Cr Bill Faulkner Faulkners Corner www.sunlive.co.nz

The introduction/induction process for the new councils continued this week.
All three local councils - the regional council, Western Bay District Council and Tauranga City had a ‘meet and greet' evening, followed by a city and district-wide familiarisation bus tour the next day.

As has been noted in this column previously, all three councils work together for the benefit of the Western Bay sub-region.
Apparently this is a rare phenomenon in local government in New Zealand. In fact, the lack of this kind of harmony was one of the many reasons given for the creation of Auckland's so-called ‘Super City'.
To ratepayers in our respective areas, local government boundaries are probably not that important. What they expect is council cooperation to ensure provision of services and amenities: The processing of Omokoroa sewage by city wastewater plants to stop seepage from septic tanks into the harbour, and the creation of TECT Park and Huharua Park at Plummers Point are high profile examples of that cooperation.
We're pleased to now be joined by the Bay of Plenty Regional Council (formerly Environment BOP, originally the regional council) which is at last helping with the sea lettuce problem. They anticipate picking up about 1200 tonnes of sea lettuce off high profile beaches this season. When we visited Bay of Plenty Polytechnic, it was interesting to hear from Dr Chris Battershill that the new Marine Research facility, in association with the University of Bremen in Germany, has allocated two PhD students to study the sea lettuce problem to get to the bottom of the problem. Sea lettuce is produced by a complicated mixture of events that seems to involve colder water, a nutrient mix and human intervention. It's shaping up to be a boomer year for sea lettuce judging from the volumes of it in Tauranga Harbour now.

Dealing with age issue
During our polytechnic visit elected members also learned of proposals to extend tertiary education in the Bay to offer opportunities for students that complement existing universities rather than competing with them. At Tauranga Hospital, we heard that the district health board which operates it is the largest single employer in the Bay with about 6000 employees. Much planning is needed to cope with a society that will have significantly increased numbers of aged into the future, we were told. We're to look forward to many more people living to 100 years, but with a falling population, how looking after these people will be funded is the question. Denmark, a leader in solving social problems, is looking at increasing the retirement age to 73.

Essential Port work
Another highlight was a visit to the Port of Tauranga and a tour of its installations on both sides of the harbour. High on the port's list of priorities is dredging the harbour to a constant depth of 14.5 metres. It is awaiting the outcome of three appeals to its resource consent before work can start. The work is essential to handle new generation container ships which will each discharge 5000 containers to the port as a central hub. From there the containers will be distributed around the country by road and rail. At present much smaller ships call at 13 ports around our coast and this rationalisation by overseas shipping companies reflects cost controls and New Zealand's relatively small size and distance from our markets. Ultimately the shipping companies will have a much-reduced port requirement in New Zealand and Tauranga will be to the forefront – provided the dredging gets approval.

Treaty settlement
I was surprised to learn that with the imminent settlement of Treaty of Waitangi claims with local Maori that their iwi harbour management plan is likely to form an integral part of their anticipated ‘co-governance' of Tauranga Harbour. There is already a harbour management plan which was put together by the regional council, publicly consulted, submitted to and deliberated on. The iwi management plan is an ‘internal' Maori perspective that has not gone through any public process. A settlement figure of around $350-450 million in cash and assets has been touted.

Tour learning experience
Elected members also heard from Priority One, TECT and watched bullet point presentations on a raft of issues as we travelled around on the bus. All-in-all, this was a really worthwhile exercise, as all this information contributes significantly to council decision-making. We don't do enough familiarisation during the triennium as we tend to get bogged down in the rarified atmosphere of the council chamber. Well done to staff who organised a precisely-timed programme and kept speakers to their allocated times. Hopefully elected members will take note and follow similar disciplines in the council and committee business sessions to come.
Later in the week there was a financial overview briefing for the city council's elected members, followed the next day by a briefing on growth, infrastructure capacity and development contributions. I'll report on these in more detail in next week's column.
The next official council meeting will be on Wednesday November 17 when committee structures and councillors remuneration will be decided. There is a pool of money decided by central government ($752,643 – called the ‘indicative' pool) and it's up to elected members how it gets divvied up. The mayoral stipend is $121,940 after deductions for private use of his vehicle.