At a packed meeting in Hokitika’s Grey Power rooms, Westland mayoral candidate Jacquie Grant is giving the audience exactly what they want to hear.

If the colourful local business owner gets to head the Westland District Council, she promises to slash its budgets by 10%, cap the rates and put an end to waste.

“When my home renovation job was finished the council sent three officers to inspect it. Three! Maybe two of them were there to protect the third one from me,” she says.

The 81-year-old came to New Zealand from Australia as a young person seeking a safe place to live as a trans woman.

Over the years she has fostered more than 70 children, built an export business making and selling sock-knitting machines, and been honoured with an ONZM.

She served two terms on the Grey District Council some years ago and has campaigned several times – unsuccessfully – for a seat at the Westland council table.

This time she believes, given the mood of the ratepayers, she has a good chance of unseating mayor Helen Lash, who’s been in the job just three years.

“The affordability of rates has become a broken promise … it feels like we’ve been left behind and frankly that’s because we have,” she told her Grey Power listeners on Thursday.

Westland pensioners are doing it hard, even those who own their own homes, she told LDR.

“They’re being hit with $4500 rate bills for properties worth $350,000. They can’t pay their insurance now. You see old people at the supermarket here buying bones and lamb’s fry from the pet food counter. People are living hand-to-mouth. “

Grant’s 10-point plan to rein in council spending includes closing Destination Westland and demanding better returns from the council’s contracting company, WestRoads.

“I would close the iSite, move it into the theatre and make that more viable - that’s five jobs gone and you’d save half a million a year,” she says.

Despite her advancing years, Grant says she’s up to the mayoral workload.

“I’m fit as a fiddle,” she says.

“We’re a long-lived lot in my family – I only just lost my mum, my grandparents were 106 and 103, my siblings are all alive and kicking. I might be around for a while.”

Following the meeting, incumbent mayor Helen Lash bit back at the promises.

She says she knows many people in Westland are doing it tough and populist policies go down well with voters, but there’s a catch.

“Yes, you can cap rates and slash budgets, but your core services are hit and they are two-thirds of our rates. What should we cut? Roads? Rubbish? We’re almost caught up, but we still have footpaths to do.”

One submitter to the long-term plan had drawn up a spreadsheet showing former councils had always kept the rates low in election years.

“We can’t keep doing that. That’s why we’re now facing 12% and 13% increases.”

The council has also been criticised over the size of its payout to former chief executive Simon Bastion, who resigned suddenly in June last year.

“It’s been reported as $190,000 – but $100,000 of that was KiwiSaver, super scheme and holiday pay – you have to pay that. The actual severance amount was $90,000,” the mayor says.

Some of Grant’s ideas, such as sharing services with other councils, are already happening, Lash says.

“We already share waste management with Greymouth, and we plan to do more. Amalgamation of councils is coming down the track, we know that. But it can’t happen fast.”

There have been calls for the council to go it alone with water services instead of forming a Coast-wide entity, but that carries risks, the mayor says.

“We’ve said we will negotiate with Buller and Grey – Wellington wants it, and we’ve seen with other councils going it alone, next thing they get a Crown observer and have to pay for it.”

Westland has less water debt than its neighbouring councils and wants to avoid subsidising them, Lash says.

“That’s where I’m not prepared to go. Smoothing costs, they call it. If it gets to a sticking point, we will bow out.”

Hokitika will soon have to build a new sewerage treatment system to meet tighter national standards, and that is unavoidable, the mayor says.

“Jacquie Grant is saying we could go for a cheaper option and that’s her opinion, but it’s not based on fact.”

Pressure from tourism means Westland ratepayers have to build bigger sewerage systems than they need themselves, Lash says.

“I have brought this up with Tourism Minister Louise Upston, and Shane Jones - how much should we be subsidising tourism? Especially at Franz Josef, with 3500 beds and only 500 ratepayers.”

The Government is now considering Westland’s case, and the incoming council will have to choose the best option, the mayor says.

The council has also copped some flak for advertising nine jobs in recent weeks.

But most are long-standing vacancies or existing positions “rescoped”, the mayor says.

And one is for a communications adviser.

“I’ve poured myself into the job, worked bloody hard; there’s a lot of travel and late nights and I haven’t done what I promised myself I would do, tell the community more about what we’re doing and why. We need to do that.”

-LDR is local body journalism co-funded by RNZ and NZ On Air.

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