A very long courtship

BY GEOFF COLLETT

A fresh round in the Nelson-Tasman amalgamation debate has been opened. GEOFF COLLETT looks at the argument that just won't die.

The one thing that is as old as the never-ending debate about whether Nelson (or, if you insist, Nelson-Tasman) should have just one council is the insistence by the idea's supporters that it is inevitable, bound to happen, just a matter of time.

A trawl through The Nelson Mail's archives on the subject over the past 20 years reveals that it first made serious headlines on January 6, 1993: "Woollaston says unity inevitable", the Mail announced, with the then mayor of Nelson, Philip Woollaston, telling the newspaper that the move to uniting Nelson and Tasman was a matter of when, not if.

It was the start of a popular and repetitive message down the years. Woollaston held true to his theme of certainty throughout his mayoralty and was joined by a cavalcade of councillors, subsequent mayors or mayoral aspirants, the odd MP, letter-to-the-editor writers and the Mail's own editorial writers, all of whom confidently pronounced that just as the sun comes up in the morning, so would Tasman and Nelson one day be united under one council.

So, of course, when city councillor Aldo Miccio last year embarked on his campaign to convince people of the merits of a local body overhaul, the headline on his opinion article in the Mail was: "Amalgamation `inevitable'."

But, as even the tardiest student of the subject would have long ago figured out, for something that is apparently such a sure bet, it's been a long time coming, principally because over in Tasman the blithe confidence in amalgamation's prospects is rather thinner on the ground.

The mayor, Richard Kempthorne, who gives every impression he has about as much enthusiasm for an amalgamation with Nelson as he does for shooting up to St Arnaud for an early-August dip in the lake, says: "I don't view it as inevitable. It may happen, but down the track a bit."

His predecessor, John Hurley, was blunter. Rather than calling amalgamation inevitable, he liked to say it was a dirty word.

Even the original Tasman mayor, Kerry Marshall, now the mayor of Nelson and of the view that a single council is the logical next step, was cautious if not downright cool on the issue when it was batted around in the mid-1990s.

The former chief executive at TDC, Bob Dickinson, who guided the council through its first 18 years, deadpans that perhaps the inevitability lies in the prospect that everyone will eventually get so sick of arguing about it, they'll do it just to get the thing out of the way.

He may be on to something. As Miccio's campaign steps up a gear he has just launched a petition he hopes will trigger a full-blown Local Government Commission inquiry into the future of the region's councils there is the palpable hint of weariness in the air, a sense of a different sort of inevitability, the here-we-go-again variety.

Still, if some people are getting heartily sick of it all, key protagonists are at least trying to be mature and diplomatic at this stage, anyway.

Kempthorne refuses to be drawn into speculating about what he thinks is motivating those behind this latest push. "You can ask that of them. I think the important thing for me is, I'm the mayor of Tasman and the feedback I get from the majority of people in Tasman is they would prefer not to amalgamate and that's where I'm coming from."

Marshall, meanwhile, insists: "I don't talk about amalgamation." Meaning, he prefers a bigger picture, clean-sheet approach to the timeworn argument: one council, certainly, but not simply a rehash of the model we have now. Something bolder, with something for everybody, including a streamlined overall leadership body, but improved grassroots representation through "community councils".

Marshall points out he understands these issues; he was a member of the Local Government Commission once, helping guide communities seeking changes to the way their local government worked. He still hopes Nelson and Tasman can find a harmonious, united future. But for now, "we've got to live with Tasman" suggesting he has limited appetite for leading a song and dance over the issue.

Even the man who would be the song-and-dance master, Miccio, is resisting the temptation to get carried away with his conviction that he may be able to drive through some progress where so many others have failed.

Even by just starting the petition he has gone further than anybody before. And he is confident that the exercise is going to be worthwhile if nothing else, "at least we'll get closure this way". Although history suggests it is too early to be that optimistic.

As Marshall points out, the notion of joining Nelson city with Richmond, Motueka, Golden Bay and Murchison and all points between has been around for more than 20 years, since before the Tasman District Council was formed during the then-Labour government's wide-ranging overhaul of local government in 1989.

