Waitaki mayor Mel Tavendale is seeking an urgent meeting with the government, and her complaint fits in one line. Central government decision-making delays, she says, are creating “double the work and double the cost for our ratepayers”.
Take away the North Otago detail and that sentence describes how process risk works across New Zealand. Indecision is not free. Someone has to budget for it, and that is usually the ratepayer, the contractor or the developer.
Two regions, every reform twice
Waitaki sits across two regional council areas, so every reform wave hits it twice. Last month the government deferred every Head Start amalgamation decision until after the election. Officials had found gaps in all 18 proposals nationally, including missing financial detail and representation problems, and none had unanimous regional support.
In fairness to ministers, pushing half-finished amalgamations through would have been worse. But deferral has a cost, and councils are carrying it. Tavendale, whose council faces a 16.9% rates rise, told RNZ: “There’s still so much in the way coming down the barrel at councils, and for us being across two regions we’re just getting some of it doubly. It’s just not sustainable.”
The water bill nobody budgeted for
The amalgamation limbo comes on top of an earlier blow. In October 2025, the Department of Internal Affairs rejected Waitaki’s standalone water services plan. It ordered a full review of the district’s water assets, with a deadline of the end of June 2026 to resubmit. At the time, then-mayor Gary Kircher warned the standalone path could mean rates rises of up to 40% over two years. The council said the review was likely to cost millions of dollars, and none of it was budgeted.
That deadline has now passed. Ratepayers should be told what the review cost and how it was funded. Demanding robust asset data is reasonable. The problem is the sequencing. Councils get a water review, then reform limbo, then whatever the next government decides. Each step forces planning work that the next step may throw away.
The official clock and the real one
Waitaki’s grievance is easy to dismiss as one council’s bad luck. The national consent data says otherwise. MBIE’s Q1 2026 monitoring puts the statutory median building consent processing time at 9 working days. Once requests for information are counted, the real elapsed median is 16. That seven-day gap sits between what the system reports and what builders actually experience.
The pattern is not new. In the year to June 2025, 64.6% of applications needed an RFI, adding a median 11 extra working days. In March 2025, then-building minister Chris Penk said RFIs meant “12 more days of projects stalling”. Analysis released at the time put the cost of a 12-day RFI delay at about $4,000 per dwelling. The government has since pushed ahead with consent reform, and it deserves credit for that. The latest figures show the gap has not closed yet.
Fewer consents, still slow
The usual excuse is volume, and the numbers do not support it. The Auditor-General found new resource consents granted nationally fell to 30,578 in 2023/24, the second straight annual decline from a 2021/22 peak. The system is handling less work and is still struggling to be timely.
Industry has been saying this for years. In 2024, Mark Ross, then chief executive of the Wood Processors and Manufacturers Association, described a consent that took 13 years and cost one company $2 million for little change. In 2023, Infometrics found pipeline uncertainty “limits their ability to invest in labour and capital”. Firms cannot hire or buy plant against a pipeline they cannot see.
Price the wait, then fix it
For business, the practical lesson is to stop treating government timing as background noise.
- Contractors tendering for council work should price in scope changes. In a district facing reform limbo, that is a reasonable expectation.
- Developers should plan around elapsed consent times, not statutory ones, and budget holding costs for the difference.
- Councils should publish what each deferral and duplicated process actually costs. That would turn complaints into evidence ministers cannot ignore.
Waitaki is where an abstract national problem becomes a number on a rates bill. Tavendale’s meeting request is a fair test of whether the government sees delay as a cost it creates or one that councils simply absorb. Deferring amalgamation until after the election may have been the right call on the merits. The next government’s first job is to set firm dates and clear interim rules, so councils like Waitaki stop paying for the same decision twice.
Sources
- ODT: ‘Double the work and double the cost for our ratepayers’ – Waitaki mayor seeks urgent meeting over govt decision-making delays (2026-10-26)
- RNZ: Mayors left stunned by Government’s council amalgamation U-turn (2026-09-25)
- RNZ: Waitaki District Council’s standalone water services plan rejected by DIA (2025-10-08)
- Beehive: Building consent data shows need for bold reforms (2025-03-21)
- Property Ticker: Costly consent delays justify reforms, as median time for commercial approvals revealed (2025-03-25)
- Office of the Auditor-General: How well councils are meeting key performance measures (2025)
- Politik: Our slow regional councils (2024-05-14)
- Infrastructure New Zealand: Estimating the Costs of an Uncertain Infrastructure Pipeline (2023-10)
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