Council considers Long Term Plan submissions

More than 100 submitters presented to Council during four days of hearings for the draft 2024 - 34 Long Term Plan (LTP) last week.

Council received 365 submissions on the LTP with 167 focused on Marlborough Sounds roads. Councillors completed three days of general LTP hearings and one day for the Sounds roading recovery.

Mayor Nadine Taylor said, like most councils across New Zealand, Marlborough had faced challenges in preparing its LTP including inflation, rising contract prices and insurance premiums, plus the need to achieve full depreciation on the region’s water assets.

“To add to the challenges, this Council also needs to unwind the Covid Rates Relief Fund. This was a subsidy set up in 2020 to keep rates below the cost of inflation whilst we dealt with the immediate impacts of Covid,” Mayor Taylor said.

“The biggest question before us is how to fund the hundreds of millions of dollars of damage to our roading network in the Sounds as a result of the 2021 and 2022 storms. We know we need to give certainty to the affected Sounds communities, and we want to get on and get those roads fixed. It is regrettable these challenges have all landed on Council, and on our community now, and at a time when people are already facing cost of living pressures,” she said.

Currently a rates increase of 12.58 per cent is proposed, not including Sounds road repairs. “If those road repairs go ahead as proposed an additional 0.37 per cent will apply, bringing this year’s average increase to 12.95 per cent. This rate increase sits below the average rates rise across the rest of New Zealand of 15 per cent but it is still a significant and challenging increase for our communities.”

Mayor Taylor told the hearings that Council could not choose which challenges were put before it, it could only choose how it dealt with those challenges in collaboration with the Marlborough community.

“It is now our responsibility to assess and weigh up the 365 submissions we have received on our proposed LTP as well as the many additional funding requests we have received from submitters, and to make the necessary decisions for Marlborough,” she said.

Council will deliberate on the submissions at a public meeting on Monday 24 June, with decisions ratified by full Council on Thursday 27 June.