He was then the mayor of Richmond (and became the inaugural mayor of Tasman). While his memory is of then-Nelson mayor Peter Malone expecting one super-council, presumably Nelson-dominated, to emerge from that process, the government-appointed commissioners of the day effectively sidelined the city and focused on the Richmond-Waimea-Motueka-Golden Bay areas instead.

But "it was always in the back of our minds", Marshall says, that there would be a "round two", when the Nelson-Tasman question would be revisited.

It's never gained serious traction beyond generating repeated headlines, other than in 1998, when Commerce Nelson (as the chamber of commerce was then known) went through a lengthy exercise to come up with a whole new way of governing the region something involving an elected board-of-directors-type body to replace the two councils.

It was too ambitious by half, needing a law change by Parliament if it was to be anything more than a pipedream, and a pipedream it stayed.

The business group's subsequent proposal to launch a petition seeking a Local Government Commission inquiry as Miccio is now doing was also abandoned.

So the obvious question, as Miccio embarks on round umpteen of the saga is, what's changed? And, by way of a supplementary question, why now?

There's a political answer he believes in the cause, campaigned on the argument when he was elected in 2007 (as part of the Hands Up ticket, born of a pro-amalgamation philosophy) and is committed to living up to his promise. He thinks the time is right, with a reformist minister of local government in Rodney Hide and the renewed focus on amalgamation generally arising from the move to an Auckland super-city.

But more specifically, he sees the Labour government's 2002 rewrite of the Local Government Act as opening the way for communities to take control of the process and trigger an inquiry by the commission. The commission, to his mind, will then be able to play an honest-broker role, sending in an expert to hear all arguments and come down with a verdict.

"The commissioner could say, `no, you guys are kidding yourselves ... I can't do better than what's already here'," Miccio acknowledges. "That's fair enough, and then it's done and dusted.

"Or he could say, `hang on, you guys are one community of interest, yeah we could probably have a better governance model than you've currently got'."

Miccio argues that any speculation about costs, structures and effects arising from a possible amalgamation are all "moot".

The obvious difficulty is that the temptation to speculate is overwhelming, and could in turn overwhelm the debate: for example, what would it do to rates? Would Nelson be saddled with Tasman's ballooning debt? How would the planning rules be rewritten? How many staff would get the chop?

One of the various elephants roaming the room is the theory that Nelson interests are pushing the idea out of frustration at Tasman District Council's reluctance to support the city's dreams of a performing arts centre.

Miccio insists it's not an issue, even if he thinks the prospect of Nelson ratepayers alone paying for it strikes him as unfair; Kerry Marshall flatly and tersely rejects the suggestion ("I'm surprised you're asking me the question, actually it's not an issue").

Kempthorne is less adamant "I don't know, to be honest," he says when asked if he thinks the performing arts centre might be influencing things.

Miccio is striving to guide the discussion away from such things and instead whip up enthusiasm for the prospect that, at last, the region could get a neutral, outside party to give expert, dispassionate advice.

Some of his arguments in an interview could be described as hard to follow he later seeks to clarify things with a written statement but his conviction that the two-council model needs a rethink cannot be doubted. "Everybody else in our region is able to operate under a single governance model," he says. "That's important ... The councils are making it difficult for everyone else."

Kempthorne has been going out of his way to counter the view that the two councils don't already co-operate, a view that he says "comes from people talking about things where they don't understand the facts". Indeed, his council devoted five pages of its new long-term plan setting out just how closely it works with Nelson City Council as did the city. The sections in question even share much of the same wording.

Intriguingly, the city council plan goes so far as to predict that "amalgamation is not likely to happen in the foreseeable future"; the TDC version doesn't even utter the A-word, preferring to note that "collaboration preserves the separate identities and accountability arrangements of the two councils, enabling each council to respond to the specific needs and preferences of its local residents".

"There's an assumption by a lot of people that we don't get on together, that we're not working together," Kempthorne says. "The whole point of putting that in [the long-term plan] is, it's not spin, it's actually just fact of what the two councils are doing together. My own perception is that the important thing is for us to work together. That's where our focus should be."

