Council aims to deliver affordable and essential services through LTP
This week Rotorua Lakes Council held its final Long-term Plan workshops for 2023.
The Council is seeking to deliver investment into essential services while balancing the pressure of increasing costs with affordability.
An earlier workshop held on 21 November gave elected members an initial look at what the financial position of the next 10 years could look like and the potential expected rates and debt across that period.
At that workshop Council started with a potential 14% average general rates increase for the next financial year - 2024/25 (year one of the 2024-34 Long-term Plan) to cover anticipated work programmes for that year.
“That increase was not acceptable to us so we went back to the drawing board to see how we could reduce the rates burden on our community,” Mayor Tapsell says.
“We challenged staff with a goal of reducing year one’s proposed rates increase from 14% to below 10%, without creating further high increases in future years.
“By reviewing operating costs, our investment in to capital works programmes, and future borrowing, we’ve managed to reduce this increase to around 9.8% in year one, 9.7% in year two, 7.8% in year three. We’ll then be through the worst of it with increases lowering again to between 2.5% and 4.1% in years four to ten.
“Due to the state of our economy our biggest problem is high inflation and interest rates which have driven up the cost of everything and makes up approximately 6% of that total increase. So we’re seriously limited on what we can spend, but we are committed to delivering essential services to our community and getting Rotorua through these tough times.
“We will keep looking at how we can improve as a Council and have set a target to find $1million of efficiency savings within the organisation to deliver further affordability to ratepayers.
“Like all Councils right now, we have a very hard task ahead of us, and we know times are also very hard for our community. We’ll cut back on non-urgent projects and focus on delivering critical and essential services and ensuring every dollar spent has real benefit for our community.
“We’ve proven we listen to our community, so having their input during consultation is important to understanding what our ratepayers want, and what they’re happy paying for, before we make our final decision.
“Through this 10 year Long-term Plan we want to give our community confidence that we will take care of business and set the foundation for a better future for everyone in Rotorua,” Rotorua Mayor Tania Tapsell says.
Following this week’s workshops, work will continue to finalise the detail of a draft 2024-34 Long-term Plan to take out to the community for feedback in April next year. Council will meet in the New Year to confirm the proposals being taken out to the community.
The finalised annual plan needs to be adopted by the end of June 2024, ahead of the start of the 2024/25 financial year on 1 July 2024.
Today’s Long-term Plan workshop was livestreamed and you can watch the full recording via THIS LINK on the Rotorua Lakes Council YouTube channel.
You can view presentation slides from today’s workshop at THIS LINK on Council’s website.