Draft Long Term Plan 2024 / 2034

*The engagement period for the Draft LTP closed on April 15. The next step in the process is for submissions to be heard by the Council before any final decisions are made. Hearings take place on 8 and 9 May.*

Kia ora Waimakariri,

We present Waimakariri District Council’s 2024-2034 draft Long Term Plan (LTP).

Every three years the Council is required to create a Long Term Plan that outlines the planned investments and activities we provide on behalf of the community over the next decade.

Before we get into this plan though, it’s important we put our LTP into perspective.

Central government reform programmes that impact the core of what we do as a council have been stopped and are being rescoped as part of a new government. This includes Three Waters, Resource Management Act (RMA) reform and a review into Civil Defence.

In relation to the Three Water reform, our Council along with Communities for Local Democracy (C4LD) impressed upon the previous government that it is important to our communities to retain ownership and control over its community assets now and in the future.

It’s important to our Council that ‘localism’ as opposed to centralisation of services remains. This has been a core theme in our feedback into these processes especially as it related to Three Waters reform where we asked our community for feedback and it was almost unanimously opposed. We are proud of the role we have played in this.

At the start of considering our draft LTP we reviewed our community outcomes—these are the high level objectives of the Council that guides our decision making.

Through this process, we listened to the community to best understand what your priorities are, and we’ve put in place outcomes we believe will improve the social, cultural, environmental, and economic landscape for Waimakariri residents—now and for the future.

We are concurrently working on the District Plan Review—our key planning document which enables economic and residential growth. This also takes into account our community outcomes to ensure Waimakariri grows in a way that preserves the uniqueness of our District.

Since 2016 Council’s Customer Satisfaction Survey has shown a high satisfaction rate. The most recent result was in 2023 and came in at 86% in overall satisfaction.

It is important that we continue to provide good public services and that residents are happy with the services we provide.

Residents want the Council to maintain our levels of service while we continue to grow.

When we adopted the last LTP there was a degree of economic uncertainty because of Covid-19 impacts and global supply chain issues. Since then, we have seen improvements in some sectors, but the economic environment has been significantly impacted by high inflation fuelled by the global cost of living crisis.

While business confidence has remained buoyant in the Waimakariri District, we have not been immune to the impacts.

Maintaining our Council’s sound financial management is key to what we do. Credit rating agency Standard & Poor’s recently confirmed the AA long-term and A-1+ short term credit rating with a stable outlook for the Council. Retaining this demonstrates we are achieving on this front.

It’s important we maintain this as it affects the rates at which the Council can borrow.

What impact is this all having on our plan for the next 10 years?

In 2021, we had originally signalled a rate increase of 4.2%, that was set in an environment of low interest rates and low inflation.

The last three years has seen inflation rise significantly. All households and businesses have felt this, and Councils aren’t immune to inflation either.

We’ve seen a large jump in local government costs. The Local Government Cost Index (LGCI) always runs higher than the Consumer Price Index (CPI), and we’ve prepared this draft LTP with this in mind.

Key contributors to the Council’s costs include:

• Insurance premiums increasing by 60%
• Labour market costs going up by 11%
• Construction costs have increased by approximately 30–40%.

These are the main issues forcing rates to increase.

We started this LTP with a proposed 19% rate increase based on our current work programme. For this reason, we have deferred $120 million of non-essential works to outer years to bring our rate increases to what we understand will be one of the lowest in Canterbury. This is all without lowering our current levels of service.

We are still however proposing spending around $693m (capital expenditure) over the next 10 years — evenly spread out between replacement of assets,increasing levels of service and growth.

Based on the Council’s preferred options going into this draft LTP, our proposed rates increase is now 8.94% - that’s about $247 a year or $4.75 per week for the average Waimakariri household.

This is a 10 year plan and the increase this coming year is the largest before we return to a projected amount closer to the 4% mark in coming years.

It’s taken a lot of work, and we’ve had to defer, re-scope, and re-jig our work programme to ensure a rates increase doesn’t disproportionately hurt households during a time when the costs of living are challenging enough.

We’ve put some projects off because we simply can’t afford it at this time. We have also ensured that the Council continues to deliver high levels of service while prioritising growth-related projects, so Waimakariri remains a great place to be. We are also still repaying loans to recover from the Earthquakes and payoff MainPower Stadium.

We have however, included key projects such as the Rangiora Eastern Link road (subject to receiving subsidy) to help address traffic congestion. This is one of our main topics for engagement and we’re interested to see what the community thinks about this project.

Below you will see the Key Issues we want your feedback on in this LTP. You'll also see other topics of interest that affect how we operate on behalf of the community.

The Council’s Draft Long Term Plan delivers a budget that’s prudent and responsible for the current environment. We look forward to your submissions and to working with you to decide where and what we should focus on over the coming 10 years.

Ngā mihi

Dan Gordon, Mayor

Jeff Millward, Chief Executive