Kempthorne is mildly peeved that Miccio has launched his campaign so soon after both councils signed off those documents (and, he adds, both councils also decided against a suggestion of budgeting for an investigation of the amalgamation question).

If he is happy to give Miccio the benefit of the doubt "I think his motivation is simply that this is something he thinks should happen and he's acting on it" it is safe to assume that Kempthorne won't be giving him his signature for the petition.

Miccio may be confident that he will attract the roughly 3500 signatures he needs from each of Nelson city and Tasman district electors (10 per cent of the total) for his petition to get the commission involved; Kempthorne is equally sure that in Tasman at least, any wider support simply isn't there.

"If I thought it was close to 50-50 if I thought that our community was anywhere close to even 40 per cent support then I'd be saying, well look, we need to have a look at it, but that's not what it seems to me. So therefore I don't think it's worth it."

Miccio is perplexed by such a view. "I can't think of a rational reason why people would not want to look at a model and then decide ... No-one's explained to me yet why we shouldn't have a cost-benefit first and then have a decision."

QUESTION TIME

How straightforward is forcing a local government shake-up?

"Not very" would be the blunt answer. Former Tasman District Council chief executive Bob Dickinson says the requirements of the 2002 Local Government Act are "complex and multi-step, and it's very, very difficult to get through the whole process and achieve amalgamation".

The Local Government Commission's Donald Riezebos acknowledges as much. "It is a difficult process, what we currently have."

The two principal hurdles he identifies are the first one those seeking a reorganisation by way of petition getting the minimum number of signatures to require the commission to get involved (at least 10 per cent of all the electors in each affected district); and the final one, when whatever proposal for reorganisation the commission comes up with has to be put to a referendum, requiring at least 50 per cent support in each district. Actually merging two councils, if it ever came to that, would be an enormous task, too. While the existing councils' arrangements around debt, financial management, rates, planning rules and the like could be "ring-fenced" for a time, the process of unifying them would take years.

Has it been done before?

Only once in the past 20 years the tiny Banks Peninsula District Council merged with the Christchurch City Council in 2006.

In that case, the smaller council voted to abolish itself and be absorbed into the city, rather than a straight merger, although it still needed the approval of its electors to go ahead with the change, which took years to achieve.

Riezebos says there have been two other attempts to force amalgamation through petitions and polls one in Hawke's Bay, the other in Waikato which failed at the final hurdle, attempting to win majority support on both sides of the debate. The commission can also knock back proposals after it has investigated them, as it did recently with a bid to merge Kaikoura district and North Canterbury's Hurunui district.

Riezebos says that example demonstrates that while amalgamation might look logical, it isn't necessarily so.

"Looking at something like Kaikoura [and Hurunui], you've got two smallish local authorities in population terms, and conventional wisdom might be `just bang them together and things might be better', but once the commission looked at the issues there, it wasn't convinced that would be the case." A literal reading of the law, he adds, suggests that if the commission cannot make things any better, it shouldn't make any change.

Could the Government intervene?

Technically, yes; realistically, no. It has consistently warned that as far as local government goes, its hands are full with the Auckland super-city project, and it will look at the results of that before deciding whether to get involved elsewhere.

Nelson and Tasman are by no means the only districts with a perennial amalgamation debate to contend with: there are active amalgamation activists the length and breadth of the country, frequently where an urban-focused council is surrounded by a large rural one, including in Southland, Hawke's Bay, Manawatu and Bay of Plenty.

How long could a Local Government Commission inquiry take?

Riezebos says up to a year is easily conceivable, given the amount of time that has to be provided for consultation (two rounds of two months apiece) plus hearings, as well as the various procedural steps in checking petitions and the like.

Aldo Miccio says his ideal would be to have a commission inquiry organised and completed in time to put its proposal to voters at the same time as the next council elections in October next year. Riezebos is cautious as to whether that would be an achievable time frame, although he says the commission "tries to deal with things expeditiously".

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