Community board model studied
Hopes are high for a re-examination of TDC’s relationship with its community boards.
Mayor Richard Kempthorne and council CEO Paul Wylie recently returned from a four-day visit to Southland where they familiarised themselves with the Southland District Council’s (SDC’s) governance model, which is regarded as a successful one.
“The SDC is often spoken of as a council that has good working relationships with its community boards and associations,” said Mr Kempthorne. “We decided to go and see for ourselves. We attended community board meetings on Stewart Island and in Winton and we’ve come home with some interesting ideas. It’s still a tricky process balancing the needs of community boards and community associations, and we have to work through our differing understandings of the costs associated with delegation—in fact our definition of delegation—but I’m sure we can make progress. The key will be mutual respect and goodwill. I’ll be reporting to the council on the 20th of this month. The CEO will now work up how we can proceed.”
To get a picture of how things work in Southland, The GB Weekly spoke to John McHugh, the chair of the Winton board that represents about 9000 people in Central Southland, and Michael Whale, who chairs the board in the Wallace ward.
“The SDC and its community boards get along exceptionally well and always have done. It’s part of the culture here,” said Mr McHugh. “Our mayor, Frana Cardno, has been in office a long time but we’ve had two or three CEOs in that time. The Winton board considers itself very fortunate with its parent body.”
The Southland District, geographically the largest in the country, has 12 community boards, 16 community development area subcommittees and various other committees. Mr McHugh explained that district councillors, who meet in Invercargill, were kept busy on “big picture” matters to do with “the regulatory side of things”.
“They don’t want to be talking about potholes in Winton or which of our streets’ footpath gets resurfaced this year,” he said. “The community board is made up of people who know what’s been tried before and what works. We’re an important link, a main way the council can communicate back to its ratepayers. We’re funded out of the rate take in our area and we decide how that money is spent.”
Mr Whale said that community board meetings were attended by a designated member of the council’s engineering staff, another support staff member who took the minutes, and the ward councillor.
“The councillor is an ex-officio member of the community board, so he gets to speak and vote the same as the elected board members,” said Mr Whale. “If he then went to a council meeting and changed his mind about an issue that was important to this ward he would expect to get a hard time at the next board meeting.”
“We probably save the councillors from a lot of work,” said Mr McHugh.
Golden Bay Community Board chair Joe Bell said that his board had been interested in the ways other councils and boards work for some time.
“We drew the examples of the Southland District and Christchurch City to the attention of TDC through the Representation Review process. When we learned about the example of the Waimakariri District and its community board in Kaiapoi we put forward a model based on their delegations. This was during our brief discussion with council about delegation. The Local Government Commission recommended greater delegation to community boards in the Tasman District but that has been resisted by TDC.”
Mr Bell went on to talk about the way community boards are funded in Southland.
“The administrative costs of the boards are not covered by targeted rates but local projects are. An example might be a footpath project that could be covered by a targeted rate in the same way as the Hamama Road sealing was. We don’t have a problem with that provided there’s a pro rata reduction in the general rate to take account of that. Also the practice must be fairly applied across the district. Wards with community boards should not be singled out for targeted rate projects over wards without community boards.”
When the Mayor reports to council on this matter at the meeting on 20 August, Mr Bell and his counterpart in Motueka, David Ogilvie, will be present by invitation.
“The Golden Bay board operates as a team and so we’d prefer that we were all at the council meeting on the 20th,” said Mr Bell. “We’d like to see improved relations put into effect.”
TDC CEO Paul Wylie said that the SDC governance arrangement works so well because it is a fundamentally different system.
“We have two out of our five wards with community boards where the SDC has 12 boards and 16 community development associations. They cover basically every settlement in the area. The community boards have a prescribed list of functions and they spend the rate that is designated for those functions in their area.”
Mr Wylie also said that what he and the Mayor had seen was obviously a successful model but that it was not like “a magic wand” that could be waved over the Tasman District.
“The devil is in the detail,” he said. “With the delegation of the work comes the responsibility for explaining to the ratepayers in your area why their rates are going up. It’s really a user-pays system. While it’s great for local democracy, it’s definitely more cumbersome and bureaucratic because most of the powers being exercised by the community boards would otherwise be exercised by staff acting under delegated authority. To change things in Tasman along these lines would not be just a minor change to the way we work in Motueka and Golden Bay. It would probably mean fundamental district-wide change. Whatever we decide to do, has to work for everyone. There’s a bit of a two-edged sword in the Southland system because while it’s wonderful for some settlements it could be disastrous for others. Our 10-year plan is firmly based on the principle that we’ve got something going for every one of our 17 settlements. It’s not just a matter of one size fits all.”
Seeking a solution to the “unhappiness” in the relationship between council and its community boards has already been a lengthy process, said Mr Wylie.
“We started working on this about eight months ago, way before the Auckland super-city business,” he said. “We’re working hard on it now and as soon as we’ve got something meaningful we’ll be talking to everyone concerned.”
Neil Wilson
