Waimairi plan affects future of Christchurch

Press, 25 August 1976, Page 16

Waimairi plan affects future of Christchurch

By

RAY DOBBIE,

our local bodies reporter

The Waimairi County Council's decision to consider the implications of asking for city status is bound to revive a request made to the Local Government Commission in 1972 for the creation of three councils to control Metropolitan Christchurch.

The request was made to the commission by the Paparua County Council when the commission was hearing submissions on its controversial plans to reorganise local government in North Canterbury. Paparua’s idea got nowhere, though it was seen in some quarters as inconsistent for the commission to create new cities at Auckland and Wellington, and to deny them to Christchurch. The old commission had very little support for its scheme of four counties between the Rakaia and Conway rivers, and a City of Christchurch enlarged to five times its present size, extending from the Waimakariri to Port Levy.

The commission’s ideas passed into limbo when its North Canterbury scheme was cancelled by the Government and a new commission set up.

Paparua has not changed its mind. The council considers that as it is one of New Zealand's largest counties in terms of its 34,000 population, and is efficiently run. it should not be fragmented.

Both Paparua and Waimairi made the point in their 1972 submissions that close contact with residents was essential to good local government, and that a city of the size proposed by the commission would be too big and remote from its people, and with a city council swayed by party politics, anathema to the counties.

Waimairi supported Paparua’s view that the best form of local government for the city would be through three councils, in effect, the Christchurch City Council and Paparua and Waimairi. City status w’as not then put forward as a goal for the two counties.

Under the three - council concept, the two county councils agreed, there was room to take in the Borough of Riccarton and possibly Lyttelton, as well as Heathcote County. The City Council, which stood to gain Waimairi, urban Paparua, Riccarton, Lyttelton and all of Heathcote and Mount Herbert counties, told the commission that it did not want Mount Herbert. All the talk was useless. The commsision’s final scheme was as per the draft, but it added a small bit of Mount Herbert, overlooked the first time, as part of the city. Now there is a new commission. charged mainly with trying to settle regional government disputes on a national basis, but local bodies are not convinced that they have a commission that is prepared to listen, and not be dogmatic. This scepticism extends to Mr Hugh Fullarton, chairman of both the old and new commissions. “He always says he has an open mind, and is prepared to listen—but he never changes his mind,” said one councillor with long experience of the commission. Before Waimairi becomes a city, there would have to be another round of talks and submissions. It is amply clear that the City Council would bitterly oppose city status for its neighbour, or, for that matter, Paparua going it alone.

Without amalgamations, there is little room for the City Council to expand its territory. The city boundary with Waimairi is a hit and miss affair, drawn to meet much earlier Local Government Commission requirements. and could well be revised. Just how far the two councils could go on give and take is open to question. The boundary is all urban, except in the north-east comer, and that is rapidly going urban. The Bottle Lake plantations, owned by the City Council, are in the county. Waimairi. with a population of 70,000, passed the

point 30 years ago where, in other surroundings, it could have become a city. Its growth has meant almost complete urbanisation, except along its western and northern boundaries where urban development has been restricted by rural zoning outside the Regional Planning Authority’s urban fence.

In this growth were the seeds of the council’s discontent with the Counties’ Association as a forum for its problems. The council’s decision to withdraw its membership of the association is a logical conclusion to this dissatisfaction.

Of recent years, the association, realising that its mainly rural-minded councils cared little for urban problems, established an urban counties group for counties with a population of 20,000 or more.

While this has eased the frustrations of the urban counties, Waimairi has lost tin backing of similar truly urban counties, such as Waitemata, Hutt and Manukau, which have disappeared into commission - created cities.

Another defect is that Southland and Hawke’s Bay counties, for example, are classed as urban counties, but they are almost wholly rural in outlook. Paparua, one of the urban group, does not share Waimairi’s dislike of the set-up.

If Waimairi did, by some chance, become a city, the council would have to do without its cherished riding accounts system, under which each riding councillor, in effect, decides the riding rate, and the riding works estimates.

A majority of the councillors are reluctant to abandon this relic of the old days, which means different rates for different ridings, and endless friction.

An immediate effect of nonmembership of the association will be the resignation of Waimairi’s chairman (Mr D. B. Rich) as the urban counties’ representative on the association’s executiva.