Thursday, Jan 15, 2015
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THE INDEPENDENT VOICE OF MID CANTERBURY
NCEA exam results out Weeks of anxious waiting ended for Mid Canterbury teens yesterday when NCEA results went live.
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Rates up or poor roads? BY SUE NEWMAN
SUE.N@THEGUARDIAN.CO.NZ
In an effort to keep a cap on rate rises, Ashburton’s district councillors may spend more than $1 million less on the district’s roads next year. Injecting the extra spending into the budget would catapult the council over its self-imposed rate rise threshold of a maximum 6.6 per cent, but not doing so could see the district’s roads slip into disrepair. Yesterday councillors began
a three-day workshop on next year’s budget, working from a base rate rise of 3.5 per cent; the extra $1m for roading would push this to 7.3 per cent. Last year an 11th hour bid saw an extra $1 million injected into unsubsidised roading work, with $300,000 of this funded directly from rates. Mayor Angus McKay was keen to boost the roading budget again next year, but this time ratepayers would carry the full cost of the extra roading vote.
That should not stand in the way of spending more money on roads, Mr McKay said. “We can’t afford to downgrade our infrastructure and I think we should put options to ratepayers. “We put this out there as an option and let’s hear from them. I want to put both options out there and let the people decide. I don’t like putting the extra $1 million in, but we’re out of options,” he said. If the roading budget was
upped by $1 million the costs would be borne 80 per cent by rural ratepayers and 20 per cent by urban. Mr McKay said he was so committed to ensuring the district’s roads were well maintained, he was prepared to commit an extra $1 million for the next 10 years if needed. “If we let our roads fall apart, we let our district fall apart,” he said. Some of his councillors weren’t feeling as generous,
with Alan Totty saying he was prepared to support a lesser figure, around $650,000. Don McLeod suggested councillors were looking at the extra spending from the wrong angle; before decisions were made on where extra budget dollars would go, they had to decide what the district’s number one priority was, he said.
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