Waikato Water Done Well is a model that offers the participating councils a range of benefits.
11 benefits of a joint approach:
- Enables a catchment-based approach for water quality, infrastructure planning and construction, regulatory requirements and consenting
- Enables water service/s delivery to be managed more efficiently and so become more affordable
- Enables greater ability to borrow money so much needed waters infrastructure can be constructed
- Enables opportunities for a skilled, sustainable and community-based waters workforce
- Enables more focus on customers/people
- Delivers efficiencies through, for example standardised data, analysis, compliance, processes eg resource consents
- Enables local control to be retained through the way the CCO is structured
- Enables broader expectations to be met eg Treaty settlement obligations, investment in regional catchment solutions, economic growth
- Enables visibility of the actual costs of waters services (not buried within or subsidised by other council activities)
- Enables non-water rates income to be reduced or diverted to other community needs
- Enables suppliers who build the infrastructure for councils, to have the confidence to employ more people and invest more in equipment, which has flow on benefits to the communities we live in.
Efficiencies include:
- access to lower interest financing
- one asset management plan informed by councils’ long-term infrastructure strategies and spatial plans
- a single combined capital works programme = greater bargaining power for procurement of services
- streamlining of processes
- reduced duplication
- pooling of resources
- smart consenting – integrated approach on catchment-wide basis
- consolidated data collection.
The CCO model and full proposal can be found here [link]