Disappointed, but not surprised by Kāpiti’s go-it-alone preference

Disappointed, but not surprised in the slightest. That is likely to be my reaction if Kāpiti Coast District Council follows officer advice at tomorrow’s council meeting and declares that its preferred future is to become a standalone Kāpiti unitary authority under the Simplifying Local Government reform’s Head Start process.

Technically, councillors are not yet being asked to withdraw from the Wellington region’s Head Start process. Tomorrow’s recommendation is that KCDC ask for a standalone Kāpiti authority to be included within the regional proposal, while confirming it does not support Kāpiti being included in a single Wellington regional authority.

The final decision on whether Kāpiti remains involved in the regional proposal is due on 4 August.

But the intended ultimatum is clear. If the other councils do not include a Kāpiti-only unitary authority in their proposal, KCDC’s report says it should withdraw from the regional Head Start process and take its case directly to the Government.

Politically, it is easy to understand why councillors would take this position.

Going it alone is the safest option available. It allows them to say they listened to the community, protected Kāpiti’s identity, defended local decision-making and refused to let Wellington swallow the district. If you are hoping to get re-elected in two years’ time, it is a hard decision to argue against.

It also has the added bonus of leaving the much more politically difficult decision about possible amalgamation to central government ministers.

If the Government eventually uses its backstop process to put Kāpiti into a larger authority, central government ministers will have to own the decision. Local councillors will be able to oppose it, campaign against it and tell residents that it was imposed on Kāpiti over their objections.

As much as I am a staunch advocate for amalgamation, I can appreciate that this is a much more comfortable political position for our local representatives to be in than voting for amalgamation themselves.

Unfortunately, what is politically safest for today’s councillors may not be what is strategically best for Kāpiti over the decades ahead, even if that is not where current public opinion sits.

KCDC can fairly argue that its preferred position reflects the results of its community engagement. Of the 2,770 people who participated, 43 percent ranked Kāpiti going it alone as their first choice. Looking north towards Horowhenua received 36.2 percent, joining a wider Wellington authority received 18.1 percent, and just 2.7 percent wanted central government to decide.

There is no doubt that those who took part were deeply sceptical about joining Wellington. They were worried about losing local control, having Kāpiti’s rates spent elsewhere and becoming responsible for other councils’ infrastructure problems.

Councillors would be taking an enormous political risk if they simply dismissed those concerns. But the engagement is not quite the overwhelming mandate for independence that the headline figures might suggest.

Going it alone attracted the largest number of first preferences, but it did not receive majority support. The Kāpiti–Horowhenua option was placed in the top two by more respondents and achieved the highest overall rank-points score. Depending on whether you measure the strongest first preference or the broadest overall acceptance, the leading option changes.

The survey was also an open, self-selecting consultation rather than a representative poll. Sixty-one percent of respondents were aged 60 or older and 97 percent were ratepayers. The PublicVoice report expressly warns that younger people, renters and lower-income households were underrepresented and that its findings should be read as the views of those who participated, rather than as a statistically representative result for the whole district.

That does not make the feedback invalid. Nearly 2,800 responses represent a substantial expression of local opinion. But we need to remember this was an engagement exercise, not a referendum, and 43 percent of a self-selected sample is not an unambiguous public instruction that Kāpiti must stand alone regardless of the consequences.

I do not envy the decision councillors are being asked to make.

The Government has given councils an absurdly short period to contemplate structural changes that could last for decades. The Head Start process remains a policy rather than legislation, its future will almost certainly be affected by this year’s general election, and councils do not yet know precisely how the eventual backstop will work.

There has been no detailed modelling of what each option would mean for rates, debt, assets, staffing, service levels or transition costs. KCDC’s report repeatedly acknowledges that its assessment is preliminary, has not been independently validated and requires much more financial and operational analysis.

This is exactly the problem I have repeatedly raised in my previous writing on amalgamation.

In Once more unto the Wellington amalgamation breach, I argued that reform needed to be built from the ground up, undertaken independently of councils, developed through meaningful deliberative engagement and based on several genuine structural options. I also warned that amalgamation would involve real trade-offs and was unlikely to produce the easy savings often promised by its advocates.

Instead, councils have been presented with a rushed, government-designed process in which they can either produce an acceptable reorganisation proposal within three months or risk having a new structure designed for them.

As I wrote when the Head Start pathway was announced, the Government has given councils a blunt choice: lead your own reform or have reform done to you. That might force decisions after decades of procrastination, but speed and clarity are not the same thing as good design.

