We have become so used to price increases that no one has even commented on the Higher Salaries Commission recommending honorarium increases for mayors and councillors.
Richard Steele
From, it sounds like , between one and 30 per cent for both regional, and district councillors. I find that deeply troubling because the increases come at a time when councils everywhere seem to be failing to fulfil their core functions.
You don’t have to look very far, or listen for long about the three waters debacle, and the off shoots of that sadness that shows up decades of poor decision making, coming home to haunt hard pressed ratepayers.
Look for a moment, at the roads that connect us, infrastructure that’s been neglected for so long that the cost of returning the roads to a good standard is going to be more expensive than it was to build them in the first place.
I look out the window every day at a river that flows mud every time it rains heavily, and it seems to get no better for the decades of rates paid to restore the rivers to their former glory.
That the suggestions I’ve made to isolate water degradation at their source have been ignored, is only a frustration, and sad, for the rivers of our beloved country. But the rivers degrade non the less under regional councils’ watch, and the fact that I don’t have a doctorate should not preclude me from commenting.
The list of councils failings goes on of course, and every ratepayer I meet has their own story, their own example, of what’s going on in their neighbourhood.
That there’s too much sewage, so you can’t swim safely in your own waterway, is an indictment that councils nationwide have never handled.
I don’t have any trouble with people being compensated for the work they do in the neighbourhood communities they serve, it’s just that as an older self-employed person, forever, I just wish people were paid for the outcomes that they actually achieved, rather than be paid whether they achieve anything or not.
It may be naive of me to expect our councillors to have enough business acumen, to have had a degree of personal success, before they aspired to public office, to actually make a difference. I live in the hope that I won’t be disappointed again.
And while I have no objection to any one being paid for their civic duty, I would object to that being their only source of income.
Reject the extra money. Now there’s a challenge. I really wonder, sometimes, whether our local government is even fit for the purpose it was designed for.
