Tag Archives: community

29/08/2025
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Local body politics

What the heck is up with the rates?

Rates are going through the roof and people are struggling. Even so, I’m going to say something that most mayoral candidates won’t admit. Rates are going to keep going up and anyone who promises that they can stop that happening is lying to you. The Government would sack the council and install commissioners if we did what it would take to stop rates increasing.

Let me explain. Rate rises are being caused by three things: increased debt levels, inflation and the need to upgrade our water infrastructure.

First our debt levels have risen. All councils use debt to pay for long term assets like infrastructure, as a way of spreading the cost over the life of the facility. Recently our Council has been borrowing money to pay for operating expenses – the day to day costs. That’s like borrowing money to pay for groceries and is something I have opposed. In fact I led a revolt of councillors against the mayor’s plan in 2023 to borrow even more to keep rates down. That debt has locked in substantial rates increases for the next few years.

Second, we have all seen the cost of living rise due to inflation. Council costs have gone up more than households because of the kinds of things we spend most of our money on eg. construction.

Third, we need to upgrade our water infrastructure. For decades the council has underinvested in this and it’s now catch-up time. This will be the biggie for the next few years. I will write at another time about possible pathways forward but the reality is that the government standards have changed and we need more expensive systems to meet them. Estimates are that we need $200 million over the next 10 years and it won’t stop there.

It is incorrect to say, as some do, that rates rises are because council spends money on “nice to haves” like the council building upgrade 3 years ago, the Mitchell Park upgrade, the Boat Harbour and the Rex Morpeth redevelopment. The council building work, which was primarily about earthquake strengthening the Emergency Operations Centre, adds about $50 a year on the average rates bill. The Mitchell Park upgrade costs the average ratepayer less than $2 a year to provide some decent public toilets and add drainage. The Boat Harbour wasn’t funded out of rates at all. At the Rex Morpeth / War Memorial hub the Council has only budgeted money for essential maintenance such as fixing the leaking roof. There is also a small amount to rescope the proposal to something more affordable and to develop a plan to get outside funding to pay for it.

If you look at the council’s budgets, almost all the money is spent on core functions such as hard infrastructure (roads and pipes), community services (the library, swimming pool, sports fields, community halls etc) and things that central government requires us to do. Despite what some candidates say, the only way to stop future rates increases is to not upgrade water infrastructure. That would put the community’s health at risk and put us in breach of the law. It would almost certainly lead to the sacking of the council and the appointment of commissioners.

Cutting out all the so-called “nice to haves” won’t make a significant difference to the rates, but it would suck the life out of our district. I do think there are other things we can do to help control council costs, but they are not enough to stop rates rising. These include:

Less use of outside consultants. It means more staff if we want to bring more things in-house but it would save us money and retain expertise in the organisation.


AI is changing how people work across the globe. We need to carefully make use of new technology such as AI to boost productivity.

The Mayor needs to champion our district. They need to work with outside funders to help pay for community assets, leverage relationships in Wellington to unlock government funding and get the councillors working as a team.

Finally we need to work with other councils to pressure government to fix the funding model for councils. Taking GST off rates and / or returning a portion of the GST raised in a district back to the council would help a lot, as would the Government paying rates on its properties.

I have said that I want Council to be more open and transparent. I won’t spin a story to try to win votes. If anyone is telling you that they will cut rates, ask them how.


