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www.nelsonresidents.co.nz

Town Crier Newsletter of the Nelson Residents Association

Vol 2 Issue 2 Free - Your donation is welcome Please Read and Pass on to Others

Good, bad and ugly - page 7 Special Membership Offer – page 8 Stop the Drop – page 4

A Good News Story Here at the Nelson Residents Association we often get tarred with the reputation of being negative all the time so it is with pleasure that we can report on a positive development. The draft Annual Plan for 2017/2018 shows that Nelson Residential and Commercial ratepayers will experience a slight reduction in their water bills in 2017/2018, whilst large industrial users will experience an increase. We welcome this move to rebalance water rates between domestic users and the large industrial users. There is no rational economic argument as to why large users should pay a lower unit charge than everyone else, so this first step towards removing the subsidy that domestic water users are giving to large industry is most welcome.

Domestic and commercial users will experience a drop in their water charge from $2.036/cubic metre to $1.970/cubic metre whilst large industrial users, using more than 10,000 cubic metres per annum will face an increase from $1.198 per cubic metre to $1.228/cubic metre.

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This is a good start but the rebalancing needs to continue. Nelson stands alone amongst all other major Councils in providing subsidised water to large users. The drop in consumption charge will save the average domestic user around $10/annum - a modest sum but in the right direction.

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Guide to the LGOIMA Have you ever wanted to know information about something that the Council (or a Council Controlled organisation) does but don't know how to go about it? Just as Government Departments in NZ are subject to the Official Information Act 1982, Local Councils in NZ are subject to the Local Government Official Information and Meetings Act 1987 (known as "LGOIMA"). The main entities within Nelson that are subject to the LGOIMA are Nelson City Council; Nelson Airport Ltd; Nelmac; Nelson Regional Economic Development Agency; Tourism Nelson Tasman Ltd; The Bishop Suter Trust; and the Tasman Bays Heritage Trust. Due to a legislative quirk, even though Port Nelson Ltd is jointly owned by Tasman District Council and Nelson City Council, it is not subject to either the OIA or the LGOIMA. Note that Government Departments; District Health Boards; colleges; polytechs, and Boards of Trustees of state schools are all subject to the Official Information Act, not the LGOIMA. All information held by these entities is subject to an information request. There are some prescribed reasons for an entity to refuse to supply information but these are limited. Even information that was considered in "public excluded" meetings has to be disclosed unless there are good reasons for

not disclosing it. The over-riding principle of the LGOIMA is that information shall be made available unless there is good reason for withholding it.1 If your information request is declined, you have a right of appeal to the Ombudsman. Several NRA members have found in the past that NCC has declined to make information available but that information has become available after an appeal to the Ombudsman. Official Information can be very broad and is not limited to documentary material. It includes material held in any format such as:

written documents;

reports, memoranda, letters, notes, emails and draft documents;

non-written documentary information, such as material stored on or generated by computers, including databases, video or tape recording;

information which is known to an agency, but which has not yet been recorded in writing or otherwise (including knowledge of a particular matter held by an officer, employee or member of an agency in their official capacity);

documents and manuals which set out the policies, principles, rules or guidelines for decision making by an agency; and

the reasons for any decisions that have been made about a person.2

Councils may charge for their time in answering an LGOIMA request but need to inform you beforehand what their expected charge will be. In practice NCC usually provides responses to LGOIMA requests without charge. Councils can take up to 20 working days to answer an LGOIMA request, and normally do take this long.

1 Sec 5 LGOIMA

2 The LGOIMA for Local Government Agencies, Ombudsman's

Office

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You can make a LGOIMA request by phone but it is better to send an e-mail with "LGOIMA Request" in the subject line. Send e-mail requests to enquiry@ncc.govt.nz A full description of the LGOIMA is available for download from the Ombudsman's Office at: http://www.ombudsman.parliament.nz/resources-and-publications/guides/official-information-legislation-guides under the title "The LGOIMA for local government agencies".

Remember to contact our tip-line if you unearth anything that should have wider public distribution.

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NRA Submission to Annual Plan

The Nelson Residents Association recently submitted on the draft Annual Plan and Budget for 2017/2018. The key thrusts of our submission were: 1. Staffing Costs The draft 2017/2018 budget projected staffing costs of $19.713 million. By way of comparison, actual staffing costs for recent years are as follows:

2013/2014 2014/2015 2015/2016

$15.718m $15.549m $16.249m

The planned budget represents a 21.3% or $3.50 million increase over the 2015/2016 actual. The Plan contained no explanation for this increase. NRA has highlighted this as something that requires explanation.

