\u201cWe want to sincerely apologise for this error,\u201d Reeves said.<\/p>\n
\u201cTo prevent this happening again, stronger internal controls have been put in place, including additional review steps.\u201d<\/p>\n
Wellington City Council chief financial officer Andrea Reeves. Photo \/ Supplied<\/p>\n
February rates bills will include personalised information about the undercharge, Reeves said, and no penalties or interest will be applied.<\/p>\n
The mistake happened when the levy was uploaded into the billing system, the council said.<\/p>\n
\u201cSome amounts were entered as GST-inclusive instead of GST-exclusive, and an incorrect fixed charge was used.\u201d<\/p>\n
What is the sludge levy?<\/p>\n
In 2024, Wellington City Council included a special sludge levy to rates bills, to help fund its first-of-its-kind under-construction sludge minimisation facility.<\/p>\n
The project has faced its own financial challenges, with a potential $83m budget blowout revealed earlier this year<\/a>.<\/p>\n Sewage sludge<\/a> is a natural and unavoidable by-product of the process of treating wastewater.<\/p>\n The city produces more sludge than it can currently deal with, leading the city council to approve the construction of a new sludge minimisation facility at Moa Point near the airport in late 2022.<\/p>\n The facility was initially budgeted to cost $200m, but climbed to $400m by the time it was approved in 2022, before being raised again to a budgeted $428m in June 2023.<\/p>\n The budget blew out again in August this year when councillors were told the cost of the project grew to between $478m and $511m.<\/p>\n Ethan Manera<\/a> is a Wellington-based journalist covering Wellington issues, local politics and business in the capital. He can be emailed at ethan.manera@nzme.co.nz<\/a>.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"\u201cWe want to sincerely apologise for this error,\u201d Reeves said. \u201cTo prevent this happening again, stronger internal controls…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":187475,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[5],"tags":[63973,5344,74,38317,138,114138,2199,5205,19959,9881,29012,78,101,96885,111,139,1536,69,25718,7676,18337,88,117893,117892,52,379],"class_list":["post-187474","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-business","tag-34m","tag-accounting","tag-after","tag-blunder","tag-business","tag-capitals","tag-city","tag-council","tag-error","tag-facing","tag-households","tag-in","tag-left","tag-levy","tag-new-zealand","tag-newzealand","tag-next","tag-nz","tag-ratepayers","tag-rates","tag-sludge","tag-surprise","tag-topups","tag-undercharged","tag-wellington","tag-year"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/187474","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=187474"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/187474\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/187475"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=187474"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=187474"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=187474"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}A render of Wellington City Council’s new sludge treatment plant. Image \/ WCC<\/p>\n