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.
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