For many of our services we charge a fee to cover some of the cost of the work required to provide them.
This includes services such as planning and building consents and inspections, renting a social house, going to the swimming pool, dropping off rubbish at the transfer station, or registering your dog.
This is different to how you pay for things such as roads or libraries, which are seen as a common good, and are funded by everyone.
When we are setting these fees, we try to balance them so that most of the cost of providing the service is covered by the fees, but some of the cost is covered by all ratepayers so they aren’t so expensive to put off development, stop people going for a swim, or disposing of their rubbish responsibly.
As part of this Long-Term Plan we are proposing to increase the fees we charge for services to bring them closer to how much it costs us to provide the service.
These changes will not affect the total rates charged to ratepayers. Instead, the goal is to adjust the charges to better reflect the actual cost of providing these services. Any rates funding that was previously used to subsidise some of these
services will be used other purposes such as maintenance.
We want to know how you think we should balance what we charge with how much subsidy we provide.
Some questions to ask yourself:
- Should we increase the amount we charge people for a building consent?
- Will rising planning costs reduce development in the district
- Should we need to support physical activity or swimming through subsidising pool entry costs?
- Are we charging enough dog registration to cover the cost of animal management?