THE PRESS MONDAY, APRIL 23, 1979. Work for a united council

Press, 23 April 1979, Page 16

THE PRESS MONDAY, APRIL 23, 1979. Work for a united council

If the new Canterbury United Council is to be something more than a "big yawn,” or a "non-event”—descriptions given to the council by members of some of its constituent local authorities —it is going to have to find useful work, and persuade its members to provide the money for that work. When the council is formed officially on May 31, and when it holds its first meeting on July 25, its only duty will be to draw up a co-ordinated civil defence plan for the region bounded by the Rakaia River, the Hurunui River, and the Southern Alps From early next year it will also take over the planning activities of the Regional Planning Authority.

Left at that, the council might be no more than a debating shop in which representatives of the 19 territorial authorities wrangled about conflicting interests while watching to ensure that the Christchurch City Council, the largest member, was kept in its place. The united council will depend for funds on councils whose ratepayers should, quite rightly, resist any further imposition to pay for an ineffective new tier in local government. Instead, the united council should be able to make a small beginning, within the prevailing legal and political restraints, towards the overdue reform of local government. The problems of irrational boundaries, and of confusing and inefficient distributions of responsibilities, will not be overcome by the creation of a new tier of government if the old authorities go their ways with their powers, finances and jurisdictions unchanged. Prodded by the Local Government Commission, the united council ought gradually to draw to itself responsibility for such activities as can most sensibly be dealt with on a regional basis.

With new responsibilities should come additional finance, at the expense of the budgets of existing councils, rather than in addition to them. This raises again the vexed and chronic question of the sources of local government finance. Auckland local authorities have opted to set up a regional council, elected directly by ratepayers, with its own rating powers. This alternative was not accepted in Canterbury. The responsibility on members of local authorities now is to see which system appears to give ratepayers the best value for money, and the most control over the way the money is spent.

If the united council can demonstrate its usefulness, the very spread of its authority does offer an opportunity to reconsider the virtues of such .new sources of finance as local taxes. A tax levied, for instance, by the Christchurch City Council alone, would make little sense. A tax on a substantial

geographic region, such as that covered by the united council, would create fewer anomalies or hardships and should have a better chance of being accepted by those who must pay. Some of the most important activities in the North Canterbury region are carried out by local authorities which are not represented on the united council. The duties of the Christchurch Drainage Board and the North Canterbury Catchment Board are probably more important to the comfort, even the survival, of people in the region, than those of any other authority.

The Drainage Board is by far the most important organisation when it comes to protecting an environment in which large numbers of people are concentrated. If its activities stopped, Christchurch would be uninhabitable in less than a week. Adequate sewage disposal, along with the removal of rubbish and the provision of safe drinking water—two activities of the territorial local authorities —alone make life possible in communities larger than the tiniest villages. In a sense, these activities are priceless and all residents should be happy to meet the costs of providing them.

Many other activities, some the responsibility of territorial authorities, others of ad hoc bodies, are also very important, especially in larger communities. These include the provision of streets and lighting, protection from floods and adequate stormwater drainage, supervision of food for sale, control of animals, and adequate public transport.

Local authorities might best be able to restrain spending, or to devise new ways of finding money, in a third category of local government activities: the provision of useful services which are not strictly essential to the community’s survival. This area includes the provision of facilities as varied as squash courts and pensioner housing, information booths and public libraries. Perhaps it would be going too far to suggest that those who use such facilities, or those who believe they should exist as desirable social services, should be required to pay for them. But there is an urgent need to consider ways of spreading the costs of such services beyond those in the community who own property.

The new united council would help to establish its usefulness in the eyes of the ratepayers on whom it is going to depend, if it set about quickly looking for alternative sources of finance for all local authorities. It might look especially at ways of spreading more fairly on to those who advocate the less essential local services, the burden of paying for them.