2. Debt For the eighth year in a row NCC has been unable to balance its budget. Projected debt at the end of 2017/2018 is $120 million, a massive increase from 2008 when debt was a modest $36.7 million. To quote Cameron Bagrie, Economist for the ANZ Bank: "When you borrow, you basically borrow from the future. But there is a limit as to how long you can play that card, because the more you borrow from the future, the less there is for the future.“ The NRA feels that NCC has a casual attitude towards debt and doesn't do enough to prioritise expenditure before resorting to debt to "balance the books". Our submission contained examples of a number of areas where wasteful expenditure is occurring and areas where Council should review whether or not it is receiving value for money. 3. Slush Funds The NRA has identified several areas in the budget where large sums of money have been allocated for unspecified purposes. For example, in the Parks and Active Recreation budget, a sum of $1.936 million is budgeted in 2017/2018 for "projects under $100,000". A further $792,000 is budgeted for Social projects under $100,000 and $725,000 for Corporate projects under $100,000. This means that some $3.50 million is budgeted for miscellaneous projects in the Parks and Recreation, Social and Corporate area. In the three years to 30 June 2016 at total of $8.50 million has been spent on minor projects under these headings. Meantime, many ratepayers who have been trying to get broken footpaths fixed or minor stormwater works undertaken to stop their properties being flooded are told there is no money in the 10 year Plan to do these works. It is clear a lot of money is going into "nice to haves" rather than long overdue infrastructure works.

We hope to be able to report in the next issue of Town Crier that our submission has had some effect - we will see.

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Sanctuary poison drop A public meeting will be held at 3pm on Sunday 21 May at the Masonic Hall, 107 Nile St in relation to the planned drop of 26.5 tonnes of Brodifacoum poison bait into the headwaters of the Brook Valley. This poisoning of our environment will be facilitated by the proposed increase in operational funding of the Brook Waimarama Sanctuary Trust ("BWST") by Council. Council proposes to treble its annual operational grant to the BWST to $250,000 per annum. The Nelson Residents Assn has urged Council to tie the increase in funding to the BWST to a requirement to use a more acceptable means of pest eradication. Recent developments, such as Good Nature traps, have shown that pest eradication can be achieved without resorting to highly toxic poisons. Brodifacoum is a really horrible poison. It kills animals painfully and slowly. It sets the standard for inhumanity to other living beings. Many of the birds the Sanctuary is supposed to protect will die from primary or secondary poisoning. Also, Brodifacoum is insoluble, breaking down slowly, and is retained in carcasses, in the soil or in sediment which will make its way downstream into Tasman Bay and beyond. All living creatures along the way including fish, invertebrates and humans are at risk.

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Protest the permit to protest

Submissions are open until 5pm on the 29 May regarding the planned City Amenity Bylaw. Whilst the NRA supports the general thrust of the bylaw and understands the issues that the proposed bylaw is trying to address, we feel it has gone too far in imposing restrictions around the right to protest. In particular, the proposed requirement to obtain a "permit to protest" from Council raises many concerns. Will a permit application ever be declined? If not, what is the point of having a permitting system? If it will be declined, who makes that decision and on what grounds? We believe that the proposed bylaw has sufficient teeth in it to deal with the problem of inner city freedom camping and vagrancy without limiting the right to protest. The NRA supports an amendment to the proposed bylaw to make it more consistent with a similar bylaw in Wellington, which has been proven to work well, without unduly restricting the right to protest.

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If you feel strongly about preserving freedoms make sure that you attend the protest meeting on 27 May and make a submission. The link to make an online submission is http://nelson.govt.nz/council/consultations/draft-city-amenity-bylaw?stage=Stage

Credit: The Anonymous Cartoonist @theanonymouscartoonist

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Code of Conduct

The NRA has been very concerned for some time now about NCC's Code of Conduct and its "gagging" clauses which potentially hinder Councillors from expressing dissenting views. We see it as core to a functioning local democracy that Councillors can freely express dissent. NRA has made a number of representations to Council in this regard. We have also been concerned that, under the Code of Conduct, Councillors could find themselves being disciplined through some sort of "kangaroo court" when they don't toe the line. So we were stunned to learn that on 5 April NCC used Mr Brendon Duffy to

"facilitate" a recent Workshop on the Code of Conduct. Mr Duffy was Mayor of Horowhenua District Council ("HDC") until he was voted out of office last October. He is now associated with Local Government NZ. Mr Duffy is well experienced in Codes of Conduct, after being named in a 2014 Ombudsman's report into how a dissenting HDC Councillor, Anne Hunt, was treated through a Code of Conduct Complaints process. Mr Duffy, and his Deputy Mayor Barry Judd, sat on a Code of Conduct Committee that considered three complaints against Cr Anne Hunt (a councillor who Mr Duffy had been critical of in the past). To quote from the Ombudsman's report: "A fair-minded lay observer would have reasonably apprehended that the Mayor, Mr Brendan Duffy, and the Deputy Mayor, Mr Barry Judd, might not have brought an impartial mind to the consideration of the complaints referred to the Committee. Accordingly, their failure to disqualify themselves from being members of the Committee was unreasonable in terms of the Ombudsmen Act". " As Mr Duffy and Mr Judd did not disqualify themselves from being members of the Committee, the Committee’s resolutions were unreasonable in terms of the Ombudsmen Act." We remain hopeful that NCC, in undertaking a review of its Code of Conduct, will agree a more permissive version of its current Code, rather than leave in place a mechanism whereby dissenting Councillors can be kneecapped.

