{"id":20250,"date":"2025-09-13T15:28:07","date_gmt":"2025-09-13T15:28:07","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/20250\/"},"modified":"2025-09-13T15:28:07","modified_gmt":"2025-09-13T15:28:07","slug":"gisborne-mayoral-candidates-united-rates-rises-not-sustainable","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/20250\/","title":{"rendered":"Gisborne mayoral candidates united: Rates rises \u2018not sustainable\u2019"},"content":{"rendered":"

Fisher said Gisborne\u2019s regional rates had increased 30% over the past three years<\/a> and asked candidates for their view.<\/p>\n

Here is how the region\u2019s three mayoral candidates responded.<\/p>\n

Incumbent Mayor Rehette Stoltz, seeking her third term, gave insight into how the change of governments affected council plans.<\/p>\n

Stoltz said questions to ask the Government would be what did \u201ccore infrastructure\u201d mean, and did the council need to include the four wellbeing provisions (social, economic, environmental and cultural)?<\/p>\n

Under Labour, the council was required by law to include the wellbeings in plans.<\/p>\n

\u201cThen the Government changed and then suddenly those are not actionable anymore.\u201d<\/p>\n

She had ideas to bring rates down, which included investigating how the council spent money, sharing services with other councils, and partnerships with private partners and iwi.<\/p>\n

\u201cWe cannot carry on this way … we do need operational efficiencies and we do need to focus on core [services].\u201d<\/p>\n

Stoltz said 80-85% of the council\u2019s three-year plan focused on essential and core services. <\/p>\n

She had approached other councils on how to share services.<\/p>\n

\u201cWe\u2019ve already spoken to Wairoa. I\u2019ve spoken to all the mayors in the north. How can we do waters better? How can we have shared services like waste?\u201d<\/p>\n

Challenging her for the mayoralty and also running under the general ward are Jono Samson and first-term councillor Colin Alder.<\/p>\n

\"SomeSome of the candidates at the Gisborne Chamber of Commerce Meet the Candidates event on Thursday evening. Pictured (from right) Gary McKenzie, Larry Foster, Blake Webb, Jono Samson, Andy Cranston, Debbie Gregory, Jordan Walker, Jodie Curtis, Teddy Thompson, Colin Alder, Ian Allan, Rob Telfer, Darin Brown, Raawiri Gilgen, Mateawa Keelan. Candidates at the event but not pictured were Jackie Akuhata-Brown, Ian Procter, Mayor Rehette Stoltz, Jeremy Muir, Elizabeth Kerekere and Rawinia Parata. Photo \/ Zita Campbell<\/p>\n

Samson said rates were unsustainable – \u201ca bit too hefty, a bit too much.\u201d<\/p>\n

He believed the way to reduce rates would be to increase the population of Gisborne and focus on the region\u2019s talents.<\/p>\n

Samson said there was an expression in America: \u201cDon\u2019t worry about today, it is already tomorrow in New Zealand.<\/p>\n

\u201cWe have an opportunity here … to take that seriously. We have manaakitanga, we have our culture, we have our wonderful talent that we could export online through the internet, and there are millions of subscribers just waiting to bring outside money into this region, and bring people in.\u201d<\/p>\n

Samson said it was 2025, but it still looked like the last century. The region needed inventive solutions to its problems.<\/p>\n

\u201cLike the exporting of waste. There are recycling and reprocessing plants and things happening all over the internet with waste, and we are shipping ours off to another city.\u201d<\/p>\n

Alder, who is bald, joked he had been tearing his hair out during his time as a councillor because of the rise in rates.<\/p>\n

\u201cTotally not sustainable and it\u2019s compounding … It affects the elderly and people on fixed incomes the worst.\u201d<\/p>\n

Alder said there was \u201cso much waste in the council\u201d, including increases in staff numbers during this term, and \u201cso much wastage\u201d in roading projects.<\/p>\n

\u201cThey were putting cones up on the road the other day and going to put traffic lights on. I spent five minutes with a spade and cleared the problem,\u201d he said.<\/p>\n

All they could do was make policy, he said.<\/p>\n

\u201cWe are going to have to lean on the fence … between policy and where jobs get done.\u201d<\/p>\n

Councillor candidates also believed the rate rises were unsustainable.<\/p>\n

M\u0101ori ward candidate Raawiri Gilgen said he wanted to help people who were entitled to rates rebates get them. <\/p>\n

\u201cA lot of people I talked to have never heard of that,\u201d he said.<\/p>\n

M\u0101ori ward candidate Mateawa Keelan said rate differentiation needed to be investigated.<\/p>\n

As a farmer, she paid eight separate rate charges for eight small M\u0101ori land blocks that she ran.<\/p>\n

\u201cI pay eight uniform annual general charges. I don\u2019t think that\u2019s fair. And I know that other farmers and other M\u0101ori landowners out there will be paying rates for their multiple land blocks and not know why they are doing that.\u201d<\/p>\n

Incumbent general ward councillor Larry Foster, seeking his fifth term, said rate rises were unsustainable, but each term the council tried to keep them down.<\/p>\n

Foster said under a previous mayor, there was a 2-3% rate rise promised for three, maybe four years, and \u201cit absolutely caned us\u201d.<\/p>\n

\u201cWe spent so much money after that trying to catch up because we could not keep up with the infrastructure needs of this region.\u201d<\/p>\n

General ward candidate Jordan Walker said reinstating the railway could help reduce rate increases, as it would reduce the strain on roads.<\/p>\n

First-term councillor Teddy Thompson said he was the only councillor who voted against the 2025\/26 annual plan because of the council\u2019s borrowing.<\/p>\n

Since he had been in council, the loans had increased, which would affect future rates, he said.<\/p>\n

\u201cThat\u2019s going to come back and hit us.\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Fisher said Gisborne\u2019s regional rates had increased 30% over the past three years and asked candidates for their…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":20251,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[2],"tags":[1558,1970,21323,12506,305,21325,21168,111,43,139,5006,69,19257,7676,10042,21324,9938],"class_list":{"0":"post-20250","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-new-zealand","8":"tag-been","9":"tag-believe","10":"tag-candidates","11":"tag-gisborne","12":"tag-have","13":"tag-increases","14":"tag-mayoral","15":"tag-new-zealand","16":"tag-news","17":"tag-newzealand","18":"tag-not","19":"tag-nz","20":"tag-rate","21":"tag-rates","22":"tag-rises","23":"tag-sustainable","24":"tag-united"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/20250","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=20250"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/20250\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/20251"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=20250"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=20250"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=20250"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}