Ratepayer rebel group to probe City efficiency

Press, 14 January 1986, Page 5

Ratepayer rebel group to probe City efficiency

The leaders of Christchurch’s rebel ratepayers have set up a committee to investigate the efficiency of the Christchurch City Council.

Messrs Kim Pettengell, chairman of the Merivale Precinct Society, and Donald Walker, chairman of the Sumner-Mount Pleasant Rates Action Committee, have formed the Christchurch Ratepayers’ Protection Committee.

The committee at present numbers four including an executive director, Mr Roy Hughes, and Messrs Pettengell and Walker. Mr Hughes’s task is to investigate the services provided by the council to determine whether ratepayers receive value for money.

Mr Pettengell said yesterday that the committee was formed because the question of council efficiency had not been answered during the rates debate.

“We want to know why the services from the City Council apparently cost more than the same services from Waimairi,” he said.

The two ratepayer groups had each pursued the question of the inequity of the rates system. However, the

effective use of the rates collected was a separate issue and best investigated by a separate body, Mr Pettengell said. Information brought to light during the amalgamation debate threw serious doubts on the value City ratepayers were getting for their money, he said. Mr Hughes said his job was to co-ordinate the investigation. As a publicrelations consultant and journalist, he was able to get information that ratepayer groups could not, he said.

His interest was personal because he was a city ratepayer and one of the "10 per cent” protesters. Mr Hughes is also the public relations consultant acting for the Heathcote and Riccarton councils in their bid to put a case against amalgamation, favoured by the City, to the public. He was previously employed by the Lyttelton and Paparua councils in the same role.

The apparent intention of the Local Government Commission’s chairman, Mr Brian Elwood, to impose a bigger bureaucracy on the ratepayers of Christchurch made a full investigation of

relative cost efficiencies imperative, Mr Hughes said.

“The City Council claimed it did not have the resources to do the research to prove its one-city concept was best for Christchurch and they expect us to take their arguments on trust.

“But the Waimairi District Council was able to fund a study of the issue and their finding was the administering of an amalgamated city would be even more costly than the bureaucratic burden Christchurch City ratepayers are now carrying,” Mr Hughes said.

It was essential that the ratepayers, who had the final say, were fully informed, he said.

The committee would conduct its investigations through the news media by asking questions of the council about its spending. It could be particularly effective in an election year, Mr Hughes said. He did not discount the possibility of the committee becoming involved with independent candidates standing for the council in the October local body elections.