Council Improvements

20 December 2023. Season’s greetings and wishing you a very happy holiday while enjoying all the wonderful amenities the Rodney area has to offer. It has been a pleasure working with all the ratepayer groups again this year. Particularly rewarding has been the ability to help the individuals who have contacted me when they have hit a stumbling block with council. Working with them to find a way through the council bureaucracy has been appreciated.

Our large number of community-orientated volunteer groups continue to do an outstanding job, ensuring we all have a wonderful place to live and work in. My working relationship with the Mayor and the Rodney Local Board has been very strong, which is important for achieving positive results for local ratepayers. During the year I have facilitated a number of visits to our area by council’s senior leaders. This included the Mayor’s visit after the extreme flooding in January, as well as another meeting with all the local ratepayer groups in March. After listening to consistent concerns repeated from those groups, he organised the budget for maintaining the unsealed roads to be doubled. That has meant there are now five grading crews operating instead of just two. Slowly but surely residents should be seeing the standard of the unsealed roads improving. The Mayor has also followed up with over a dozen of our other local groups helping them with their concerns.

Other visitors to Rodney have included the chief executive of Auckland Council and the chief executive of Auckland Transport. They have seen first-hand the growth challenges our area faces and why we need a fair share of our rates spent back in our area. After Cyclone Gabrielle, the request was made for Auckland Council to give 100 per cent rates relief to the “red stickered’ properties that had become uninhabitable for families due to severe damage. Many of these homes were in the Puhoi and Muriwai area. This was supported by the Mayor and the other 20 councillors.

In the New Year, the Mayor will be asking for your feedback on what he believes to be Auckland’s spending priorities for the next 10 years. This is part of his plan about how to “fix Auckland”. Despite there being a number of budget cuts across Auckland, Mayor Brown is proposing for more money to be spent back into Rodney due to the years of underinvestment. The details will be available on the council website, or from the libraries, between February 28 and 28 March 28 for public feedback. Please take a few minutes to support our efforts.

In closing, I would again like to wish you and your family a very Merry Christmas, a Happy New Year, and a safe and enjoyable summer holiday.