KCDC’s response is therefore understandable. Faced with incomplete information, a sceptical community and a looming election, councillors are likely to choose the option that preserves the greatest theoretical degree of local control.

But theoretical control is not the same as practical influence.

The strongest argument for a standalone Kāpiti authority is straightforward. Kāpiti has a strong local identity, relatively well-managed infrastructure, contained water catchments and a council that is operating within its financial benchmarks. It has an asset base worth more than $2.3 billion, an AA- credit rating and water infrastructure that has allowed it to retain an in-house model under Local Water Done Well.

Those are genuine strengths. They demonstrate that KCDC is not a failing institution that needs to be rescued by a larger neighbour. But being capable of continuing as a district council does not necessarily mean Kāpiti has the scale required to become an effective unitary authority.

A unitary authority would not simply preserve the existing KCDC with a new name. It would need to absorb regional responsibilities currently exercised by Greater Wellington, potentially including regional planning, environmental regulation, flood protection, catchment management, public transport and other specialist functions.

Even the council’s own assessment says a standalone authority would require sufficient financial capacity, technical expertise and organisational scale to undertake those responsibilities. The assessment then identifies a long list of risks.

Kāpiti would have less ability to spread costs, fewer opportunities to attract specialist expertise, less purchasing power and limited organisational scale. It would still rely on neighbouring councils for regional transport, environmental functions, specialist capability, and cross-boundary coordination.

The size of the regional functions being transferred is unknown. So are the transition costs, workforce requirements, operating model and effects on existing service levels. Recruiting and retaining specialist staff could be difficult.

We would carry the responsibilities and overheads of a regional authority without the rating base, workforce or institutional scale of a genuinely regional council. We would remain dependent on our neighbours while having less influence over them. We would preserve our council boundary while losing a seat at the table where many of the most important decisions affecting Kāpiti are made.

That looks remarkably like the worst of all worlds.

In December, I argued that the central question was whether Kāpiti would shape reorganisation or simply be shaped by it.

Kāpiti is deeply connected to metropolitan Wellington. Our residents commute into Porirua, the Hutt Valley and Wellington (a point recently reinforced by more detailed analysis). Our housing market responds to pressures generated elsewhere in the region. Our growth depends on regional transport connections which largely transport people southwards, and decisions about infrastructure, planning and employment made outside Kāpiti already affect daily life here.

Remaining administratively separate does not make those connections disappear. As I wrote then, staying outside a reorganised Wellington would not protect Kāpiti from regional decisions. It would simply deny us a vote on many of those decisions.

There is a revealing contradiction in KCDC’s supporting material for their decision tomorrow. The council describes Kāpiti’s transport network as largely “self-contained”. It points out that local roads are controlled by KCDC and that local bus routes feed rail stations at Paraparaumu, Waikanae and Ōtaki. But the electrified rail spine is not evidence that Kāpiti is separate from Wellington. It is physical evidence that we are connected to it.

Those bus routes feed passengers onto a metropolitan rail system operated as part of the wider Metlink network. Trains do not reach Waikanae and then cease to have regional significance merely because the railway station sits inside the Kāpiti boundary.

The same principle applies to the expressway and Transmission Gully. Although KCDC controls the local roads feeding into it, the strategic corridor connects Kāpiti with Porirua, Wellington and the wider lower North Island. Its value and operation cannot sensibly be understood solely within the Kāpiti boundary.

The same is true of our labour market, housing market and use of public services. Administrative geography does not define the full community we live in. Many Kāpiti residents earn their incomes in Wellington, Porirua, or the Hutt, they use roads and public transport elsewhere in the region, visit regional hospitals, parks, libraries and cultural facilities, and rely on infrastructure networks that extend far beyond the district boundary.

A standalone authority would give Kāpiti greater control over strictly local decisions. But it could also reduce our influence over the regional decisions that increasingly determine the district’s future and affect the day-to-day lives of our residents as they live, work and play around the region.

KCDC’s own risk analysis admits as much, warning that standing outside the Wellington regional proposal could reduce Kāpiti’s voice in regional conversations and create conflict between local priorities and regional planning and investment decisions. I know from my time on KCDC that this was already a significant issue with the separated structure we currently have, standing alone or going with Horowhenua would make this worse with the areas that have the most impact on us.

None of this means Kāpiti should blindly join whatever model the metropolitan councils produce. There are legitimate reasons to be worried about amalgamation.

