The Regional Council doesn’t want us to focus on its steep increase in rates. Instead, it hopes to distract us with the fact that it has made a small reduction in the amount of the increase which it had been planning.
Wellington City Councillors are having difficulty making the savings that they’ve been told are necessary.
Mayor Wade-Brown announced last week that they have been unable to resist their annual rates increase. They’re proposing an average increase of 4.1 per cent. But this is not what she had earlier announced. Only three weeks before, she’d said that councillors had agreed to cap the rates increase at 3.8 per cent.
Wellington City Councillors spent most of last week trying to make decisions about spending. More accurately: decisions about cutting spending. For the rest of us, the issue is what they’ll decide about the rates. They’ve consistently shown enthusiasm for increasing the rates every year. As a result, as the DomPost reports this morning, Wellington’s rates increased by 86 per cent in the first decade of the new century.
The Wellington City Council yesterday announced an add-on to next year’s budget – an extra $120,000 “to improve community emergency preparedness.” In the same announcement, we’re told that the average rates increase is going up to 4.4 per cent from the previously announced 4.3 per cent. Curiously, the council also tells us that rates increases for homeowners and commercial property owners will be coming down.
With the Wellington City Council’s Funding, Activities and Revenue working party finishing its deliberations, the prospect of homeowners being asked to shoulder the rates burden again is almost a foregone conclusion. That will mean another zero rates increase to the owners of commercial buildings and another seven percent increase for home owners.
Soon after the government announced its tax cuts, the Wellington City Council moved in the opposite direction and announced its annual increase in rates. Last week’s announcement tells us that the rates for Wellington home owners are going up by an average of 5.75 per cent.
The increase is even higher than than the figure which the council announced a month ago – when it said that 5.5 per cent was to be the increase for home owners.
Ratepayers have reason to want more information about the $30million in overdue payments which was owing to the Wellington City Council at the end of its last financial year.
The Classics Museum at Victoria University houses a collection of ancient Greek and Roman artefacts: vases, coins, sculpture, objects for use in daily life.
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At lunchtime on Friday 3rd January, our group of 7 EM trampers along with the MF group, met at the Wellington train station bound for Nelson Lakes National Park. We had a smooth sailing across the Cook Strait before bad weather hit Wellington! However, we didn’t escape the rain in Picton. As the rain pelted ... Read more
Ten of us (4 M and 6 EM trampers) met at 1pm on Waitangi Day (a Thursday) for the drive to Kaweka Forest Park. After stopping for leg stretches in Shannon and Woodville, and a meal in Hastings. We arrived just before dark at the road end campsite and pitched our tents for the night. ... Read more
