Saturday August 12, 2006

Soaring rates: Keeping account the weakest link

One of the biggest bugbears for ratepayers is how councils spend their hard-earned money. A frequent perception is a lot of it goes down a bottomless drain, wasted on other people's visions or spent on councillors flying around the world on research jaunts.

For local body consultant Larry Mitchell, who narrowly lost a bid to be mayor of Rodney at the last elections, the gripe is the lack of decent performance measures.

The only real accountability councillors have is whether the public vote them on or off at election time and accountability, Mitchell says, is the missing link. "It's so easy for councils to say, 'Let's blame Government for loading stuff on to us."

"They have a point, but they're in no position to demonstrate what effect that might have in terms of good cost accounting and performance management criteria. You're left in the dark as to whether your council is good, bad or indifferent."

Take Rodney District Council, Mitchell says. Staff numbers have gone up 60 per cent in the past five or six years but the number of ratepayers, the people who pay the bills, has gone up only 12 per cent.

Yet there are no adequate measures of the cost-effectiveness of staff.

Mitchell says that public satisfaction surveys are not the same thing.

It's probably easier for smaller councils with less money to keep track of cost-effectiveness, but bigger councils have a lot of money and "have what we call the $150,000 desk syndrome - that is, every time they take another employee on they either have to give them a car, an office, or both.

"It's no wonder the rates are going through the roof because we're getting bloated bureaucracies which are not being asked to perform to reasonable criteria."

Local government consultant Peter McKinlay says half Auckland's problem is that it aspires to be an international city. For that there is a price-tag.

Any city with these aspirations has to spend lots more on things to which other cities will say, "No, we can't afford it", such as culture and recreation. In return, high-skilled people are prepared to live and work there, but that's little consolation for the bus driver or sole parent at the lower end of the income scale.

We have not had anything like the kind of public debate needed on this, he says. It's a choice people have to make - "we can decide we will become a backwater in relative terms and the Auckland economy will continue to slip, or, we can decide that we're going to go for it but gosh, there's going to be a cost associated with it and a good part of that cost is going to have to be born locally."