A looming double-digit rates hike is enough to raise Southland farmers’ hackles, but proposed changes to flood protection are also proving a hot topic.
Environment Southland’s Long-Term Plan (LTP) includes a move to replace 140 existing catchment rates with a single new flood protection infrastructure rate, based on property capital value.
Federated Farmers Southland life member David Rose is deeply concerned by this “one bucket” approach to catchment management.
“This proposal undermines the important principles that people who benefit most from a service should pay the most, and people paying deserve a close say in how the money is spent,” Rose says.
“Call it socialism, regionalisation, ‘we’re all in this together’ or whatever else you like but it doesn’t seem right that someone sitting behind a stopbank in Gore, for example, pays the same rate on capital value as someone 100km away with little or nothing by way of flood protection.”
Rose, a former Federated Farmers national board member, is also concerned that Environment Southland is presenting only one option for catchment expenditure.
“I attended several council LTP workshops and I remember a specialist saying best practice for genuine consultation is to present different options – not too many, but two or three, and not the only alternative being the status quo.
“Presenting just one option versus the status quo has a feel of railroading us towards what Environment Southland want to do.
“Most people haven’t even woken up to the fact such a big change is being talked about,” he says.
The current catchment rating system has its roots in the formation of catchment liaison committees in 1979. There are 17 schemes under eight such committees.
Environment Southland says the schemes’ boundaries are based on old flood analysis, and don’t provide for upstream solutions or downstream consequences.
Those funding processes are “narrowly focused and overly complex”, the council’s LTP consultation document says.
Rose, who co-chairs the Oreti River catchment liaison committee, says there could be options for more fairly spreading the costs of stopbanks and their maintenance, floodgates, warning systems and the like.
But moving to a region-wide system and one pot of money would dilute transparency and accountability, he says.
“While the catchment committees are only for liaison, and the council has the final say, we’ve proved our worth with common sense input into budgets and plans. Significant savings have resulted.
“Is the end game a ‘one Southland liaison committee’, diluting the existing local scrutiny?” he asks.
“Will they then start rolling the reserves we’ve built up into one pot as well?”
As at June 30 last year, the Oreti catchment alone had a disaster reserve of $1.6m and another $3.5m in lease reserves.
Rose says there’s also nothing in the council documents that accounts for the special circumstances of the Waiau catchment.
Power company Meridian pays an annual contribution (around $400,000 this year) to account for the fact it diverts all but 10% of the river’s flow for power generation.
It’s seen as compensation for farmers for the consequences of the negative effects of that lower flow.
“That’s pretty unfair if Waiau area farmers end up paying considerably more in rates for work that will never happen in their area,” Rose says.
The LTP proposes an increase in flood operational spending of $2.3m per annum. Future improvements would be debt-funded, with debt rising from $18.9 million in 2025 to $73.2m by 2034.
Rose says about half of that 2025 debt relates to the “massive blowout” in the Lake Hawkins pumping scheme, from $750,000 to $9m.
“That’s a debacle ratepayers still haven’t had a satisfactory explanation for, nor assurances it can’t happen again.”
Federated Farmers president Chris Dillon says, according to council figures, the flood rate proposals will mean a decrease for 3,500 rural property owners and, overall, the rural sector’s share of the total rates take will drop from 45% to 41%.
“But it’s a case of swings and roundabouts. More than 2,300 rural ratepayers will be paying more, with 160 of them paying an extra $500 a year or more.
“Longer term, we’ll likely have more focus on urban stopbanks and higher costs, with less debt headroom if there’s a big flood.”
Proposed overall rates increases of 23% in 2025, 11% in 2026 and 13% in 2027 “shows the council isn’t doing the belt tightening and cost cutting many of the region’s households and businesses are having to do”, Dillon says.
The switch to capital value rating means farmers who’ve invested in improvements, such as expensive wintering barns to lessen environmental impact, will now be slapped with higher rates.
“Federated Farmers Southland will have a lot to say in our submission on this LTP,” Dillon says.
“We urge individual farmers to also look at the impacts on them, and to speak up.”
Federated Farmers, New Zealand’s leading independent rural advocacy organisation, has established a news and insights partnership with AgriHQ, the country’s leading rural publisher, to give the farmers of New Zealand a more informed, united and stronger voice. Feds news and commentary appears each week in its own section of the Farmers Weekly print edition and online.
