John MacDonald: Return to sender - Christchurch needs to halt water invoices

Shout out time for Christchurch city councillor Sam MacDonald who has gone into bat for those of us who think the council has made a right cluster of its excess water charges regime. The council has brought in the excess water use charges because it wants us to use less water. There are environmental factors but it also thinks that if we use less water, it may not have to spend truckloads of money over the next 10-or-so years on water infrastructure. It’s also been saying over the last few months that, where this sort of thing has been done elsewhere in the country, water use has dropped by 20-to-30 percent. Although, I see the council has said in the past 24 hours that, since the charges were introduced, water use has decreased by something closer to 10 percent in Christchurch. So decreasing water use by 10 percent, 20 percent, 30 percent - whatever - that’s fine and dandy. But the beef I’ve still got with this new regime is that it doesn’t treat everyone equally. These charges don’t apply to every household. They only apply to properties that have their own water meters. So if you share a water meter with some of the houses around you, you can use as much water as you want and you won’t be stung for it. That’s just plain wrong, as far as I’m concerned. But it seems to me that Councillor Sam MacDonald went as far as he could yesterday, getting councillors to agree to consider increasing the daily water limit. And that’s because yesterday the council was meeting to consider its annual plan for the year ahead. If he wanted to get them to scrap the whole excess water charges thing altogether, that would’ve had to have been done through the council’s Long Term Plan process. Either way, the whole thing is Mickey Mouse because of the inequity. Because of the fact that there are, and will be for some time, thousands of properties in Christchurch that won’t be penalised because they don’t have their own water meter. 25,000 properties where people can use as much water as they want, with no consequences. Water the garden, as many baths and showers as they want. They can run through the sprinkler day and night. 25,000 properties out of a total of just over 110,000 residential connections in the Christchurch City Council area. So that’s about 22 percent of places connected to the city council water supply where they don’t have to think twice about how much water they’re using. But, at least there’s a glimmer of hope on the horizon, with the decision by councillors to go back out and consult the public on whether or not it should increase the daily water limit per property from 700 litres to 900 litres. Naturally, I think that’s a no-brainer. But I also think that the council needs to pull the plug on the thousands of invoices that have gone out in the past week or so. I know the argument will be that these invoices have been calculated using the 700-litre-per-day limit, which has been the limit up until now and still is the limit. But, as of yesterday, it’s all up in the air again with the majority of councillors agreeing to put a higher daily limit out for consultation. It wasn’t a unanimous decision by the way - it was a nine/eight split among councillors. Nine were in favour of lifting the daily limit and eight were against. Nevertheless, the daily limit is up for discussion again. And that’s a good thing. But I think that, as long as it is up for discussion, the council has to pull the plug on all invoicing.See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.