(Published in the Whakatāne Beacon 29/8/25)

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13/02/2025
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Activism, Local body politics

MORE THAN MATERNITY SERVICES AT STAKE


The massive downgrading of maternity services at Whakatāne Hospital is just the tip of the
iceburg. Investigations have revealed a hospital in crisis, with dedicated and highly
competent staff struggling to keep servicing the community within a dysfunctional system.
When news first broke that Obstetrics and Gynecology services were closing, the public
was told that it was just a recruitment issue and that secondary maternity services
(obstetrics) would resume in 12 months. After speaking to a number of staff within the
hospital, it is clear that there are far bigger issues that have led to this closure, and which
threaten other departments. The community has a right to know, and to make our voices
heard.
Recruitment is absolutely an issue, with a shortage of obstetricians globally, but more
importantly the recruitment process at Whakatāne Hospital is a shambles. A number of
departments have chronic staff shortages, but they get almost no recruitment support.
When they manage to find applicants, getting contracts signed off by the bureaucracy in
Tauranga can take up to ten months. The coalition organising Saturday’s Hikoi for Health
has heard of multiple examples of great people being recruited by local senior staff, but by
the time their contracts are approved they have moved on.
Other applicants have become so frustrated by the lengthy delays in getting a permanent
contract that they end up applying through a recruitment agency and being taken on as a
locum, at a higher cost and with numerous other disadvantages. Senior staff have
complained at being unable to identify where the hold ups are, with decision-making
unclear to locals. What is clear is that recruitment for Whakatāne takes a back seat to
Tauranga.
This is made worse by the lack of a local General Manager for the hospital, someone who
has oversight over the whole hospital, a local perspective, and who can advocate within Te
Whatu Ora for Whakatāne’s needs.
Even when people are recruited, staff shortages mean that doctors and nurses are
constantly under stress and exhausted, leading to people leaving. The Coalition
understands that of the four obstetricians who recently resigned, leading to the closure of
the unit, three had been recruited from the USA within the last couple of years. They
moved country, relocated families, bought houses here, only to move on within a short
space of time. This is indicative of a dysfunctional working environment and poor
management from Tauranga and our coalition hopes that those people will tell their tale so
the local community can understand what is going wrong at the hospital.
On top of all of that, succession planning seems to be almost non-existent. Te Whatu Ora
had plenty of advance warning of at least one of the obstetricians resignations but didn’t fill
the position, leading to gaps in the roster and only patchy coverage since last year. In
another department a doctor coming up for retirement gave a years notice, but the hospital
sat on it’s hand rather than proactively planning for it. There are enough cases that it
seems to be a systemic issue. Overseas recruitment is vital to keep the hospital staffed,
and at least 6 months is needed to allow to visas to be approved and families to relocate,
so succession planning is a necessity. The lack of dedicated recruitment staff also means
that silly mistakes get made. Recently a number of new staff had to be put on hold
because they had applied for the wrong visa, following faulty advice.

Some of the problems are not new but recent moves to a more centralised system have
made it worse, with Whakatāne staff having little autonomy to make decisions about what
is best for our community. Added to that is cost cutting driven from Wellington, including
the downgrading of the back office functions that front line staff rely on to do their job.
I am deeply disturbed at what has come to light since the closure of Obstetrics and
Gynecology services. It is apparent that a number of other department’s are on the edge of
collapse. We cannot allow this to happen. Whakatāne has always had excellent medical
services, as many of us know from personal experience. We need to join together to fight
to keep them.
The Hikoi for Health Coalition is a broad coalition of people behind the Hikoi for Health
thus Saturday. Members come from a wide range of backgrounds and ages and from
across the political spectrum, united in their determination to protect local medical services
and staff . They include concerned members of the community, health professionals, as
well as representatives of organisations such as Whakatane Action Group, Whakatāne Act
Local, NZ Labour and the Green Party.
We are not medical experts but from talking to people who are, it is clear that there are a
number of things that could be put in place straight away to ease the situation. Allowing
heads of departments to appoint staff to vacant positions without having to go through
Tauranga is one. The appointment of a local General Manager to the hospital is another.
Third is to appoint some recruitment specialists. Lastly Te Whatu Ora needs to improve its
management of people and rosters and support our amazing medical staff. We will be
marching on Saturday Feb 15 at 12 noon from Mitchell Park to call for urgent action to
reinstate full maternity services in Whakatāne, and to fix the broader systemic issues at
the hospital.


