Rates

There has been a lot of talk about rates capping to keep rate rises under control.  My response is to be careful what you wish for. Many costs are imposed on councils and without any other reasonable source of revenue, rates are the main source of income.  Arbitrarily capping rates could result in an unintended loss of services. 

The Rates burden on those with low or no income is unfair. I believe that the government should share a portion of the GST earned from businesses that operate within a  local council's jurisdiction. Then revenue would be a combination of fixed revenue (i.e. rates) and transactional transactional revenue (i.e. a GST share).  

Unfortunately this is unlikely to happen anytime soon. So how do we reduce the burden of rates yet provide key services?

The only practical ways are:

1. Grow the rating base  - i.e. try all we can to attract more ratepayers into the area. We have to make Carterton an attractive and affordable place to live.  We also have to attract more businesses who can provide employment also needed to attract new residents. I have some ideas on how we can do this.

2. Reduce the general rate by transferring as many council services onto a users pays model as much as possible. This is because user pays allows users to control how much they get charged simply by how much they use. It is fair because we don’t want those who do not use a service much  subsidising those who do. Water is a key example but there are others.

Rural Roads

A significant portion of rates goes into maintaining our rural road network. This is a targeted rate affecting rural ratepayers more than urban ratepayers. NZTA does assist by providing a 51% subsidy onto the cost of rural road maintenance.  But is this fair?

If all rural roads had class 1 vehicles such as cars using them that is fair as there is a mixture of local and visitor road use. However it is not fair where a large portion of the rural traffic is from heavy vehicles such as logging trucks. These vehicles cause a disproportionate amount of damage resulting in more frequent road repairs.  It is not fair that ratepayers are subsidising the damage created by these vehicles.

I believe that where roads have a significant portion of heavy vehicles regularly on them, that NZTA increase their subsidy. After all, these heavy trucks pay the road user charge (RUC) to NZTA so it is only right that NZTA pay more towards the damage caused by these vehicles which NZTA is getting RUC revenue from.

Did you know that our near neighbour, the Tararua District Council, gets a 71% subsidy.  How do they enjoy such a significantly higher subsidy than Carterton?  This needs to be challenged.  We would save a lot of ratepayer money if we succeeded in getting this subsidy increased.