Press Release - 5 September 2012

Replacement Rates Proposal

The Queenstown Lakes District Council will be asked on Friday to adopt a proposal to undertake a fresh round of consultation over its 2012/13 rates, QLDC acting chief executive Stewart Burns said.

“Council confirmed last week that it needed to review anomalies found in the first instalment of rates and we are now acting as quickly as we can to get a public process underway,” Mr Burns said.

Council would hold a special meeting to consider a proposal that would deal with inequities in rates movements for some properties and introduce a solution to moderate those impacts.

The proposal would see reductions to three Capital Value based rates (Recreation and Events, Regulatory, and Governance) and the creation of two new fixed charge rates (Recreation and Events, and Regulatory and Governance combined).

“Instead of collecting all of these rates based on value, there will now be an element of fixed charge for everyone, which results in a fairer allocation of rates, the outcome we had always intended,” Mr Burns said.

What the proposal would do was move the total number of properties sitting in the movement range of minus 10% to plus 10% from 69.5% to 81.4%. The percentage of properties showing reductions or increases in rates of greater than 20% has reduced significantly from 14.6% to 7.9%.

Under the proposal most properties continuing to be in the 20% plus range would be those that had changed for rating purposes in the last year; i.e. been developed; change of use or where additional council services have been provided and charged (i.e. water or sewerage). “What we plan to do will not be a silver bullet for anyone in this category, they should still anticipate their rates will have moved accordingly,” Mr Burns said.

“We looked at various options but have recommended a proposal that will give us a solution that remains in line with the way the rates had been intended to be allocated – as per our recent 10-Year Plan process,” Mr Burns said.

If the Council adopted the proposal on Friday, it would open for submissions the following week (10 September).

“We plan to send an outline of the proposal to every ratepayer, with submissions also available online, we will also develop an on-line rates calculator,” he said.

In order to allow for full public input to the rates proposal, Council would push out the timeframe for instalment two from 23 November to 7 December. Meanwhile ratepayers had been asked to pay instalment one (due September 21) with any adjustments to be made on instalment two.

“We would be looking to adopt the final proposal on 30 October, 2012,” Mr Burns said.

Council had apologised to ratepayers for the unexpected anomaly and was grateful for their patience over the matter.

ENDS

© Scoop Media

Scoop Post Election Podcast: The River Of Freedom Documentary Review

After recording a River of Freedom review the Scoop Political Podcast went into hibernation. Now with a new Government formed it’s time to dust off this forgotten silver and look at the impact this documentary, about the Wellington parliamentary protest of 2022, had on Election 23. Watched by potentially tens of thousands of voters in the weeks prior to the election River of Freedom was not likely to have won votes for the then Labour government. More

Gordon Campbell: On The Skewed Media Coverage Of Gaza

Now that he’s back as Foreign Minister, maybe Winston Peters should start reading the MFAT website which is currently celebrating the 25th anniversary of how Kiwis alerted the rest of the world to the genocide in Rwanda. How times have changed ...

In 2023, the government is clutching its pearls because senior Labour MP Damien O’Connor has dared suggest that Gaza’s civilian population - already living under apartheid and subjected to sixteen years of an illegal embargo, and now being herded together and slaughtered indiscriminately amid the destruction of their homes, schools, mosques, and hospitals - are also victims of what amounts to genocide. More