Waikato District Council is working on its Long-Term Plan for 2025-2034, and your feedback will help decide where rates and investments should be focused over the next nine years.

Our priority is to keep things running smoothly while keeping costs down. To do this, we must prioritise our projects, services, and activities carefully – we simply can’t afford to do everything.

We will be formally consulting with the community on our Long Term Plan early next year, but for now we would value your opinions on the topics below.

Share your thoughts by completing the below online survey on our website between 27 September and 20 October 2024. Just click on the tabs of the topics you are interested in and answer the questions we’ve provided.

Here’s how your feedback can help make a difference:

• Your input will guide the Council on how much to invest in different services, projects, and activities.
• We’re particularly interested in hearing your ideas on how we can run waste and library services efficiently, and have some tailored questions for residents in areas receiving specific services.
• Your voice is essential in helping us ensure the Council is meeting the needs of our community.

Council owns 33 community halls, which are either managed by committees made up of local community members, or Council. These halls are funded through a targeted rate paid by properties within the hall's 'catchment' area.

Hall committees are vital to the management and upkeep of these spaces, which often serve as hubs for small rural communities. Although they work in partnership with Council, these committees are usually run by community volunteers.

Each committee is responsible for the hall's day-to-day operations, such as handling bookings, managing repairs, and keeping the hall in good condition. While some maintenance is supported by Council’s facilities team, the committee also manages the hall's finances, planning for repairs and collecting money from event bookings.

Please note: Our hall committees may propose targeted rate increases for other halls over the next month or two. If there are significant changes proposed, we will ask you about them, but these are the only increases we are investigating at this time

We provide a range of services that impact your daily life, like supplying water, maintaining roads, looking after community facilities, and keeping our parks and playgrounds in good shape.

We’d like to hear which of these services matter most to you and your community. Your feedback will help us make decisions that balance maintaining quality services with keeping costs in check.

What’s the deal with rubbish and recycling in the Waikato district?

It’s been a while since we reviewed our recycling and rubbish (waste) services.

Our existing service has been the same since 2018, but a lot has changed since then. It’s time to assess what we’re doing in the rubbish and recycling space to see if it still works and how we provide these services to you - our community.

Your feedback will help us develop options for the 2025-2034 Long Term Plan, which we’ll talk more about with you early next year.

Current district services

94% of our households currently access one of Council’s waste services. We manage over three million individual rubbish and recycling collections every year.

Services vary across our district and include:

Service A – Residential waste service - urban and rural

• Two recycling crates - cardboard and paper on the side.
• Weekly kerbside rubbish service - rubbish is collected in any 60L bag with a user pays sticker attached, which is purchased by an approved local retailer.

Service B - Wheelie bin waste service

• A small portion of residents (7%) have the same recycling service as above, but with a wheelie bin rubbish service with a user pays tag attached.
• 141 Tuakau business premises currently have access to the services above for residential properties. Businesses do not receive this service elsewhere in the district due to varying waste volumes typical for businesses. For example, a pub has more recycling than an office, elsewhere businesses are serviced by commercial waste operators.

Service C – Raglan (urban)

• Raglan (7% of residential properties in our district) have the same recycling service as A. above, plus a weekly food scrap service.
• Raglan rubbish is not a council-rated service. Instead, it is operated by a contractor through a pre-paid bag service.

Service D – Raglan (rural)

• 3% of those receiving council-funded waste services in rural areas around Raglan are served by two unmanned rubbish and recycling depots.
• One depot is functioning well, but the one highly visible and off a state highway has issues with recycling overflow (despite being serviced five days a week) and experiences high levels of illegal dumping.
• This service, covered by Waikato district rates, is also accessed by users outside the district, such as Hamilton and Auckland.
• The cost to run this service exceeds the rates collected from eligible households.

Service E – Recycling pop-ups

• A small portion of residents (just 1%) use a monthly pop-up recycling service. The community brings their recycling to a local car park where it’s collected by a kerbside truck.
• Users were recently surveyed, and results showed that the service is well-received by locals who use it. They prefer the monthly pop-up over a kerbside collection or unmanned depot.
• A targeted rate covers the cost of this service.

Rural collection

The Waikato district has a large rural area, and it can cost more to deliver our rural waste services due to the physical distance between collections and travel and mileage costs. Rural and urban properties in our district pay the same for weekly services, except those specifically mentioned above, which are also outlined in the table below.

What’s ahead for our district?

Waste minimisation

This year, we will be carrying out extra work to minimise waste using funds from the national Waste Disposal Levy.

This includes:

• Promoting waste minimisation through education and advertising
• Creating new opportunities for the community to divert waste
• Encouraging people to shift from single-use to reusable products.

Northern resource recovery centre

Council will start the first stage of building the Northern Resource Recovery Centre on the same site as the new Tuakau pound.

