Jane Nees BOP Regional Councillor www.janenees.co.nz

There is a lot of change on the horizon for local government – and most of it is being driven by central government.

There is a general move towards simplification, rationalisation and provision of more central direction from government on national issues – like bio-security, water management, spatial planning, infrastructure, transport and relationships with iwi. Stronger direction on these issues is a good thing in many instances because it will lead to more consistency across the country and hopefully better all around performance.

However, much of this change is happening quickly and changes are overlapping – not easy to deal with for the local government sector, which is bureaucratic and not particularly nimble.

A case in point is transport planning. The Bay of Plenty Regional Transport Committee has been developing our draft Regional Land Transport Strategy as it has been required to do under legislation. Next week we start hearing public submissions on the draft strategy.

Two weeks ago, government announced changes to the Land Transport Management Act 2003 – to make the transport planning process simpler and more streamlined, while promoting better alignment between central and local government. One of the changes is to reduce the number of transport plans and strategies required. This is to be achieved by extending the role of Regional Land Transport Programmes – the prioritised list of regional transport projects and activities – so they identify the outcomes, objectives and interventions proposed for at least 10 years and remove the requirement to produce a separate Regional Land Transport Strategy. However, the development of our strategy has not been a waste of time – we will shortly start reviewing our RLTP so our strategy work can flow into this.

There will still be the problem of achieving alignment between our regional direction and the national transport direction, which could change at election time. The local government sector has been calling for a longer term national vision, rather than the short-term transport Government Policy Statement we have now. The legislative changes address this by a Government Policy Statement on land transport, which will set out central government's outcomes and objectives for the land transport sector for at least 10 years and be issued every six years, with a review of the investment strategy every three years. This matches the timeframes for the RLTP, but ideally we should have the national document before we set our RLTP – and this is not going to happen. So we will need to predict national policy, something which thankfully, we have been good at in the past.

The secret to this is collaboration and good relationships across organisations, across the region and across central and local government – something the Bay of Plenty works hard at. Add flexibility, a willingness to change, a proactive approach and the readiness to invest in our future and we will be in the best position to cope with the changes coming at us.