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When Jenny Shattock was Mayor I mentioned on the Genuine Tokoroa Page that there were ways to lower rates fee’s and while some people thought it a good idea, most ignored it in favour of the status quo.
So how can rates be lowered.
When things are not going well and are broken any sports coach would tell you that you have to go back to the basics, that the play has become too complicated, and that the basics has always worked and is also the foundation of any team, sports, business or otherwise.
What we have here is many rules, (Regulations) many laws, demands and so on that all cost money or cost us money if we fail what we are demanded to do. Basically nothing can be just done anymore, you have to get permission and abide by the rules and then pay fee’s and so on.
The Basics Town is a community of people who actually are the voice of the town not a group of business people working in an expensive building telling the common folk what to do.
The Council wants business here, visitors, progress in the materials sense, but as time goes by when the Council fails for years and things have all become so complicated the general public now have to pay with higher rates to satisfy the desires of each new mayor, Councilors, and then the money is used for each mayor and current Counselors version of the improvements that they deem that the town needs.
It is a repeated, and very expensive (for us) process.
But through each Mayor and councils changes does the town get better, is there growth, is it healthy growth, and why do the rates keep climbing, and why does not Mayor or Counsel lower the rates?
If any Government, New Zealand included, or local Council was a business it would fold from mismanagement and foolish spending (Like fixing up Leith Place when it didn’t need fixing), so why doesn’t it. It stays afloat because of the huge amounts of money the general public are forced to pump into the Governments and Local Councils coffers every week/year.
This is the reason why rates and taxes go up, and also why prices go up, because the Government and Counsels fail the people.
If we can understand that broadly over the entire country rates have taken leaps and bounds upwards putting many people in debt and now struggling where in the past they were not struggling.
If memory serves me well, before Shattock & Sinclair penalties for late payments was around $25, not they are just under $100, add that to an already high yearly rates bill and you will see many people in dire straits.
The first problem that the rate payers should address and consider, is that every Mayor has an agenda, something that he or she wants to have done, and coming from being a job such as a truck driver, dentist and so on, they are all of a sudden with millions of dollars to spend, our rates money, they spend it on something that each Mayor favours. Thus in a sense its like winning lotto to them and spending other people’s money on “pet projects”.
With Shattock it was the Leith Place toilets and redesigning a streets parking etc that didn’t need redesigning, in other words just wasting lots of money on Leith Place. Before that it was the Events Center, recently the lake and so on.
I am not knocking the projects, but what seems obvious to me is that the Councils spend on huge projects and there is not enough return on them or much cheaper projects could have taken place saving the people a lot of money and keeping rates prices down.
The goal of the Council is obviously not trying to keep rates prices down, and also to punish the common folk harshly in the already stretched wallet with very high penalties. It seems to be a case of some people not paying their rates so the Council wants everyone to suffer for that and be punished as well.
People fall on hard times from time o time, this is a fact of life, but the Council lacks this understanding of the common folk, and this is just one of the ways the current political system fails the people who pay their wages and pays for their projects.
A suggestion is, that if the Council or Mayor has a project over a certain amount of money the idea should be given to the people and the people decide whether their rate payers money should be spent or not on the suggested project, and this would do away with the dictatorship way of which high spending is done today.
If memory serves me correctly many local people were against the pool, and many against the upgrade to Leith Place, but regardless of what people thought they went ahead with these projects anyway. Thus if the Mayor has a pet project in mind it happens regardless of what we tend to want.
People deciding would also keep rates low.
The entire country and probably the same overseas is part of a failing setup/system that is due to people being in control that are not capable of doing their jobs. Politicians are not the best at being capable because most have no qualifications for what they are doing anyway, but many lack imagination and all demand that we do as we are told or we are penalized.
The problem is the system that controls Government and Councils.
I suggested back in Shattock’s days that we could take the jobs away from contractors and such and offer them to the public, general folk, people who are unemployed, people who want to help, people who care for the community.
I also remembered this morning that back in the past before the contractors the Council employed local people as staff, especially what some contractors are doing these days.
