May 2007

Alright folks, here’s the evi­dence, straight from the Auck­land CEO him­self that C&R were stick­ing up for Auck­land Ratepayers.

As men­tioned ear­lier , C&R Coun­cil­lors Arm­strong and Mil­lar did NOT vote for the Metrowa­ter price hikes. As the email below from David Rankin (Auck­land City CEO) proves, Arm­strong and Mil­lar in fact tried to force the whole issue back onto the full Auck­land City Coun­cil of 20 politi­cians to take a full vote on the mas­sive water hikes, not just those who sit on the Finance and Cor­po­rate Busi­ness Com­mit­tee. Had it been forced back onto the full coun­cil, pan­icked City Vision politi­cians may have backed down over their mas­sive spend­ing plans, and finally agree with C&R pro­pos­als to seek effi­cien­cies and reduce coun­cil spend­ing, thus not requir­ing either a rates increase or water price increase.

Let’s remem­ber folks — C&R have been push­ing for core coun­cil activ­ity from the oppo­si­tion benches for the last two years. In revenge, one of the City Vision­ers leaked false min­utes of the meet­ing to the Herald.

You heard it here first.….…

David Rankin’s email fol­lows now:

______________________________________________

From: Rus­sell, Nicki On Behalf Of Rankin, David

Sent: Fri­day, 25 May 2007 16:35

To: ‘Bernard.Orsman@nzherald.co.nz’

Cc: Cr Arm­strong, Dou­glas; Cr Mil­lar, Toni

Sub­ject: COMPLAINT

Bernard

Regard­ing your spe­cific ques­tions to assist the Her­ald in deal­ing with com­plaints by Coun­cil­lors Mil­lar and Arm­strong, I note as follows:

1. If Coun­cil­lors Arm­strong, Mil­lar and Milne had voted in favour of Coun­cil­lor Fryer’s amend­ment, with the three coun­cil­lors who sup­ported it, the effect would have been to pass the motion 6–5. Metrowa­ter would not have required a price increase and depend­ing on other cost fac­tors, could have con­sid­ered reduc­ing their price. Cor­re­spond­ingly, the council’s ten-year bud­get would have had $220.8 mil­lion of rev­enue removed from it. This would have required expen­di­ture cuts of this level or a 4.7 per cent rates increase in 2008/2009 to com­pen­sate, and smaller addi­tional increases to this in future years.

2. If the com­mit­tee had not adopted the sub­stan­tive motion to approve the three-year state­ment of intent, a valid state­ment of intent would not have been approved by 30 June by the coun­cil as required to do under local gov­ern­ment leg­is­la­tion. This would have neces­si­tated fur­ther urgent con­sid­er­a­tion by the coun­cil of the price increase issue, to enable a state­ment of intent to be approved at a fur­ther meet­ing to be held in the near future. This was, as I under­stand it, the intent of Coun­cil­lors Mil­lar and Arm­strong. In essence, a future such meet­ing would have had to resolve to either:

a. con­firm the 9.1 per cent price increase and leave council’s ten-year expen­di­ture and pro­posed rates increase unchanged; or

b. arrive at some dif­fer­ent price increase fig­ure for Metrowa­ter requir­ing an off­set­ting bal­ance in some mix­ture of spend­ing cuts and rate increases for the year to compensate.

Regards
David Rankin