Your Questions Answered - Dealing to history

 

Last week, Kaipara District Council resolved to instruct lawyers to pre-pare a case against Audit New Zealand for negli-gence. We also resolved to take action against the Council’s previous Chief Executive.

These decisions have not been taken lightly. They follow months of work by the Council and its advisers.

This is the last of the key steps that the Commissioners must take to deal to history. Let us recap. We needed to:

• Get Council’s books back into shape, stop the growth of debt, and put an end to budget deficits. This has been achieved. Debt is now reducing and small surpluses are being generated. • Build a Council organisation that had the competencies and culture necessary to support and engage with the District with excellence. This is work in progress, but is advancing well.

• Fix up the rating errors of the past in a transpar-ent way. This was done by Parliament. Mem-bers of Parliament scru-tinised this past. They visited Kaipara, listened to the various opinions expressed. They then passed the Validation Act with support of Act, Greens, Labour, Maori Party, National, and United Future.

• Pick up the advice from the Auditor General’s Inquiry Report and ensure that we attended to those parts of the report that exposed deficiencies in Council’s processes. This has been done.

• Spend time to try to “heal the wounds” of those who felt let down by their elected mem-bers and others who are in roles that undertake the checks and balances to support our func-tioning democracy. We have been partly successful with these endeavours, but there remains a grievance with some that may never be healed.

The Commissioners never expected that their tasks would be accomplished easily. Three particular events have caused additional cost to Council, and thus to ratepayers.

The Auditor General’s Inquiry Report took far longer than she forecast, and was only published in December 2013. This delayed our ability to pin down accountability, and thus take the legal action just announced.

Secondly, before we were appointed in Sep-tember 2012, the Mangawhai Ratepayers and Residents Association (MRRA) had called for people to go on a “rates strike”. The impact of this on Council finances caused Commissioners to defer capital works on our road network. While most ratepayers did not take up this call, there re-main a number of property owners who refuse to pay any rates, and have not done so now for two to three years. The largest of these owes in ex-cess of $200,000, and fifteen others owe on average of over $12,000.

Thirdly, MRRA launched Judicial Review proceedings against Council. These proceedings imposed large costs on the Council. The High Court met for three and a half days to hear the case, and made its rulings. Council accepted these rulings, and was under the impression that this “day in Court” would be the end of the matter for MRRA. Not so. Unhappy with the High Court’s rulings, the MRRA Executive has lodged an appeal. The Council will once again incur the cost of defending its position.

As Commissioners, we are dealing as best we can to the past. We do so with the goal of getting Council into good shape for Kaipara’s Local Body elections to be held next year. It would be helpful if those property owners not paying rates paid up, and it would be helpful if MRRA reversed its decision to appeal the High Court’s rulings.

That would leave us with a clear focus in terms of dealing to history – one of seeking to recover cost from those who failed in their duties.

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