Lee Vandervis – lee@vandervision.co.nz

An increasing number of people are asking me daily now. Emails, texts, whenever shopping – they have all wanted my opinion so here it is.

Having spent 18 years as a Councillor I know all of these people personally and have respect for their various skills and experience, despite many having opposing opinions.

In my opinion Useful Councillors for our next 2025-2028 Dunedin City Council include: Vandervis, Lucas, Radich, Weatherall, Barker, Acklin, Whiley, Lund, Hamlin, Galer, Simms, Chambers, Todd, and Macfarlane.

Under the Dunedin STV computer voting system, please only mark candidates you really want and leave the rest blank.

No useful Councillors for Otago Regional Council – hopefully ORC will soon be disestablished or “dismembered’ as MP Shane Jones has called for.

Lee

And in no time Andrew Barnes Rutherford used some AI trickery to produce this version using my lyrics.

This is the full ODT article [on my FB page but some time ago] in which MP Jones calls the Otago Regional Council’s existence into question, describing the ORC as the Kremlin Council that needs to go.

https://www.odt.co.nz/regions/kremlin-councils-need-go

Shane Jones calls for the dismemberment of Regional Councils, having last month called out the ORC for stopping Macraes Gold expansion.

Getting Dunedin free of the Otago Regional Council can’t come soon enough, but needs a strong Mayoral push to make it happen.

My specific proposals are in contrast to Cr. Barker’s aspirations.

e.g.

“Cr Vandervis: Dunedin needs to “be free of” the Otago Regional Council. “We need to reclaim our port and our harbourside.” A unitary council should be established in Dunedin. “Once we get this new model where we have a single council, we will then be able to lead the development of Dunedin in a way that hasn’t been possible in the past.”

Cr Barker: We need to “re-envision” the city. “I’ve been working on a bit of a vision, which is around the best place to live in New Zealand, where people live fulfilled lives in a connected city that’s safe and accessible for all, where our standard of living is enhanced by our treasured environment, a prosperous city with meaningful jobs and strong communities resilient to climate change, a smart city respecting heritage while innovating for our future.” Bold ambition is required, and a plan has to have smart, measurable goals.

Governance, leadership and accountable decision-making

Cr Vandervis: “As mayor, I intend to make sure that only relevant decisions get put in front of the council and that much of the submissions industry, much of the international politics and much of the virtue signalling that goes on at council simply doesn’t get on to the agenda in the first place.” He would push for slimmed-down meeting agendas. Better agendas should lead to better results.”

“The mayor’s suggestion “core” council debt would drop after five years was presented in council material as DCC debt excluding water, and this metric shows projected decreases from 2030.

Cr Vandervis described this as a “future fantasy”.

Mr Radich described Cr Vandervis as “sceptical” after many years at the council.

“I believe we are on track for debt repayment,” the mayor said.

“Anyone can see that core council debt excluding water starts dropping after five years and total council debt flattens, hence my contention that debt growth is under control when the LTP is looked at as a whole.”

Mr Radich had quite a different reading of the situation in February, when he urged councillors to avoid adding to the rising council debt that had already been included in draft budgets.

“We have been on a skyrocket trajectory of ever-increasing debt levels,” he said at the time.

“That is not sustainable and we don’t have to stay there.”

In March, S&P Global Ratings downgraded the council’s credit rating.

The rating of the council and its financing arm, Dunedin City Treasury Ltd, dropped from AA to AA- and the outlook for both organisations remained negative.”

My Debt Solutions include: back to basics spending, getting our Port Chalmers and Harbourside land back from the ORC (worth near $30 million per year), no more ORC rates, run better buses, get commercial returns from our Council- owned companies, sell-off unused or low-returning DCC land, improve staff productivity with University collaboration and AI, reverse recent $100+ million zerocarbon/cycleway splurge, pause $92.4 million Brighton Landfill, and use local contractors to keep Dunedin dollars and jobs in Dunedin.

Business South & Allied Media – Dunedin Mayor Candidate Forum | Otago Daily Times Online News

Very happy with the ODT quotation of me from an informative debate last night.

“Cr Vandervis said Dunedin needed to ‘‘lose’’ the Otago Regional Council and restructure its own operation to be financially and environmentally sustainable.

The regional council was getting in the way of development beside the Otago Harbour, he said.

He wanted slimmed-down council agendas and a focus on land-use zoning to be pulled back.

Cr Vandervis and Mr Simms believed the council should get out of Local Government New Zealand.”

LEE VANDERVIS 

Core services must be optimised

Age 70

Occupation Dunedin city councillor

Running for mayor and council

How should your council balance the need for infrastructure spending with concerns about rates rises?

Better contract delivery of Dunedin core services is needed to balance out-of-control rates, debt and bureaucracy. The DCC nine-year plan proposes rates rises many times the rate of inflation, plus billion-dollar-plus debt for most of the nine years, costing $1million PER WEEK just in interest! By cancelling $100-plus million carbon-zero and cycleways budgets and a $94m new landfill, we can optimise core services – drainage, sewerage, more parking and better road maintenance without raising rates or debt.

How do you envisage working with others in council – especially those who don’t agree with you?

Treating all councillors equally by abolishing name-only standing committees with chairmanships will reduce tensions and help enable consensus decisions. I will use mayoral powers to keep agendas free of world and national political issues, shorten and clarify with summaries using AI and get consensus through better information on just local core services decisions. Whether councillors agree with my wider political views or not should not be an issue.

What are your thoughts around the role of local and central government in NZ? What could be improved?

