Masterton District Council is consulting the community on
its participation in the Government’s Future of Severely
Affected Locations (FOSAL) buy-out programme for properties
in Tinui damaged in Cyclone Gabrielle.
Under the FOSAL
funding arrangement, the Government would contribute 50 per
cent of the cost of buying out Category 3 properties if the
Council funds the other 50 per cent.
Nine properties
with 12 dwellings around Tinui have been provisionally
assessed as Category 3, meaning they are not safe to live on
due to risk of flooding.
The estimated total cost to
the Council of the buy-out programme would be $2.5 million.
The Council’s share would come from loan funding. The
impact of this for the 2024/25 year would be an increase of
0.75 per cent in rates, an extra $26 per year for a
median-value urban residential property.
Consultation
is open now and closes at 4pm on Monday 4 December. Council
deliberations will be held on 13 December.
Masterton
District Council is encouraging submissions to be made via
their website: www.mstn.govt.nz.
Hard
copy documents are also available at the Council’s office
at 161 Queen Street or Masterton District Library at 54
Queen
Street.
If you're using Scoop for work, your organisation needs to pay a small license fee with Scoop Pro. We think that's fair, because your organisation is benefiting from using our news resources. In return, we'll also give your team access to pro news tools and keep Scoop free for personal use, because public access to news is important!
The most charitable explanation for National’s behaviour over the smokefree legislation is that they have dutifully fulfilled the wishes of the Big Tobacco lobby and then cast around – incompetently, as it turns out - for excuses that might sell this health policy U-turn to the public. The less charitable view is that the government was being deliberately misleading. Are we to think Prime Minister Christopher Luxon is a fool, or a liar? It seems rather early on in his term of office to be facing that unpleasant choice. Yet when Luxon (and senior MP Chris Bishop) tried to defend the indefensible with the same wildly inaccurate claim, there are not a lot of positive explanations left on the table.... More
New CTU analysis of the National & ACT coalition agreement has shown the cost of returning interest deductibility to landlords is an extra $900M on top of National’s original proposal. This is because it is going to be implemented earlier and faster, including retrospective rebates from April 2023. More
“The new Government’s plan to expand oil and gas exploration is as dangerous as it is unscientific. Whatever you think about the new government, there is simply no mandate to trash the climate. We need to come together to stop them,” says James Shaw. More
MFAT's decision to remove te reo from correspondence before new Ministers are sworn in risks undermining the important progress the public sector has made in honouring te Tiriti. "We are very disappointed in what is a backward decision - it simply seems to be a Ministry bowing to the racist rhetoric we heard on the election campaign trail," says Marcia Puru. More