amend the buyout terms<\/a> to increase funding for 13 homes at risk of future flooding or landslides to build retaining walls, move or lift the homes, to make them safe.<\/p>\nIt means the homes can be lived in and the council will not have to pay up to $14 million buying out the properties – the homeowners have not yet been advised.<\/p>\n
West Auckland is Flooding spokesperson Lyall Carter said some of them likely would have preferred a buyout.<\/p>\n
“The people that are advocating on behalf of storm-impacted people, we don’t know who these people are and as far as we’re aware, these people don’t know who they are.”<\/p>\n
He said they did not know what situations these homeowners were in.<\/p>\n
“How far are they through this process, are they near the end of the process, do they expect to be bought out through this process? I mean, can understand why from a fiscal point of view they’re making this decision but you don’t change the rules halfway through the game.”<\/p>\n
Carter said the homeowners should have been notified of the change before it went to councillors to vote on, on Tuesday.<\/p>\n
“While I can understand on one hand the need to be good financial stewards, this is not the way in which you in my view that you work with victims of a weather disaster.”<\/p>\n
As part of the buyout scheme, the council can now fund grants up to 40 percent of the property’s capital value (CV), an increase from 25 percent.<\/p>\n
If building work exceeded that 25 percent limit, a variation could be sought to increase it or the homeowner could opt to be bought out.<\/p>\n
Council’s recovery office said it would be contacting the homeowners with the details once the buyout terms are changed.<\/p>\n
There are 75 Auckland properties in the early stages of having building works costed that would make them safe to live in.<\/p>\n
Sign up for Ng\u0101 Pitopito K\u014drero<\/a>, a daily newsletter curated by our editors and delivered straight to your inbox every weekday.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Flooding in Henderson Valley, west Auckland on 27 January 2023. Photo: Supplied An advocate for Aucklanders affected by…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":267127,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[2],"tags":[48,47,111,43,139,69,49,46,44,45],"class_list":{"0":"post-267126","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-new-zealand","8":"tag-audio","9":"tag-current-affairs","10":"tag-new-zealand","11":"tag-news","12":"tag-newzealand","13":"tag-nz","14":"tag-podcasts","15":"tag-public-radio","16":"tag-radio-new-zealand","17":"tag-rnz"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/267126","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=267126"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/267126\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/267127"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=267126"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=267126"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=267126"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}
![\"Flooding](\"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/02\/4LEINEP_car_jpg.jpeg\")
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