In the two hours before going under the knife for a new hip this week on Wednesday I learned of the last-minute proposal to change The DCC Revenue and Financing Policy to allow even more spending to be classified as DEBT, so as Chair of Finance and Council Controlled Organisations I wrote this response, which the ODT subsequently quoted accurately on Saturday’s front page.

Dear Elected Representatives and Senior Staff

Shameless, a proposal to change our Financing Policy so that we can reclassify even more spending as capital.

A capital idea.

More ‘let’s do it on debt’.

More, yes more that Council can spend now that doesn’t appear as a rates increase [short-term at least] but just pays it forward into the never-never of debt.

Some have argued that building major stuff like our Town Hall without debt happened ‘in a different time 100 years ago’, even though the Mayor Skeggs Council Civic Centre was built without substantial debt or rates rises in 1979, and substantial DCC debt only began to grow this century.

And now we somehow justify raising an extra 100 million$ in debt every year, a new Stadium’s worth [Stadium debt still not paid back after 14 years!] and not build anything substantially new with this massive debt increase, claim falsely that this is all somehow “good debt” and claim that all our mainly infrastructure maintenance is somehow all capital expenditure so can be borrowed.

Even better when we can cunningly leave out all our increasing debt figures, both in the CEO Overview and the hundreds of pages of 9 Year Plan, bar a single distant 2034 billion$ figure, and get people to focus only on the rates increase.

You get the votes for spending money now that somebody else will have to repay 10 years later, and with unbalanced budgets you can even use the borrowings to pay the interest in the meantime!

Buy heaps now, somebody else can pay later.

Brilliant!

Regards.

Lee