B Kawe

It is interesting to read in Wednesday’s Beacon that the mayor-elect is pushing ahead with his rates increase agenda.

As of October 15, the Whakatāne District Council website states that the mayor-elect has received 3607 of the district’s votes; that is 28.72 percent of the 12,560 votes received, 13.8 percent of the 26,066 enrolled voters, hardly a mandate for his proposed agenda for the next three years.

If the mayor-elect received 13,034 votes, then I would say he has a mandate.

Note the combined vote of Victor Luca and Phillip Jacobs, two candidates with similar policies, was 4804 votes, that is 38.25 percent of the votes received and is more indicative of the direction our community wants the new council to head.

Economically, this region is suffering, all councillors need to give greater weight in their decision-making to the state of our district’s economy at that time.

The mayor-elect’s priority should be making our district affordable for all to live in and to rein in the regulatory processes and wasteful spending on the nice-to-haves by councillors and bureaucrats – unacceptable, particularly given the council’s history of an inability to control project budgets.

Ratepayers do not have a bottomless pit of money to support out-of-control council spending. How much more debt can ratepayers cope with? After all, council is using our properties to secure this debt.