Lee Vandervis

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This Otago/Southland Unitary Council replacing the ten current Councils where we will probably end up anyway, but doing it two steps rather than one will cost double and delay much bigger integration and development opportunities.

Tom Campbell Mayor of Invercargill

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Lee Vandervis if the Govt were restoring a Provincial system or a federal State system that would be sensible Lee, but we are talking here about a Council with a Mayor who will need to get around and be familiar to the communities as Mayors must. Southland on its own is bigger than Belgium and bigger than eight US States which is going to be a huge challenge to get around. If you double that by the addition of Otago it would become impossible in my view, and the Mayor would become a very remote figure.

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Lee Vandervis

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Ground Control to Mayor Tom…

Your point about the Mayoral position is well made, but the large area covered is not really important in my view. 

Local Government is mainly about services for people and there are 12 million in Belgium whereas Otago Southland only has 358,000, with only a 1/3rd of them in Southland.

Doubled up IT systems and bureaucracies for the region make no sense, and a single Unitary Council would make much stronger representations for regional development, integrated services with greater scale economy and Government funding, rather than competing for it as 10 Councils do currently.

There are of course large river catchments and environmental challenges in a large area, but again these are best managed by a single Unitary Council with end-to-end river and integrated power generation and distribution management. Your PowerNet and our Aurora lines companies should be working together optimising their respective strengths rather than having turf wars.

The Southland/Otago Mayor would have greater resources to travel around the region and use more zoom-style technology to get the whole region developing together. 

We need to look at Local Government a bit differently as it has not worked very well in the past and Central Government is seeing the bigger picture that threatens all current representation…