Published on 13 February 2025
Councillors are back from their summer break, and we’ve kicked the year off with a very busy Ordinary Council meeting. Work now starts with our planning for the next financial year.
Our Draft Community Strategic Plan as well as an asset and a service level survey are currently out for public comment. Please tell us what you think, as these are both designed to guide our planning for next year.
As you can imagine, our key role – once again - is to find some more money to put onto the roads. We have been tightening our belts with our non-road budgets for the last few years, but this only leads to small incremental monetary gains. This year we may need to consider reducing our discretionary services. Many of our services are required by legislation, so we will be concentrating on areas that will impact residents the least.
I have heard some recent complaints that our roads staff just don’t know how to do their job. I find it sad that people want to blame staff. We have many very skilled and dedicated staff who do a wonderful job with the limited funds we Councillors provide to them – and in the face of ongoing criticism.
Staff know they need larger budgets for the roads, and they know exactly how they would spend this to improve our roads network. Much of this is set out in our comprehensive Roads Strategy. Unfortunately, we Councillors have not been able to provide the necessary funds at the same time as maintaining all our existing services at their current levels. Unfortunately, we have over 3,600kms of road and a comparatively small Rates base to fund our work. The money does not go far enough.
We have measures in place to increase efficiency and cut out any wasted spending, but again this only provides incremental gains. There is no magic bullet, but we will continue to seek out innovative ideas and endeavor to find acceptable solutions to this dilemma.