Published in the Whakatāne Beacon 12/02/25

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22/01/2025
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Activism, Local body politics

MAKE OUR VOICES HEARD ON OBSTETRICS CLOSURE

The decision to close down secondary birthing services at Whakatāne Hospital will put mothers and babies at risk. Not just in Whakatāne, but across the wider Eastern Bay area and up the coast. It means that only low risk births will be supported in Whakatane, with an estimated 300 deliveries a year having to transfer to Tauranga. That’s a long way to go in an emergency. Whānau will have worse outcomes and reduced choices. We cannot allow it to stand.

The closure has already taken place, last week. We are assured it is temporary, and that the service will reopen in 12 to 18 months, once new specialists can be recruited. I find it hard to believe that this will actually happen. My concern is that it will become the victim of a broader push by this government to slash spending in the public health service. This is already happening in other areas of healthcare. Once we have become used to the lack of services in Whakatāne it becomes too easy to just let the restart deadline slide, and keeping sliding, until it just becomes the new normal. Even if that is not what Te Whatu Ora intends right now, without a strong community pushback other priorities will come to the fore as local health bosses grapple with increasing central government demands for savings.

We are told that the service is closing because the hospital has not been able to recruit the specialist staff needed to run it. There has been some internal criticism that they haven’t been actively recruiting, and that the shortage of staff was foreseeable. Could this closure have been avoided? I am not an expert and I know how easy it is to criticise people when you don’t have all the facts. I believe that Te Whatu Ora regional leadership has done the best it could do with what it had. The question for us as a community is how do we make sure that our opposition to the closure is heard, and that we don’t allow it to become a permanent thing? Taking Te Whatu Ora at their word, how can we best support them to ensure that the funding is there to restart when new staff have been recruited?

It is not Council’s job to fix the public health service. We don’t have the expertise, the resources or the mandate. I do think it is council business, however, to talk about the closure of critical local medical services, to advocate for our community and to pressure the government to do better by this sub-region. We are a growing area and right now the Government should be investing in us – in housing, in workforce development, in business support, and yes, in increased medical services. It is not a time to go backwards.

The pressure must come from the community. It is about our willingness to stand up for ourselves. A number of people have said that we need a march to demand the reopening of the service, and after talking to Kat Walsh (who started the petition) and others I am putting my hand up to be the contact point. We need to keep this issue on the table and not allow it to slide into oblivion. A strong show of support from the community will make a huge difference right now, to make sure the issue doesn’t get forgotten. If you are willing to help organise the march, please get in touch. We need a strong team of us to make it a success.

Following a successful march, I think there are a number of other things that the council can do to support the community. It just takes some political leadership and skill. Council is not just about roads and water pipes. Civic leadership, backing our communities and supporting local action on important issues like this are all part of a council’s role.

If you can help organise the march please contact Nandor at <nandor.tanczos@whakatane.govt.nz> or 021 887 011

Published in the Whakatāne Beacon 22/01/25

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10/03/2023
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Climate change, Local body politics, Social ecology

Building a resilient future

Sometimes people don’t need more facts. What they need is a plan.

You don’t need to be a rocket scientist to realise that we face multiple challenges in the world today – environmental, economic, political and social. Climate change is far from the only problem, but it is probably the most significant, because it makes everything else much worse. Many of us have been talking about this for decades, and slowly gaining traction, but it wasn’t another rigorous, scientifically conservative, well referenced report from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change that seems to have tipped the balance. It has taken a cyclone of unprecedented scale to bring home the real cost of our, and the world’s, inaction.

The science tells us that we still have a brief window to stop runaway climate change. That means we can still prevent the sort of feedback loops that would probably bring an end to homo sapiens 10,000 year experiment with civilisation. If they kick in, we just won’t have the abundance of resources, including the food surplus, to make cities work.

So it give me great comfort to know that the window still exists. That’s a helpful fact. Now what we need is a plan.

