Rates Report Highlights Need for More Funding
Implementing the six recommendations from Report of the Local Government Rates Inquiry relating to the use of rating tools will not achieve significant benefits for ratepayers without additional funding from outside the rating system.
This is the conclusion from No Magic Answers, a report on 12 March 2008 by Local Government New Zealand and the Society of Local Government Managers (SOLGM).
No Magic Answers presents the results of modelling undertaken by 20 councils to determine the impact of the Rating Inquiry’s six recommendations on the use of rating tools.
The headline results from the report are:
- in metropolitan local authorities the recommendations will see a shift in the incidence of rates from the commercial sector to the residential sector. If one accepts that the Inquiry was established largely out of concerns about rates increases for residential ratepayers in our cities, then these recommendations on their own are likely to create more issues than they resolve
- in provincial and rural New Zealand, the recommendations generally create a shift from townships into rural areas. The size of the shifts are more mixed, some are relatively unaffected, for others the shifts are particularly significant.