While you often see large headline figures attached to projects, these have a smaller effect on your annual rates bills as the overall cost is spread out over decades.
The main driver of your rates bill are the day-today costs such as staff and contractor salaries and costs of the things we use such as power, water, fuel, and building and roading materials.
It also covers the cost of financing any debt interest the council carries and depreciation, which is the money we have to set aside to replace infrastructure at the end of its life.
You can look at it like a household. For big purchases such as your house or your car you can take out a loan or mortgage and pay it back over time.
Ongoing costs such as food, electricity, fuel, and any maintenance, as well as interest on those loans, you have to pay for at the time you incur them.
As it is not prudent to taken on debt to cover day-to-day running expenses, the main options to handle increasing costs is to increase rates, reduce the amount we spend on providing those services, or charge more fees for services.
Council staff are also undertaking a major project to cut operational spending by reducing waste, bringing more work in-house instead of contracting it out, and cutting out non-priority projects.
For the first three years of this LTP Council will be running at a deficit. To get the council books back in surplus, we need to reduce the gap between how much the council spends and how much we charge ratepayers, and we need your feedback as to how quickly we should close that gap.