July 2023 - Draft Annual Plan 2023/2024 feedback

Feedback period has closed

Thank you to everyone who shared their views with us on the development of the draft Annual Plan 2023/2024. The feedback period closed on 26 May.

The Annual Plan is being finalised. All your comments were provided in the report to Council when they consider and adopted the draft Annual Plan and confirmed the rates on 21 June 2023. 

You can watch the meeting below. 

 

A link will be provided to the Annual Plan document on our website in due course.

You can use our rates prediction tool to see the updated rates for your property based on the final confirmed rates which will come into effect from July 2023. 

In summary, the rate change for individual properties will vary throughout the district depending on the type of property, its location and the services it pays for, as well as its capital value. By township, the proposed average residential rate increase varies. Using the average percentage increase, the lowest increase is 4% in Stewart Island/Rakiura and the highest is 12% in Riversdale. Using average dollar increase, the lowest increase is $111 in Orepuki and the highest is $363 in Manapouri. By land use sector the proposed average rate increase varies from $76, or 1.7%, for forestry, to $753 or 9.6%, for commercial properties.

Striking a balance

Each dollar of your rates represents an investment in the future of our district.

There are undoubtedly tough times, with households and businesses alike feeling the pinch from rising prices. In a recession such as we are currently experiencing the instinct is to hunker down, slash spending and ride it out. In local government, however, it is not so clear cut.

Here at Southland District Council we too have had to grapple with cost increases across the board, while trying to get the best value out of each dollar we are spending on your behalf.

In roading, as an example, the money that would have previously paid for 8km of programmed pavement rehabilitation might actually get us closer to 6km now that the increased price of bitumen and other costs are factored in. Those inflationary pressures apply to every metre of road, every bridge, every water pipe and every community facility in the $2.2 billion of infrastructure assets SDC manages on your behalf.

But we are committed to continuing to replace ageing infrastructure that needs to be replaced. This is the course we’ve charted in our Long Term Plans (LTPs), and as much as we can’t afford to replace infrastructure as fast as we would like to, neither can we afford to stop doing it. This would create a broken network and an unaffordable cost burden on future generations to fix it.

So our challenge is always to strike the right balance. In our Annual Plan we have made some savings to bring the average rate increase as low as we can while continuing to budget on our programme of work to make the district a better place to live.

What’s the plan?

What are the increases and what's behind them?

We are budgeting on average residential rates rises across the district ranging from 6% to 13% in our draft Annual Plan for 2023/2024. The actual rates rise for your property will differ based on a range of factors, including the type of property, its location, the services provided in respective areas, and the capital value of the property.

Use our rates calculator to find the rates for your property effective from July 2023.