In the interests of efficiency local govt contracts out a lot of services. This runs the risk of companies (and Wellington City) seeking monopoloy rents. What will you do to stop the companies, e.g. water (if we ever have one), parking facilities, parking regulation enforcement, Snapper, tourism promotion and Wellington Airport (Infratil) from ripping us all off?
Kevin
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All services that are of benefit to the ratepayers and citizens should be brought back into Council where it is possible. These services should be delivered at cost to the Citizens as personal private profit isn an extra cost to the consummer. Water management and parking enforcement along with the Management of the waterfront should come back into council without any difficulty.
Even where we contract out services we retain control of the policy under which they supply. We must, by law, contract most of our maintenance work on infrastructure to get cost efficiencies. However, we tell them what to do and we have an in-house department which also tenders against them - so we keep them honest. Capacity is a company owned by Hutt City and ourselves which manages water supply and maintenance and saves us $700,000 on what we used to do. We must run a tight ship and hold down rates. Private enterprise frequently does things more efficiently than we do and we reap those savings while they still employ the people and make a profit. It is wrong to think that private enterprise just "rips us off".
Water is managed by a Council-owned company and we oversee their costs and charges through the CCOPS committee. They essentially deliver water at cost to Wellignton City. Council directly owns all the water assets. For services like parking enforcement, we have tenders and contract management.
Regards
Celia
Kevin, a lot of these should be brought back under council control. Capacity and Waterfront Ltd. for a start should be revised and be made totally accountable to ratepayers, and I have said this at some of our debates and forums. It is a waste of money for Waterfront Ltd. to defend legal action from Waterfront Watch—Waterfront Ltd. should be enacting policy that has been agreed on by the citizens of Wellington, not sneak in projects that we have already objected on. On parking enforcement: when the contract is renewed, this will also be brought back under council control as I cannot see any efficiency gain through contracting it to Tyco. In fact, the efficiency dogma, most of the time, is deceptive, in my book (it was the argument of Slater Walker and British Leyland in the UK, for instance).
The theme of my administration is transparency, which means sharing information with all citizens so that we can comment and know we have been properly consulted. This means we would encourage public participation as a counter to any organization exercising undue monopoly power—something that is certainly an offence under the Commerce Act.
I would not mind your clarifying ‘tourism promotion’—do you refer to Positively Wellington Tourism? This is perhaps one area where I see us needing to maintain this organization but have closer links to it from the Mayor’s office and council.