Transfer station upgrades

This year we’re also upgrading some of our assets at the Te Kauwhata and Huntly transfer stations. We’re also making some safety improvements at the Raglan Resource Recovery Centre.

How services are funded?

The money from rates and the sale of rubbish stickers and tags is used to pay for waste services, including picking up and disposing of rubbish at a landfill. Without the income from stickers and tags, rates would be higher. The cost of stickers or tags for rubbish bags or wheelie bins hasn't increased since 2018, but the overall cost of waste collection and disposal has risen.

The Council operates six libraries across the district, offering public spaces for the community to meet, join activities, or just hang out. Four of these libraries also provide essential Council services, like paying your rates, handling rubbish and recycling queries, dog registrations, burials, and food and alcohol licenses.

Here are our libraries and their current opening hours:

In addition to our physical libraries, we provide an online catalogue where you can access eBooks, eAudio, eMagazines, and even stream movies and TV shows through Beamafilm — all for free and available anytime, anywhere.

Note: If you live near Hamilton, you can use Hamilton’s libraries through an agreement with Hamilton City Council, as we currently don’t have a library in your town.

District Overview

While we have received a higher level of co-investment from NZTA than in previous LTP funding rounds, we didn't receive the entire amount we applied for. We could either fund more maintenance on our roading network using rates alone, or reduce future rates increases by around 2%.

Our Council currently receives 51% of its funding from the NZTA. This funding supports a range of activities, including resurfacing roads, filling potholes, maintaining unsealed roads, repairing footpaths, line marking, cleaning and replacing signs, and mowing roadsides.

How does the funding work?

• Like other councils across the country, we send a work plan to NZTA every three years and ask for funding to cover road asset maintenance, operation and renewal costs.
• NZTA looks at all the maintenance, operation and renewal needs for road assets across the country and allocates a portion of money to councils to help them keep their roads in good shape.

In the past, our strategy has been to only do work when we have received matched funding from NZTA (on eligible maintenance, operations, renewals and improvement projects) to get the best value for money for our ratepayers.Taking that into account and acknowledging the increased funding we will still be undertaking a good level of maintenance, operations and renewals on our overall roading network and focusing the funding where it is needed most.

Overview

Council owns a range of properties across the district. Some properties were purchased for public works or strategic reasons, others were gifted, vested through subdivision, or were transferred from the Crown.

These properties vary in size and purpose, but all come with ongoing costs such as maintenance, tenancy management, insurance and in some cases, earthquake strengthening. We also pay rates on the land we own. To ensure we’re being financially responsible, it’s important to regularly review the properties Council owns to make sure they are still serving the community and Council’s need effectively.

Council has identified that some properties no longer provide the benefits they once did and wants to manage costs associated with these. As part of this process, we’ve reviewed our portfolio to determine which properties continue to meet the needs of the community and which ones no longer do.

We've identified some properties that we'd like your feedback on now, and we'll continue to explore options for other properties. We may seek your feedback on these as part of the 2025-2034 Long Term Plan process in April 2025.

Wainui Bridge (Whaaingaroa/Raglan) traffic light trial

We took your feedback from the 2024/25 Annual Plan on board and Council decided to pause the traffic light trial at Wainui bridge. Now, we’d like to check in with you – knowing there’s no matched funding from NZ Transport Agency and the trial would increase your rates, would you still like us to go ahead with the trial?

Overview

Wainui Bridge in Raglan is a one-lane bridge that operates on a courtesy give-way system. Throughout most of the year, this system works smoothly, accommodating the regular flow of vehicles. However, during peak holiday seasons, some drivers may experience brief waits to cross, and each year, Council receives a number of complaints regarding these delays.

Data collected last summer shows that the majority of wait times were under one minute, with the longest recorded wait, just over two minutes, occurring on New Year’s Day. The data also highlights that the bridge is most frequently used by those travelling to the beach, with higher traffic volumes travelling west in the mornings and east in the afternoons.

In the 2024/25 Enhanced Annual Plan, Council initially planned to fund a traffic light trial at Wainui Bridge to help manage the increased traffic during peak holiday periods. This idea came from recommendations in the Raglan Transport Study, as well as concerns about potential future development west of the bridge.

However, with less development happening in that area over the past year and mixed feedback from the community, Council decided to remove the funding for 2024/25 and revisit the trial during the 2025-2034 Long Term Plan. We’re also conscious that installing traffic lights could cause unnecessary delays during off-peak times due to the light programming.

The trial would cost $200,000, fully paid by the Council, as no funding from NZ Transport Agency is available. If the trial goes ahead, it would run during the 2025 Christmas holiday season to help determine whether a permanent solution is needed.

We’d like your thoughts on whether the summer traffic is a concern for you, and whether you’d like us to fund the traffic light trial.