Hauraki Mayor Toby Adams Photo: Toby Adams supplied
A plan to reduce the number of elected councillors in the Hauraki district has been rejected by its rural community.
In April, the council voted to reduce the number of councillors for each of its three wards by one per ward, bringing the total number of general ward councillors down from 13 to 10.
If it also introduces two Māori ward councillors at the 2025 election (as planned), the total number of councillors proposed would then be 12.
Mayor Toby Adams said that the representation review, which is required of local councils every six years, was seen by Hauraki as an opportunity to get effective decision-making.
"We've seen that 13 elected members can get the job done, we don't think we need more councillors," he said in April.
Adams said that Hamilton city, which has a population of 160,000, has the same number of elected representatives as Hauraki District which has a population of 22,000, so ten councillors across the three general wards of Plains, Paeroa, and Waihi, was still good representation.
The community, especially in the rural Plains ward, did not agree.
The council received almost as many submissions on this one issue as they did for their full Long-Term Plan consultation.
Sixty-eight percent of the submissions opposed the proposal and the majority of submissions came from the Plains ward.
Lorraine McDuff was one.
"[The ward councillors] currently have such a massive area to cover, and we hardly see our councillors," she said in her submission.
Eileen Fisher said four generations of her family have lived on the Plains, two serving as previous Plains ward councillors.
"A reduction of councillors will also be a reduction in representation to the unique requirements of the Plains," she said in her submission.
In order to achieve the head of population to councillor ratio rule required of councils, Hauraki needed to change the Plains boundary and move a small part of the current Plains ward into the Paeroa ward.
Submitters seemed to particularly dislike this idea.
"Our interest lie with the Plains, not Paeroa," said Joan Rawnsley in her submission.
"We bought our farms in the Plains Ward, we do not and will not identify as Paeroa Ward," said Brent Aitchison.
He thought the Plains could, if anything, ideally do with more councillors.
Adams said representation reviews are always hard and the more rural or provincial a community the more connection they feel to their local representatives.
"They are more part of a community, more known to people on a personal level, so the community feels like they've got better interaction and they wouldn't like to see that lost."
The council has now gone to the community with its final review proposal, decreasing the number of councillors in the Waihi and Paeroa wards by one per ward, but leaving the Plains as it is. This means if the two Māori ward councillors are introduced the council stays with the same net number of councillors.
Adams said the community has spoken and that is fine with him.
"There is a bit of a myth out there that council gets upset if the community says something different but at the end of the day, the community makes decisions, we are there to implement the decisions for them and if they say this is what they want we are happy with it, we run with it," he said.
Appeals or objections to the final proposal can be made before 7 August. Adams said as of this week none had been received.