Straight from city council A personal view, by Councillor Steve Morris

You may ask why doesn't Tauranga have a museum or some of the other feel-good things a modern city has? The answer is simple – infrastructure. Building a city out of a small town in the 21^st Century is expensive. Of the $360m the city owes, $140m is 'growth-funded” – that means it's paid for by building and subdivision fees for roads, water and sewage for our new residents. The next five years will see this growth-funded debt increase to more than $270m as more infrastructure is built to cater for growth.

However, the true cost of growth is higher because before 2011 council subsidised developers with your rates by not charging interest on money borrowed to build infrastructure to service new subdivisions. Because of this and government rules that don't allow council to charge developers the full cost of growth, our ratepayers are paying off an additional $40m in debt.

The Government acknowledged the pressure that their demands for more housing are putting on council's finances and is borrowing $1b for a Housing Infrastructure Fund that councils can apply to. Unfortunately, they failed to realise that debt is still debt whether it's borrowed from the bank or the Government. The projects government want us to build with this money will still breach our debt ceiling and cause a credit downgrade of council by rating agencies. The answer is for government to build the infrastructure and collect the cost off developers over time, saving the city and its ratepayers. Next week, is regional council to the rescue?