The evidence that larger councils automatically save money is weak. Transition costs can be substantial, bureaucracy can become more complicated rather than less, and attempts to standardise salaries and service levels can place upward pressure on rates. KCDC’s research concludes that whole-of-council cost reductions are not reliably observed and that rates rarely fall following amalgamation, a reality which has been backed up by academic and think-tank research too.

Nor should concerns about local representation be waved away.

A poorly designed regional authority could centralise too much power, leave peripheral communities feeling ignored and weaken relationships between residents and their elected representatives. Any Wellington model would need meaningful local governance arrangements with genuine responsibilities and budgets, rather than decorative community boards whose advice can be ignored.

Auckland’s experience should also make us cautious about democratic distance. Electoral participation in the super-city has remained troublingly low, while the scale and complexity of its governance arrangements can make it harder for residents to understand who is responsible for what, something which Simplifying Local Government wants to rectify.

The case for Kāpiti joining Wellington should therefore not rest on simplistic promises about cheaper rates. It rests on whether being part of a larger authority would provide Kāpiti with greater strategic capacity, stronger professional capability and a meaningful vote over the regional systems that already shape our lives.

KCDC’s own research accepts that larger entities are generally better positioned to undertake long-term planning for infrastructure, land use and economic development. Those potential advantages need to be weighed honestly against the equally real risks to local voice, identity and control.

That is the detailed, deliberative assessment the Head Start process should have allowed. It has not. And the fault for that lies with central government and its extremely rushed timeframe, not with KCDC or the councils of the Wellington region.

The Government deserves much of the blame for the position Kāpiti now finds itself in. Through its attempt to pass the buck on a difficult decision to local government’s elected representatives, it has inadvertently created a process that encourages councils to prioritise immediate political survival over long-term outcomes.

KCDC can choose the locally popular option of advocating independence. If ministers accept it, councillors can claim a victory for local voice. If ministers reject it and impose amalgamation through the backstop, councillors can claim they fought for Kāpiti and blame central government for the outcome. Either way, they avoid directly owning the unpopular choice.

That may be rational politics, but it is not necessarily strategic leadership.

As KCDC’s own analysis acknowledges, amalgamating with councils to Kāpiti’s south aligns most strongly with the Government’s Head Start criteria and its proposed changes to resource management and spatial planning. Cabinet is expected to decide in September which outline proposals will proceed, and it is not difficult to see why ministers may be reluctant to approve Kāpiti’s preferred alternative of going it alone.

With a population just shy of 60,000, a standalone Kāpiti could emerge from the reform programme as one of the country’s smaller unitary authorities, wedged between much larger amalgamated councils to its north and south. The Government says Head Start is intended to produce one or only a small number of unitary authorities within each region, with proposals assessed against economies of scale, simplified governance, regional planning and deliverability.

If the reform process creates larger entities across metropolitan Wellington and the Manawatū–Whanganui region, ministers may reasonably ask what is gained by leaving a comparatively small Kāpiti authority sitting between them. From their perspective, that could look less like simplification and more like preserving fragmentation, particularly when Kāpiti’s transport, labour, housing, economic, social and cultural connections are increasingly intertwined with the communities to our south.

Kāpiti’s strongest case for standing apart lies in its environmental geography, particularly its largely self-contained water catchments and corresponding infrastructure. But that physical separation is much less apparent when considering how residents live, work, travel and participate in the wider regional economy.

All of this is why I have long argued for a more considered, deliberative and non-partisan process, ideally through a Royal Commission tasked with designing a sustainable future for local government.

The Government’s rushed Head Start process, rather than any unique failure by KCDC, has created a situation in which Kāpiti appears ready to make the inclusion of its preferred model a condition of remaining involved in the regional process before the costs, benefits and consequences of any of the options have been properly established.

Regardless of where responsibility lies, the practical effect may be that Kāpiti steps away from the regional table and leaves the final decision to the same central government politicians its community says it does not trust to determine the district’s future. Councillors will be able to say they advocated for the option most favoured by those who participated in the engagement. But Kāpiti may discover that choosing independence on paper does not give it control over what happens next.

I understand why councillors are likely to choose to go it alone, just as I understand why the public reacted as it did, given the rushed process, an understandable degree of parochialism, and the set of underdeveloped options placed before it.

But I will still be disappointed if the political safety of standing alone is prioritised over Kāpiti’s longer-term ability to influence a region of which it is already an integral part, and over the better outcomes that active participation in that region could produce for our communities.

Even so, my greatest disappointment is with central government for creating this mess in the first place.