington region’s mayors gathered behind closed doors on Friday, in a meeting that ran till late in the day. They were making one last attempt to hammer out an agreed solution but, in the end, Upper Hutt, Carterton and Masterton councils have refused to join a Wellington super-council. Kāpiti Coast wants to be a distinct council within the bigger regional body. Hutt City and Porirua want referendums.
At this stage, it appears 17 councils simply won’t submit so-called Head Start proposals to Local Government Minister Simon Watts – and instead, they face him ordering them into forced marriages, for want of a better description.
The minister has been unequivocal. Those councils that don’t submit a Head Start proposal by Sunday evening will, instead, be routed into a so-called Backstop process that will take council feedback into account, but ultimately the government will decide the way forward.
The only exceptions, he says, are Marlborough and Kaikōura, to which he’s granted extensions because of the “exceptional circumstances” they’re facing following severe weather events in their communities, and the impact that’s had on council resources.
Cabinet will mull the other councils’ Head Start proposals after they’re received on Sunday, he says. “Councils that don’t take part will go through the Backstop process, and we’ll work through what that looks like once Cabinet has considered the Head Start proposals. I’ll have more to say once those decisions have been made.”
From the 2028 local elections, every part of the country (aside from Auckland and Gisborne) will have simplified local government structures – whether councils choose to lead the reform themselves, or not.
Council groupings for Head Start proposals
Newsroom asked Watts how many councils he wanted to end up with – 40, or fewer? “The objective of that reform has always been about simplification of local government to deliver better services for ratepayers, and where possible, drive size and scale that makes sense for communities,” he replied.
“This isn’t one size fits all. There is uniqueness across this country, and at the end of the day, what I want is enduring change and enduring reform that lasts decades. You know, what we’ve seen is if Wellington dictates to regions how it needs to look, it fails. And that is not enduring.
“So I’m confident that local communities will work together, and local government and central government will work together to lock that reform into place.”
Yet going into this weekend, even with the best will in the world, 23 councils have been unable to reach agreements to consolidate structures or services with any of their neighbours.
Six of those (Far North, Tauranga, Rotorua, New Plymouth, Christchurch, Selwyn) will put forward Head Start proposals to continue on their own, albeit taking on regional council functions as well. Seventeen won’t put in proposals.
Tongue firmly in cheek, Upper Hutt mayor Peri Zee posted on LinkedIn: “I’m genuinely impressed with how effectively the coalition government has re-focused the conversation around local government reform,” she wrote.
“We should be debating what might need to change to deliver better local government for our communities now and into the future. Instead, we are debating whether to let the government decide now or let the government decide later.”
She and Wellington mayor Andrew Little both spoke to Newsroom ahead of Friday’s meeting, trying to describe how they’d weave together a combined mega-council draft from the eight councils’ disparate positions.
Zee was hauling herself from her sickbed, equipped with a flask of concentrated hot lemon, honey and ginger. “My husband asked me what time I’ll be home, and I was a bit unsure what to say.”
Little said people wanted to make it work. “So hopefully we’ll knuckle down and get stuck into it as quick as possible.”
The Wellington mayor did agree change was needed. Local government had become much more complex than when these councils were set in place in the big Fourth Labour Government reforms of 1989. He pointed to the technical expertise needed for investment in infrastructure like drinking water, wastewater and stormwater services.
“The other big challenge is climate resilience, and the amount of investment that’s going to be required. We face it in Wellington city, but it’s actually right across the region. You’ve seen what’s happened in the Wairarapa the past few weeks, the damage that’s been caused. The amount of investment that’s needed to build climate resilience is going to be significant. Councils can’t do it on their own.
“I think the level of skill and capability you need now, to do even modest sized projects, is significant. The rules you have to comply with have all changed, so it’s become a lot more complex. Small councils can’t afford that capability. For an integrated social and economic region like ours, actually, it makes sense for us to pool resources.”
He was unhappy, though, with the pressure placed on councils to design sustainable solutions to complex problems under an extraordinarily tight deadline.
“I think ministers were right to put the challenge out there. I just think the timing has been not particularly helpful. And they’ve chopped and changed their expectation,” Little said.
“It was always a highly constrained timeframe trying to do all this in three months. We’ll do the best we can. We don’t want Government telling Wellington region what to do, so we need to be working with them to get a proposal up as close as possible to the deadline.”
He said the mayors all wanted to ensure any proposals they submitted would comply with the Government’s guidance and criteria, around challenges like water catchment management and coordinating public transport.
Zee agreed. For instance, she said, even those councils that weren’t in the agreed Head Start grouping, like Upper Hutt, Carterton and Masterton, would want to work with the super-council to design structures to manage shared services and infrastructure, like the commuter rail line that runs from Wellington, up the Hutt Valley and through the Rēmutaka range to the Wairarapa.
But after studying overseas experiences of amalgamation, she wasn’t convinced of the economies of scale. Fifty thousand-strong Upper Hutt has half the staff, per ratepayer, that other councils in the region have. Rates are lower. There are some things they can’t do, like operate their own urban design teams, but those are the trade-offs.
“I was skeptical from the beginning in terms of the costs and benefits and risks, and the modelling really confirmed those for me.
“For us, the jump to be part of a larger entity would would probably end up meaning increased ratepayer costs because we would be merging into more expensive systems and teams with larger amounts of people. Whereas at the moment, the people we have are all we require to deliver the minimum viable product of services that we provide as a council.”
If Upper Hutt is choosing to remain a single authority, others have had their hands forced.
Over the past few weeks, Rotorua has been forced to vote to go it alone, after failing to secure any agreement with its neighbours.
A swathe of rural and provincial councils across the central North Island like Wairoa, Ruapehu, Whanganui, Rangitīkei, Manawatū and Tararua have voted to stay out of the minister’s accelerated Head Start programme.
This week on Monday, Whangārei and Kaipara voted to merge with the Northland Regional Council, with the Far North District hoping to join them later.
On Wednesday, Napier, Hastings and Central Hawke’s Bay voted to amalgamate and subsume their regional council – but they remained disappointed at Wairoa opting out.
Masterton and Carterton voted for a pan-Wairarapa council, but their neighbour South Wairarapa voted to join a Wellington super-council.
Palmerston North and Horowhenua said they were looking to merge, but not yet. They’re not putting in a Head Start proposal; instead, they’re writing to the minister seeking more time.
Hutt City voted to join Wellington in the super-council, with Porirua following suit on Thursday.
Marlborough and Kaikōura voted to amalgamate, but Christchurch and Selwyn decided to go it alone.
Finally on Thursday, Tauranga and Western Bay of Plenty held a joint meeting to agree to follow their officials’ advice and merge – but the advisors were confounded by the vagaries of democracy. Tauranga councillors agreed to the merger, but Western Bay of Plenty councillors unexpectedly pulled out.
Which brings the local government sector to once last meeting of all the mayors in the greater Wellington region, in the hope of reaching sufficient agreement to deliver a Head Start proposal to the minister by 5pm Sunday.
“In the event that we get a Head Start proposal approved, we’ll then have six months to actually do that detailed work,” said Little. “It’ll be intense, but the real task is actually that next phase.”
| WHICH COUNCILS ARE NOT SUBMITTING HEAD START PROPOSALS? |
| Hamilton Western Bay of Plenty Wairoa Taupō Ruapehu Whanganui Rangitīkei Manawatū Palmerston North Horowhenua Tararua Upper Hutt Nelson Tasman Buller Ashburton Chatham Islands |
Notes: This article was updated to reflect the outcome of the Wellington regional mayors meeting. It’s been corrected to show that Selwyn District Council voted to remain separate.
