Waitomo District Council is seeking feedback on its fees and charges schedule for 2024-2025.

Each year Council reviews, consults and updates its fees and charges to reflect the cost of providing services to the community. These can range from dog registration fees, library charges and landfill charges to the cost of building consents.

As part of the budgeting process for Year 1 of the LTP 2024-2034, fees and charges are reviewed to ensure the costs of providing these Council services are recovered by those who use them. This annual review provides the opportunity to reflect changes in the costs and services.

General Manager Strategy and Environment, Alex Bell says fees and charges are applied to fund most of the operating costs of activities where the people who benefit can be directly identified and charged.

“Our fees and charges play an important role in the delivery of the services we provide to our communities. To ensure our fees and charges are robust, we review them annually.

“The aim is to shift a proportion of the cost to the people who get the most use out of the services, rather than the general ratepayer.

“Due to the increased operating costs, most fees and charges are being increased by 5% in line with current inflation. We need to ensure costs are recovered so that Council services are not subsidised further by rates.”

An additional provision is proposed to add to the schedule that non-legislated fees can be reduced in exceptional circumstances at the discretion of the Chief Executive.

Services provided by contractors are also increasing in areas of roading, water supply, wastewater, stormwater and solid waste. As there are cost increases forecast for water supply, metered water charges will also increase.

Hireage of the Les Munro Centre has been simplified to be fully inclusive, sound system, crockery etc.  A commercial rate has been set to recover the cost of hireage for a full day and an hourly rate. A half price rate for community groups is proposed to support these activities.

The Les Munro Centre has a cancellation fee of 50%, if cancelled within five working days, and a minimum hireage of two hours. A new fee of $50 will be imposed for pre-inspections of venues if hirer fails to attend within 15 minutes of agreed meeting time.

The cost of purchasing a WDC rubbish bag will now be $5 and the minimum waste charge is proposed to increase to $12 to cover the increases in operational costs.

A full list of fees and charges schedule and an online submission form can be found here