Counting the cost: Who’s paying the piper(s)?
As residents across the region gasp at new rates bills, new data shows Wellington City residents are paying roughly one-third the cost per person for pipes than those in Porirua.
Wellington Water chief executive Tonia Haskell has released figures for how much each of council funded it to fix, replace and maintain pipes and related infrastructure in the last financial year, and how much each will in the current year.
Hutt City, with a population 104,532 in the 2018 census, plans to fork out $93 million this year to Wellington Water versus Wellington City’s $87m. But factoring in populations, the numbers become starker. Hutt City works out at $896 annually per person, Porirua at $1319, Upper Hutt at $504 and Wellington at $431. Population numbers are used as a guide as council revenues come from a range of sources, including commercial rates, and rates are charged per-property – not per person.
Wellington’s pipe crisis was brought into sharp relief last summer with water restrictions in place and people flocking to snap up short-supplied water tanks under the real risk of taps running dry as a hot summer mixed with about 44% of water being lost to leaks.
Haskell said Wellington Water aimed to renew 20km of pipes a year and reached 24.5km last year. But only 9km was planned this year as “a result of a prioritisation of available capital spend on the most urgent, critical infrastructure first”.
Shortly before the Wellington City Council voted in an effective 18.5% rates rise this year, mayor Tory Whanau put the blame for much of it at the feet of decades of underinvestment in pipes.
The Wellington Water data shows her council will spend $4.7m less than last year on its capital programme but will spend $5m more on planned and unplanned network maintenance.
Capital spending amounts to new stuff, such as new pipes. This means the only funding increase in Wellington City will be on maintaining and plugging holes in a network of pipes that is, in parts, more than a century old.
Meanwhile, Hutt City, Upper Hutt, Porirua, Greater Wellington, and South Wairarapa all increased capital spending.
Whanau said Wellington City faced “different financial pressures” than other councils. She cited the cost of strengthening the Town Hall, which in 2023 blew out in cost by $147m to $329m, strengthening the central library at a cost of about $200m after a previous council opted for the most-expensive option, a new $400m sewage treatment plant not included in the Wellington Water figures, and $500m on upgrading social housing.
Also, the council’s 10-year plan would see water infrastructure investment eventually rise by 68% to $1.8 billion over the coming decade.
Porirua mayor Anita Baker expects to be voted out of office in 2025 due to the city’s most recent 17.5% rates increase.
But 55% of the council’s budget was now going on three waters – tap, storm, and waste – and “we could be spending double that”, she said. “We chose to invest, not to spend on other things,” Baker said.
Crofton Downs resident Neil Madgwick said his rates bill had jumped from $3736 to $8263 in four years while council services such as water had worsened.
Big building projects such as the Town Hall that irked him the most.
“It is just incredible,” he said. He yesterday emailed councillors telling them: “The inability to prioritise essential services over the ‘nice-to-haves’ and ideological projects that benefit a select few is evident.”
“We chose to invest, not to spend on other things.”
Anita Baker, Porirua mayor