Keith Melville

I was puzzled last Friday to find a town centre devoid of people and traffic, on what normally is a busy workday. There were few pedestrians in sight, my favourite coffee shop had few customers, and car parks along The Strand were vacant by the score.

The next morning, I was told by a local business owner the reason for the dead town centre was rates day - the final day for paying the first of four instalments of our council's annual rates demand.

If that reason is right, I should not have been surprised but it did bring home to me just how dominating and crushing the cost of local government has become to property owners and renters, business owners, families, farmers, the young and the elderly, Māori and Pakeha and anyone else with a stake in rateable property.

It also showed just how desperate people had become if they had to save money by waiting until the last minute to pay rates to avoid the council's 10 percent penalty.

We are in the midst of a rating affordability crisis. Local government is sucking the financial life out of our community. That is not an exaggeration. There are people out there who are having to sell their homes because they cannot afford their rates.

In Whakatāne our rates have increased almost 41 per cent in three years, among the highest in the country, and more steep increases are on the way.

The finances of our council are a debt-ridden mess, which will only be made worse by some major unavoidable projects on the way - the Matatā and the proposed Murupara sewerage projects. These will have a financial impact district-wide but we seem to have a council incapable of containing or planning costs.

I am therefore pessimistic that the new council after the October elections will have the will or wherewithal to make significant changes unless there is radical change in the council make-up

I say that for a few reasons. Some candidates are openly committing themselves to the next massive, big spending council project, the Rex Morpeth Park and facilities upgrade. I do not disagree that those facilities should be upgraded though not at the cost of impoverishing ratepayers especially when there are other basic projects that desperately need attention.

Coupled with that are the three Māori ward candidates and their supporters, Pakeha included, who seem to have a fixation with the preservation of Māori wards but not with the financial plight of all our people. Not one of them has mentioned, at least in their public statements I have seen, that we are afflicted with an affordability crisis. Not one has presented an opinion on how they would deal with that.

Furthermore, there is little evidence in the campaign offerings of other candidates, except for one or two, that they actually care for ratepayers.