Waikato Councillors break their word

The Herald reports:

Five Waikato regional councillors who last year campaigned on pushing for the council to leave Local Government New Zealand have voted to stay.

Elected members voted yesterday on a motion to cancel the council’s $91,539.24 annual Local Government New Zealand (LGNZ) membership.

The motion was lost in a 10-3 vote, meaning Waikato Regional Council will stay a member of LGNZ until March 31 next year. …

During the last local body elections in October, a group of eight people campaigned as the Rates Control Team.

That team included elected councillors Maher, Downard, Dunbar-Smith, Hughes, Cookson, Reymer and McGuire.

On the team’s website, it was stated that one of their policies was to “Leave Local Government NZ”.

Yesterday, of the seven, only Hughes and Reymer voted to leave LGNZ.

This is spitting in the face of ratepayers. They had an explicit policy on which they were elected to leave LGNZ, and Maher, Downard, Dunbar-Smith, Cookson, and McGuire all a few months later did the exact opposite.

There can sometimes be times when a promise can’t be met. You might campaign to keep rates to say 4% and an earthquake hits and you need to spend more on rebuilding etc.

But this was not one of those cases. It was a very simple policy, and there can be no excuse for reneging on it months after the election.