An example was my suggestion about the public caring for their own town, was of an orchard at the lake. People complained, “Who would look after it?” and you know, they were worried about the wages and so forth. I suggested that the job be given to the public. If people want free fruit and such then people would volunteer. But see, the Council is worried about fruit businesses and New World and Countdown/Woolworth’s losing money, so it never happened.
People said that there would be rotten fruit, and I suggested that people could take the rotten fruit for free compost or that they would be compost for the orchards.
Years ago I read that some original supermarkets actually had a plot of land behind the Supermarket for growing vegetables, thus the people got fresh healthy vegetables in the Supermarkets. To run them of course they used locals.
The crops were rotated to avoid pests and so on.
I remember back when Shattock was in the old Tokoroa Toilets in town was going to have the ceiling painted, cost, $6000 or thereabouts, which had many of us on the Genuine Tokoroa Page shocked. Special paint, special contractors, and so on. I suggested good paint (not super expensive) & people on unemployment doing it and the council paying them and that was ignored. The job probably could have been done for less than $1000-2000.
I read of someone overseas separating their area/town from Government, with the entire population of that area supporting this.
Then they made up their own rules ignoring Government rules, conditions and red tape.
All of a sudden the town changed positivity in leaps and bounds.
The reason why Council is so money hungry and toxic is because Council Control is an inside job, it is a business with business-minded people in suits, people who are career Council office people are the ones that control what really goes on, they enforce rules set by local or Government rules. All said to be for safety, but really for business and more money coming to the area.
If many of the jobs relegated to contractors were given to people who are unemployed, huge amounts of money would be saved. On every job of course there would be a qualified soul, but otherwise people who need work could do the work, and learn as they go.
If we consider that people who love a town will help out, for free, because they care a lot of the jobs that the Council is hiring people for can be also done for free. I am not promoting dangerous work, I am promoting a community that loves where they live, desire that area to be healthy, affordable, and a place that they want to stay in.
Volunteers can be asked for and then lunch and drinks provided, an event panned and people will work hard, be proud of their efforts and the finished job, and partake in a decent feed afterwards and transport home.
When people actually are involved in what is going on they take more pride in what’s going on, and they don’t cotton on to foolish folk vandalism or doing graffiti or theft.
And the young adults, children, teenagers will not want the work effort that they took part in destroyed. Thus the young become proud of their part in the community from a young age. Making them more likely to stay here.
How many parents in Tokoroa must be so saddened when their children leave for other places due to little work being here, or the rising crime, my suggestions on the Genuine Tokoroa Page in the past were to improve the town and how people saw Tokoroa or the South Waikato so that the children would want to stay.
From what I can tell Council is always looking at the most expensive ways to solve problems, or to make things, but we, the public (who don’t get a say) are the ones who have to pay for this foolishness. Its a mentality that business people get in to when they have loads of money to play with, same for the politicians running countries spending our tax payers money on things that we don’t want and what we don’t believe in, but we are still forced to pay the taxes anyway.
The only way we are going to get our rates down and have our area/town healthy and as we want it changes much be made in Council and how things are done. People need to understand that the Council are not the power, they pay for nothing, it is the ratepayer who have the power and also the money which the Council spend.
Changing our views, values, deciding that we will tell the Council what we want, and the community having much more say in what happened in the community and actually being able to participate in what is going on changes everything.
It also gives the power back to the people who actually live in the Council Controlled Area.
Basically to change we need to step back from the norm of what all the NZ Councils are doing and do our own thing. Because if we don’t we are looking down the barrel of many many years of non-stop increasing Council rates and higher and higher penalties.
Its not going to get better int h path that the political people are currently taking us.
When I first moved into my house the rates were around $800 or so, a year, now they are over $3000. It is with almost absolute fact that the next Mayor will increase the rates yet again (especially if the other Councils do) and unless the people take matters in to their own hands and decide that they want the situation to change, we will all just be slaves to the system that previous business people in the Councils and incompetent politicians created.
Whatever the people decide, there is no hope nor optimisn in this current situation, nor will it change until the people have ahd enough and make the change happen.
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