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Donations The Nelson Residents Association welcomes donations to help us represent ratepayers. Donations can be made to our bank account 03-0703-0313476-00.

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Stoke Loop Bus

In a news scoop brought to you by the NRA we can report that Council's own analysis shows just how costly to ratepayers some N-Bus routes are. Fare recovery on the Stoke Loop North route only meets 3% of the costs of operation, meaning that ratepayers are subsidising every passenger by $44.11 per trip. The Stoke Loop South route isn't much better, costing ratepayers $17.31 per passenger per trip. How do we know this? From information presented at the Annual Plan Workshop held on 8 February. This is why it is so important that Workshops remain open to the public as ratepayers would never otherwise know about extravagances like this. We hope that Council will face reality and shut down these uneconomic routes asap before much more ratepayer funding is consumed.

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SHAs rear their ugly heads again Very few residents are likely to understand the full implications of the Housing Accord and Special Housing Areas Act ("HASHA") until they find out that a Special Housing Area ("SHA") designation has been sought for an area near them. The HASHA legislation was supposed to be an instrument for increasing the availability of affordable housing. Instead it has become a mechanism whereby developers can over-ride all planning rules and the public can do very little about it. We

were disappointed that NCC, in recently renewing its Housing Accord and thereby continuing with the HASHA process, didn't seek to include affordability or social housing criteria in its Accord. This is in contrast to what other local authorities, such as Queenstown and Tauranga, have done. NCC seems to still favour the "free for all" approach. Atawhai residents near the proposed SHA at 12 Wakapuaka Rd have overwhelmingly opposed the proposed designation. As many of the Atawhai residents have found, the SHA process gives little opportunity for genuine consultation and there is usually very little information available for the public to give feedback on. We will await with interest to see what Council decides in respect to this proposal when it meets on 8 June. Unfortunately this is unlikely to be the last that we will hear of SHAs.

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Don't miss out on future newsletters Get your Town Crier by e-mail and never miss out on getting an issue. Send an e-mail to us at NelsonResidentsOffice@gmail.com with "Town Crier" in the subject heading and we will put you on our e-mail list. You can unsubscribe at any time.

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Having trouble reading this Newsletter? In order to keep printing costs down the format of our Newsletter has been kept small. Go to the NRA Facebook page https://www.facebook.com/NelsonResidentsAssn and you will be able to access an online copy of this Newsletter which you can enlarge on your screen.

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The Good, the Bad and the Downright Ugly At the risk of appearing biased, our bouquet for good performance this issue goes to ex-NRA member and new Councillor Stuart Walker for his efforts in having the ill-considered Anzac Park Cycleway decision rescinded. At its meeting held on 15 December approved expenditure of $255,000 on a cycleway adjacent to Anzac Park on Haven Rd. This proposed route would have seen the loss of 7 trees from the edge of Anzac Park, along with the loss of between 14 and 18 carparks. Councillors voted 11-2 in favour of this option, with Councillors Acland and Lawrey voting against the proposal. In Cr Acland's view the Haven Rd shared path proposal was a "poor infrastructure option and a waste of ratepayer's money". Kudos to Cr Walker for reconsidering this decision and promoting a notice of motion, considered at the 2 March meeting of Council, to revoke the decision to build the Haven Rd cycleway. The motion was passed unanimously. All credit to Council to be willing to reconsider a decision in the face of public reaction. However, we can't help but think that the original decision should have been more fully considered and debated. Unfortunately, papers on this project were part of a 650 page Agenda. It is unrealistic to expect Councillors to be making considered decisions when swamped with so much paperwork at short notice. Overall we are impressed with the new Councillors, who have shown themselves ready to query and challenge management at times. Cr Dahlberg rightly refused to be pushed into making an "on the hoof" decision about the proposed City Amenity Bylaw when it was presented to Council as a Late Agenda item on 23 March. Both Cr Dahlberg and Cr Rutledge have been asking probing questions of staff at Council meetings. Cr Courtney has also shown that he is not there to "rubber

stamp" decisions and he has been quite prepared to enter into vigorous debate. On the other side, we are not impressed with management's efforts to prevent the public from attending "Workshops". E-mails released under the LGOIMA show that, following the attendance the Annual Plan Workshop on 8 February by several NRA members, management went into almost panic mode and wrote a draft Mayor's report recommending exclusion of the public from future Workshops. Deputy Mayor Matheson bought into this strategy when he excluded the public from attending the Code of Conduct Workshop on 5 April. No doubt there will continue to be strong pressure from staff to prevent the public gatecrashing their secret tete-a-tetes with Councillors.

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Diary Key dates coming up are:

21 May "Stop the Drop" Public Meeting 27 May Protest the Permit to Protest 29 May Submissions close on City Amenity

Bylaw 8 June Council meeting (covering Wakapuaka

SHA) 13 June NRA Monthly meeting 7pm at NRA

Offices, Buxton Square 21 June Council meeting to hear submissions

on City Amenity Bylaw

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TIPLINE Feel free to contact us at nelsonresidentsassociation@gmail.com with any issues you think we should be concerned about

Editor: Steve Cross

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