That has been my main focus since first being elected to Whakatāne District Council in 2016. In that first term the council agreed a set of principles to govern how we respond to climate change. We asked the people of Whakatāne for feedbaack, and we got strong support. In my second term on council we agreed a set of strategies, targets and action plans. Again these got strong support. The result has been both reduced council carbon emissions and substantial work on adapting to climate change. Last year we agreed on a reset of those strategies – a shifting of gears. You can expect to have your say as part of that work.

I need to add here that I didn’t do that work by myself. The success of the programe is really down to the highly talented staff that work and have worked at WDC. What I provided was the political leadership that allowed staff to do their jobs well.

The next phase of the climate change work needs to engage our communities better. If we have learned anything from the array of disasters that Whakatāne District and other areas have experienced, it’s the need for resilience in the face of an uncertain future. At the heart of resilience is community.

National and regional agencies, and the council, are important in terms of emergency response and long term recovery, but it is our willingness to look after each other that is the most critical. It is when we check on the neighbours because we know they may need a little help, or get stuck in where we see the need, that we see the best of us. Great examples are the Community Emergency Response Teams in action, or springing up, in places like Edgecumbe, Matatā, Waiohau, Thornton, Galatea / Murupara, Awatapu and Manawahe. Marae, who fling open their doors to become critical parts of the emergency response infrastructure, are another. It is a reminder of how blessed we are in the Eastern Bay to live in communities where people look out for each other.

Adapting to climate change isn’t just about disaster response. Council’s job is to make sure our infrastructure is both robust (strong) and resilient (able to spring back when parts of the system fail), but that’s just one part of the story. Given the impacts that Cyclone Gabrielle is already having on things like food supplies, how do we build a more resilient economy in the Eastern Bay? It’s not just about food sovereignty – we need to build strong local economies, that cycle resources (including money) around and around the community as many times as possible so as to extract maximum value.

WDC Council members were privileged recently to hear from Jacob Kajavala of Industrial Symbiosis Kawerau about the work to build synergies across businesses in Kawerau (and increasingly beyond). They work with workforce development training, recruitment and employment, and growing industry and opportunity. These kinds of collaborations across local businesses have great potential to build a vibrant local business ecosystem which provides some buffer from international economic shocks because they are grounded in strong and enduring relationships.This could be a building block towards a true circular economy, where upcycling applies to resource flows (eg the waste from one enterprise becomes the feedstock for another) people flows and financial flows.

It’s just one example of how the Eastern Bay of Plenty has the ingredients we need to build a strong, resilient, interconnected, prosperous and ecologically grounded sub-region. We just need a positive vision and leadership.

First published in the WhakatāneBeacon 8/3/23

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03/03/2019
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Local body politics, Social ecology

RESPONDING TO CLIMATE CHANGE IN WHAKATĀNE

This is an amazing moment in history. Young people, sick of seeing decades of denial, procrastination and evasion on climate change from political and business leaders are taking to the streets. School children are striking from school. Youth are organising direct action movements. People are demanding action.

They need to. Local Government New Zealand has drafted a Climate Change Declaration setting out some principles and aspirations for how local government can address the challenges of climate change. It is not radical – it asks councils to promote walking and public transport, improve resource efficiency and healthy homes and support renewable energy and electric vehicles. It recognises that local government needs to work with central government and with their communities.

Some 56 councils have signed but around 24 still refuse to do so. Thames-Coromandel Mayor Sandra Goudie says that the issue is ‘politically charged’  (because politics is anathema for a politician!). Meanwhile the West Coast Regional Council is opposing the Government’s Zero Carbon bill because “the evidence proving anthropogenic climate change must be presented and proven beyond reasonable doubt”. Apparently near unanimous agreement in the international scientific community is not sufficient.

