As others have mentioned, UHCC is effeciently run focusing on the key functions of a council, in buildings with genuine 1970′s styling. At the last election no one, bar the usual joke candidate, stood against the incumbant mayor Wayne Guppy.

The simple reality is that for some of the other cities in the region an amalgamation is nothing more than a case of less for more, and there is likely to be little to any support from some the outer cities.

Already have, the largest city (in land area) in the country comprising Port Chalmers, Portobello, Waitati, Waikouaiti, Karitane, Mosgiel, Brighton, Outram, Middlemarch and a few smaller places as well. Don’t know if the new Auckland will be bigger or not.

Bit like company amalgamations, Owen. Sometimes they work, even for a long time, like General Motors, but more often it’s just papering over the cracks.

Lefties love committees, inquiries, commissions, mergers, restructuring, piling plans upon plans upon plans … in other words their heaven comprises perpetual chatter.

Oh well, if a large leftist organisation ends up running Auckland, with another running Wellington, it might become time for South Island-Aoraki to consider seeking entry into Australia as a state. Better than being part of a declining, South Pacific version of Belarus or Cuba.

Stig and Capitalist, your denigration of smaller places than Auckland is laughable – Auckland is smaller than such well known cosmpolitan metropolises as Heze, Guarulhos, Nizhny Novgorod, Palembang, Bursa, Tijuana…

September 18th, 2009 at 9:02 am
Auckland has something like 29 sister cities between the different Councils. I suspect the new Council will have a handful only which is a plus.

No. By my reckoning, that’s a minus.

Unfortunately the whole logic behind the Super City is to promote Smart Growth. At the meeting at Matakana on Saturday the ARC folk were all quite clear that Rodney District had to be inside Auckland Council so that the Council could stop people leaving Auckland to live in Rodney Kaipara because of the attraction of low development contributions and hence low house prices etc.

The Berlin Wall has to be far enough out to stop people living where they want.

In principle I am in favour of one main council for Wellington, Porirua and the two Hutt cities, but and it’s a big but, apart from Upper Hutt city where I live, it seems that most of the local councils are run by munters arguing about their own pet projects.
Wellington city councils Rob Goulden is not able to work with anybody at times, and Lower Hutt council struggles to be able to deal with the sea side suburb of Eastbourne being two obvious sore points.
Also Porirua has very wealthy areas right next to low income areas and because of voting being based on populations not on households, we see rates based more on capital values and not flat household charges. (Feel free to correct me if I’m wrong). In effect the high value homes subsidises the low value homes for rates services.

Upper Hutt isn’t perfect, but it focuses more on the bread and butter and the ratepayers are happy with the council. To prove the fact, they’ve had two mayors in the last 20-30 years.

So why would Porirua, Kapiti or Upper Hutt want to join the disfunctional population heavy weights Lower Hutt and Wellington City council and lose basically well run local services to fund the whims of Wellington CC and Lower Hutt CC???

I look to Auckland to see how that goes in the meantime.

As it happens the evidence from the UK US and Canada is that mega mergers lead to dominance by the left.
Remember Red Ted – first Mayor of the Greater London Council.

Les Brown and Mike Lee will almost certainly be the Mayor and Deputy Mayor of Auckland. The transition agency is already being dominated by lefties. We seem to be following the trend.

All the talk above about sister city junkets and waste. Is this stuff going to be easier or harder to control in a super-council? I think it will be harder. We’ll have a mayor who’s paid more than the PM, who will appoint himself some Ministers of Economic Development etc and spend a fortune running around studying the rest of the world and making busy work.

I like the idea of economies of scales etc, but unless the remit of these super-councils is tightly defined, we’ll just end up with multiple governments.