Dunedin Mayor Jules Radich has called on the public to suggest ways the Dunedin City Council could save money.
He is imploring people to make suggestions through the long-term plan process.
In local councils there is a 10-year budget, a long-term plan, which is refreshed every third year.
In the years between only spending which is additional to the proposal put forward in the most recent refresh is inspected in detail.
The idea is that we have been promised rates rises for the next three years until the next refresh, so we have all been consulted on this as "business as usual".
The business it is assumed we have consented to is large rates increases.
This is a particularly unhelpful way of looking at out-of-control rates.
We need to get to the bottom of why these rates rises are happening.
We could instead take an arbitrary point five or six years ago and produce a list of all the people employed.
Not by name but by department and by job.
Then the same list could be created for people employed now.
For any areas which have increased staff, we could require an explanation of what the increases were for, how they were intended to achieve the intended outcome and what evidence is available that they have achieved that.
This information could be given to people to judge whether we want that outcome considering the cost, or which of the increases we would ditch.
And whether airy-fairy concepts like "relationship building" are outcomes we want to pay ever increasing rates to achieve.
Some staffing increases would have more obvious need than others.
For example local government official information act and meeting (LGOIMA) requests may have trebled, so the number of people involved in answering them would be expected to rise.
That still leaves a role for the chief executive of each council to oversee the execution of a job, to keep an eye on whether the job could be done more efficiently of course.
On the other hand an increase in the number of people working in communications is another matter.
More people may just mean more expensive, glossy, unintelligible or relentlessly self-serving information coming out of council offices.
There may be some jobs that we don’t need doing at all.
For example the work required to create submissions to government about rules which do not apply to the business of running local council.
Jules Radich recently took a submission to Parliament against the highly political Treaty Principles Bill, saying he represented Dunedin citizens.
To have staff employed to create templates that cater to political decisions by council is not core business in any sense.
Central government knows these are not really from the people, but only councillors wanting to fluff themselves up.
There may be some jobs where it is cheaper and more efficient to have more people working for the council and less contracting.
It would be easy enough to tell us why it is better to do the work in-house and how that has reduced the costs, albeit increasing staff numbers.
In general with the right information we can tell councillors if we think they were wrong to suggest we all want more spending.
Councillors and mayors often cite an increase in government regulations as being responsible for increased costs.
The explanations we are given about why the increases actually were necessary would make it clear whether blaming government requirements is reasonable or not.
Any knee-jerk reaction, which is political game scoring, would likely be outed.
Has there been any reflection on the cost of interactions with the government about the building of the hospital in Dunedin?
Would it have been cheaper with a better chance of success to pay someone in Wellington to cosy up to the government and keep our concerns at the fore?
Or is the spending of hundreds of thousands of dollars putting flyers around Dunedin and talking to each other really helping ratepayers, or only councillors hoping to be seen doing something.
If we really want to get rates under control we need to have the money spent being strongly aligned with the needs of ratepayers.
To know why there are significantly more people and resources spent by some councils with no apparent benefits.
We need to remember that inflationary pressures do not apply to increases in staff.
Councils need to tell us exactly why there are more staff and what they are achieving.
They need to ask whether we want to pay 50% more rates each couple of years, and if not, which of these extras we prefer to leave out.
PS: They could also ask us whether we want them to give our money away without consultation as they have recently in Dunedin for a scholarship.
This decision was not only outside anything consulted on but is intended to last for three years, which is more than we can assume all of the councillors will be in office.
• Hilary Calvert is a former Otago regional councillor, MP and Dunedin city councillor.
