As rates bills hit letterboxes this week, Kāpū-te-rangi Māori ward councillor Toni Boynton has countered “anti-council sentiment” in the community in relation to Whakatāne District Council’s 15 percent average rates rises.

She blames a broken funding model for local government and the repeal of three waters legislation.

She said people who campaigned against the Labour government’s three waters reforms needed to acknowledge that a large part of this year’s rates increases were directly caused by costs of maintaining and upgrading water infrastructure.

In March, the council’s infrastructure general manager Bevan Gray gave the cost of keeping the district’s three waters –drinking water, stormwater and wastewater – systems compliant with consents over the next 10 years as $440 million, and said the council did not have the capacity to deliver that.

It has budgeted less than half of that, $213 million, for three waters in its Long-term Plan 2024-34.

“If three waters had continued on, would we have this increase? No. We would have some increase, but the three waters part would have been taken out of council’s hands,” Ms Boynton said.

“We would have been able to get [three waters infrastructure] upgraded, because it’s so overdue. What we’ve had to do is cut that right back to the bare essentials and spread it out even longer.

“There is an anti-council sentiment that is building within our community,” she said.

“My concern is that many of the people who are very angry and creating this anti-council swell are a lot of the same people who were also anti-three waters.

“I’m saying, hang on a minute, you wanted this, the council listened. Now you’ve got it. Now we have to pay for it. You’re mad at the council for the increase, but you won’t acknowledge in any way or form that three waters had an impact on that.”

She acknowledges not all the increases are from three waters.

“There’s other cost (increases) as well, but the reality is that if that wasn’t there, it wouldn’t have impacted as much.”

Mayor Victor Luca has a different view on the three waters situation.

“Three waters reforms were a bunch of nonsense. I came out strongly against them from the start, because they never solved the financing issue.

“What they had proposed was to set up large entities that would have sufficient scale to borrow more money. Right at the beginning I said, “why do you need to set up separate entities when you’ve got the Local Government Funding Agency, which already has scale and can already borrow with sovereign interest rates.”

Earlier this month, the LGFA announced it had been working alongside Central Government, the Treasury and Department of Internal Affairs to increase funding options for local government for its three waters projects.

“A light has suddenly gone on in somebody’s head,” Dr Luca said.

“None of it really helps us, anyway. It allows us to borrow more, but that borrowing will need to be serviced ... Somebody’s still got to pay.

“What I’m trying to do is say, let’s focus on what we really need to do, what is the cheapest way to solve the problem, and not come up with highfalutin ideas. Otherwise, there will be unlimited amounts of money that need to be spent.