Here in Whakatāne, climate change is already real for us. The flooding in Edgecumbe last year put our vulnerability to rising sea levels and increased storms into sharp focus. We know we can expect more of that. We know that the water table in the Rangitaiki Plains – once a wetland covering some 300km2 – is rising. A number of our people live under escarpments, along the coastline or clustered around our rivers. We have no room for complacency.

edgecumbe

Like much of local government, our council has been developing scattered pieces of work over the years, adjusting our district plan to incorporate climate change related hazards, but it has been piecemeal. There have been some attempts in the past to develop a Sustainability Strategy, but that never really went very far. What the organisation needed was more leadership at a political level, more strategic governance that recognises the real threat that climate change poses for our council and for our community. That leadership is now there.

Our Mayor, Tony Bonne, gets it. He signed the Mayors Declaration as soon as he found out about it. The issues of climate change and of sustainability are now being regularly raised around the council table, and not just by me. There is, I think, a strong acceptance around the table that climate change is real, that it poses a significant threat, and that we need to address it hand in hand with our communities.

In our organisation we are taking real steps. Our new CEO, Steph O’Sullivan, has a strong background understanding of climate change, of resilience and of partnering across communities, businesses and with the Crown. We have developed a high level Climate Change Steering Group with representation from senior leadership and with myself as the political representation. We have a Climate Change Project Team that has representation from the people that will be implementing our strategies. We are developing Climate Change principles based on the LGNZ declaration but drilling down into how they apply to our district, with input from across the organisation. The key thing about those principles is that they will flow through into decision-making across the organisation so that sustainability becomes embedded into decision-making rather than remaining a clip-on.

We have begun the process of bench-marking our own emissions so that we can improve and change, by signing up to the CEMARS programme. We have also done an energy audit to see where our bulk energy use is and how we can reduce it. That has given us a number of potential places where we can save money and reduce our greenhouse gas emissions. The next step is a more detailed investigation to see which of those possibilities might work in practice. This includes exploring the potential for adding solar generation to our buildings, which has highlighted that we need to address our approach to new public buildings and incorporate basic sustainable building design principles – something we have so far failed to do.

Council needs to address our own emissions, our own robustness (ability to withstand shocks), and our own resilience (ability to spring back from shocks). This is about showing leadership. Perhaps even more importantly, though, we need to be leading a deep discussion in our communities. Neither council nor government will ‘fix’ climate change. We can help or hinder but the most significant decisions will be made elsewhere. In this district, for example, the decisions around land use are critical both in terms of our emissions as a district and in terms of how we adapt to climate change. Council has an important role in making sure that people have good information when they make their own decisions about their homes, their businesses, their farms, their marae. We need community discussions that are non-judgemental, open and honest, and resourced with reliable information.

That process has begun, even though it has a long way to go. Whakatāne Ki Mua is the biggest community engagement that council has ever done, establishing a foundation for what the community wants for our communities. The GreenPrint forums have been exploring sustainability, resilience and regenerative design for our district and that has led to two community initiatives – Waste Zero and the Food Sovereignty network. A number of cool projects are being showcased during this months Sustainable Backyards which, for Whakatāne, is based out of Wharaurangi. In making that site available to Envirohub for the month, council has also committed to engaging our community around climate change, as the first step towards that deep discussion.

The horizon on climate change doesn’t stop in 2080 or 2100. The world will keep warming, oceans will keep rising, storms will keep getting stronger regardless of what we do. However we can influence how much worse it will get, for our children, grandchildren and great grandchildren. Imagine what our own great grandparents would say to us if we refuse to act now, when we know.

This isn’t about blame or judgement, it is about coming together to talk about how we are going to respond, collectively and individually, to this challenge. Most importantly it is about recognising climate change as an opportunity. Not for a few people to enrich themselves, but to genuinely change how we do things. We can create a future that is better than our past and present. By becoming genuinely sustainable and resilient, by building stronger community networks and looking out for each other, we can solve not just climate change but many of our other issues as well. Climate is just a symptom of a deeper problem. We have become disconnected from the rest of life and we have become disconnected from each other. The results are not just ecological but social, economic and cultural. Redesigning our way of life to put people and planet at the centre is worth doing regardless of climate change. Climate change is just the driver.

