The assessment came from company critic and former Delta employee Richard Healey on the second day of a hearing about whether the Dunedin City Council should sell Aurora.
The company also operated in Central Otago and customers there had arguably the most expensive line charges in the country, Mr Healey said.
A new owner might have the mentality the Central Otago "lemon has been squeezed fairly hard", but Dunedin customers could pick up more of the cost burden, he suggested.
The Commerce Commission limits how much revenue can be retrieved from customers and Mr Healey said revenue was determined by the commission.
However, a new company owner could be expected to take a different view from present decision-makers about how charges might be levied and Dunedin might be perceived as having "plenty of room to increase prices", he said.
The bulk of his presentation was about what he described as "true profit" — or declared profit plus deferred income.
Deferred income — revenue earned but not yet able to be retrieved from customers — exceeded $50 million across three years until 2024, Mr Healey told councillors.
"Aurora is a massively profitable company," he said.
"It is truly a gold-plated licence to print money."
Mr Healey told councillors he thought there was an element of haste regarding a potential sale.
"I think it’s a rush before everybody wakes up to just how profitable Aurora really is," he said.
The company had also dramatically increased in value.
Mr Healey was prominent in news media from 2016, when he exposed neglect of Aurora’s network.
He told councillors yesterday 100 years of enterprise and effort had been "lost to incompetence and ignorance".
There has since been a maintenance catch-up, and the company has not paid a dividend since 2017.
Mr Healey has generally expressed the view Aurora is able to operate in a regulatory and business environment highly favourable to it and the company is worth keeping.
The hearing was dominated yesterday by submitters opposed to a sale.
One was Allied Press chief executive Grant McKenzie, submitting as a ratepayer.
Mr McKenzie is a former city council chief financial officer and he was asked about Mr Healey’s assessment of Aurora.
Mr McKenzie said he would "take everything Richard Healey says with a grain of salt — I’m not sure if I’m allowed to say that, but ..."
However, he did not contradict him and was on a broadly similar wavelength on several points.
"If I knew for every dollar I invested in my business I was going to get a guaranteed return, I would love it," Mr McKenzie said.
"Unfortunately, very few businesses get that opportunity."
He referred to investment cycles and said Aurora was going through a period of heavy investment.
Cr Lee Vandervis suggested Aurora was "investment-hungry", it needed to invest far more into Central Otago and the two lines to Wanaka were inadequate. The council and its companies did not have the money available to optimise the value of Aurora and run Central Otago lines in a way that was reliable or could give a return.
Mr McKenzie said he had sought to demonstrate this could continue to be funded by debt in the short term.
Cr Vandervis asked what it would mean if the council and its companies could not raise the money without breaching a covenant with the Local Government Funding Agency (LGFA).
A point of order for misrepresentation was called about Cr Vandervis saying "we’re at our debt ceiling now".
This was not upheld, and Dunedin Mayor Jules Radich said the council was headed towards its debt ceiling, but the LGFA matter was not revisited with Mr McKenzie.
