Leading locally
Better than competent
Council is ably led by a first term Mayor and a Chief Executive with international experience in local government. Council has retained its strong and well-structured operating culture reflected in mutual respect between elected members and staff. The district’s vision has now been advanced into something coherent and the retention of rural town identities is clearly articulated.
Council has responded to the community and is setting out to deliver a coherent yet pragmatic Long Term Plan (LTP) that recognises and retains the identities of the towns, while meeting the community’s aspirations for effective infrastructure across the district.
Council has considerable experience from the Mayor through to the elected members, many of whom are long serving. New elected members are also willing to embrace systems and processes and contribute effectively. Council staff are led by a capable Chief Executive with personal values well-aligned to the organisation.
Investing money well
Competent
Council is actively managing a tight fiscal environment and has a good understanding of its finances and integration between the current Financial Strategy and service provision. Council’s current financial structure should be revisited.
The pragmatic integration of policies supports informed decision-making between financial planning, service delivery and financial control. Council is a small council with limited resources that is engaging equitably across the region to deliver what its stakeholders want.
The straightforward delivery of financial performance enables Council’s Strategic Finance Policy to be readily embedded in the LTP, and the annual Audit Report to be included in the Annual Report. These inclusions provide immediate integration between financial planning and control, and the costs of service delivery. The investment in water supplies and community infrastructure needs has required prudent financial management and adherence to what Council refers to as its position of ‘net debt’. In summary, Council’s investments ($150m) and its income are more or less equal to its debt ($132m) and costs associated with this debt. However, Council remains highy indebted - the second most indebted rural/small provincial Council in New Zealand. While the cost of debt servicing has been met by returns from investments, those returns are now less stable than they have been in the past. The management of investments and debt to ensure that an intergenerational burden is not created will require continued prudence by Council staff and elected members.
Delivering what’s important
Competent
Council’s service delivery and asset management is competent across the breadth of its physical and social infrastructure network. Strengths in some areas (such as solid waste, three waters infrastructure and community facilities) are offset by the need for improvement in others (such as building control).
Variability of service outcomes reflects the multiplicity of challenges faced by a Council seeking to retain the integrity of each of its seven towns through the equitable distribution of service delivery and assets. This gives rise to asset maintenance and expenditure challenges.
Council is committed to retaining the integrity of their district’s townships in the form of ‘complete communities’ but may wish to consider how the approach will be sustained in the longer term. Council’s earlier ambiguity in ‘retain to grow’ has been supplanted by ‘attract and grow’ to which there is increasing evidence across the district, in view of a 2 per cent net annual population growth rate.
Listening and responding
Better than competent
Council has invested considerable time and effort in formalising its communications policies and practices since the 2017 assessment. Key messages are clear and consistently relayed across the organisation. A focus on two-way and face-to-face communication has been well received by the community, as evidenced through the high engagement levels obtained during the recent Community Visioning Project.
Council’s communications exhibit a desire for genuine and effective engagement and cover a range of channels in an attempt to provide a touchpoint for as many segments of the community as possible.
Some aspects of engagement, such as that with iwi, could be further developed, however, improvements have been seen through the appointment of an Iwi Liaison Advisor, the establishment of an Iwi Liaison Committee and more informal quarterly Huinga-ā-Iwi meetings. Council has also appointed a Business Development Manager to engage with the business community. The appointment is of particular relevance as the district navigates the economic uncertainty presented by COVID-19.