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14/07/2017
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Local body politics

Youth Offending in the Eastern Bay

I heard some really interesting news on Wednesday. I was representing the District Council at a meeting of the Youth Offending Team, and the Police Youth Aid Officer was talking about offending rates in the Eastern Bay of Plenty.

To give some quick background, the Youth Offending Team is a monthly forum where different agencies working with young people can get together and share what they are up to. Not everyone can make each month of course, but we had people from Oranga Tamariki, REAP, Voyagers, Tūwharetoa Ki Kawerau Hauora, Manna Support, Te Pou Oranga o Whakatōhea and others. It was a really interesting and informative meeting that covered a lot of ground.

One of the things I almost always hear in these kinds of forums are cases of really successful schemes that got funded for a pilot, proved their effectiveness and then struggle for enough on-going funding to work properly. This time it was REAP’s Manaaki Programme, designed to support kids to stay in school. Being disconnected from school can be a real blow to some young people as it can disconnect them from friends, adult support and opportunities. It was great to see different agencies offering advice about where pūtea could be found to support this important initiative.

I was also pleased to hear about a mobile playgroup that is starting up and will be focussed on Awatapu to start. Lots of comments made at the Awatapu community day a few weeks ago highlighted the need for more facilities for childrens, so this should provide a useful service in the area.

But the really interesting news for me came when Tom Brooks started talking about offending rates. Apparently youth offending rates across the country are sinking rapidly, except among young Māori. Youth offending by Māori is going up across the country – but in the Eastern Bay it is going down. Similarly the high teenage pregnancy rates in Kawerau and Opōtiki have plummeted. This is a great story and one that I have not heard before.

“What has caused that?” I asked. In reply I was told that the police are being less precious and are taking a more responsive approach through Problem Oriented Policing (look it up). I heard about the police working with iwi, such as through the Hui-ā-Whānau that Tūhoe is championing. I heard about agencies working with the whole family, including siblings, rather than just focussing on “problem” children. I heard about less reliance on courts to solve problems. Most of all I heard about the community looking for its own solutions and coming up with the goods.

To me this was a reminder that we live in a really resilient, grounded and innovative community here in the Eastern Bay, and that we have a lot going on that other areas on the country can learn from. It was great to be part of the YOT and I look forward to more.

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20/09/2016
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Local body politics

Whakatane Social Sector Forum proposal

PRESS RELEASE 12/9/2016

Nāndor launches Social Sector Forum idea for Whakatāne

Nāndor Tānczos today launched the third of his ‘great ideas for Whakatāne’, this time focused on community development.

“There are some awesome social sector organisations around Whakatāne, but there is no regular forum for them all to share what they do with each other and talk about how they can work more effectively together. This lack of coordination makes it hard for organisations to create the synergy that comes from strategic coordination”.

“By supporting the different social agencies working in Whakatāne to get together on a regular basis, to share information and coordinate their services, council could do something useful for the community sector without spending a lot of money” said Nāndor.

The idea for the Social Sector Forum came out of discussions with a number of people working in the community, who described the difficulty of any single agency pulling such an initiative together. Yet just as the Halo Project has drawn a number of environmental organisations together around some common themes, the social agencies could benefit from taking a more coordinated approach guided by a broad common vision. The Council is in a prime position to take that role.

“It is not council’s role to do community work. It is a council role to support the community to be its best. This kind of social infrastructure is just as important as roads, drains and pipes but would cost almost nothing – just a venue and some facilitation.” he said

“Having a healthy, connected community is in everyone’s interests. Helping to support that is an investment in our future, in terms of making Whakatāne a more attractive place to visit and to live, increasing social cohesion, building resilience, and reducing crime. Once again Whakatāne has an opportunity to show leadership to the whole country with some fresh thinking and some political leadership”.

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