Dunedin needs to be free of the ORC. We need to return Port Chalmers and harbourside land to Dunedin, land that Dunedin ancestors reclaimed and developed for over a century before it was gifted to the ORC in 1989. Otago Regional Council rates add ever increasing cost but little value for Dunedin, and are unaffordable. A Dunedin unitary council free of the ORC has been talked about for years, recently by the PM and Shane Jones, but needs a strong mayoral push to make it happen.

What style of leadership is required for the city?

Decisive leadership is needed with a focus on core services, treating all councillors equally, not allowing waffling, virtue-signalling and central government political posturing in DCC meetings. As mayor I would ensure no-nonsense meeting behaviour, clarity on proposed budget and operational cost information, raise Dunedin’s profile nationally and internationally, attracting investment, streamlining DCC consents/compliance and freeing Dunedin of ORC duplicate bureaucracy.

What has the council got right and what are your priorities for change?

DCC has recently employed some highly skilled council companies directors and this year we received our first company dividend for a decade – $11m to offset rates increases, which I have pushed hard for. My priorities for change include better-value contracting, freedom from ORC rates and compliance costs, reduction of DCC paperwork using AI and clearer DCC focus on core services, resulting in the ability to control rates, debt and bureaucracy.

The Taxpayer’s Union have not got this Pledge right and have email-bombed Elected Representatives with it.

Subject: Re: Ratepayer Pledge: Can we promote you in our ‘How to Vote’ guide?

My reply –

Dear Sam,

I would have liked to sign the pledge for #2 and #3, but #1“exceed the level of inflation and population growth.” is two different numbers and dumb anyway because a rates cap without a debt cap is moronic.

I am Chair of DCC Finance and Council Controlled organisations and a long-term battler against these ludicrous Rates and DEBT increases mainly caused by poor value spending.

See leevandervis.com for details and DCC Debt graphs.

In answer to my publicly videoed 9 Year Plan question, ‘What would next year’s 10.7% rates increase need to be to cover budgeted expenditure without adding $120 million to the debt?’, the DCC Chief Finance Officer confirmed that the rates increase would have had to be 58%!

Our monopoly print media ODT did not put this on the front page, but you can check the DCC YouTube video yourself.

Rates cap without Debt cap is pointless as they are interdependent.

Kind regards,

Cr. Lee Vandervis

For more than a decade I have asked DCC staff to plant at least some Family Friendly fruit trees since they plant hundreds of other trees annually, but so far without success.

As Mayor I will be able to push this catch-up with other NZ Cities much more effectively.

https://ccc.govt.nz/parks-and-gardens/edible-christchurch

https://sailorsforsustainability.nl/…/urban-gardening-nzl/

What electricity lines company Aurora [currently owned by DCC] ‘can earn’ means what profit margin is allowed by the Commerce Commission for Aurora to charge customers.

This electricity cost to the consumer is set by the Commerce Commission and not by whoever owns the lines company.

Exporting our waste seems wrong until you consider that most of our waste is imported in the first place, and that regional boundaries don’t recognise ideal waste disposal areas.
About 80% of Dunedin waste, mostly commercial is appropriately disposed of in local landfills like Nash and Ross at Burnside with only the putrescent household waste having to go to near-full DCC Green Island Landfill.
The ideal landfill geology for problematic household waste is a limestone quarry like AB Lime in Winton or the new limestone pit just south of Timaru. Sending our putrescent waste there makes economic sense since these facilities make money both selling limestone creating the easiest complying hole, and then charging for filling the hole with putrescent waste.
These limestone-quarry facilities have already invested all the hundreds of millions needed to have some 200 years of landfill capacity available. Why not use this existing capacity and save ourselves the $94 million estimated for Smooth Hill, an up-front cost which may well escalate.

The argument for spending $94 million on a new better Green Island facility at Smooth Hill could make sense if you assume that: 
1 – there will be sufficient waste quantity for the next 20 years to justify the massive up-front investment, 
2 – that interest rates will not go higher than 5%, 
3 – that the DCC can afford the interest and opportunity costs of burying $94 million in Smooth Hill, 
4 – that Smooth Hill will be run efficiently for at least 20 years, 
5 – that there will be no leakage or other environmental issues, and 
6 – that AB Lime or Taiko won’t set up their own competing waste collection points in Dunedin and undercut DCC’s Smooth Hill operation.

If any of these assumptions is in doubt, and most are, then Smooth Hill looks to be an avoidable $94 million financial liability at a time when our Billion$ debt is already unsustainable.
There is no plan to pay DCC or DCC Company debt down over the next 9 years, we still haven’t paid down the DCC $85 million Stadium debt after 14 years, and doing it on debt is the current spendthrift Council’s way of disguising real rates increases.

Like the emotional argument of not ‘exporting’ our waste, the emotional argument that we need to ‘have control’ of our waste is an illusion as well. My 18 year Councillor experience of DCC ‘control’ of the DCC Landfill has not been pretty. Green Island management has been out of control for some years, gas collection has been incompetent and out for control for other years, staff claims of the complete fullness of Green Island have been wrong repeatedly, and post landfill closure liabilities have also been misrepresented. 
Household waste disposal is constrained by increasingly difficult central government compliance and environmental legislation that is best anticipated by centralising reduced disposal volumes in the ideal geology of a limestone quarry. 
DCC Waste Minimisation policy is a direct threat to the viability of a Smooth Hill household waste facility which can only be viable with sufficient volume – volume which the DCC is aiming to significantly reduce.
Convenient as green-waste bins are for some, the DCC should be reducing green-waste streams by actively supporting composting at home, mulching rather than green-waste removal, and permitting on-site spreading of woodchip.
Having acquired the necessary consents for a Smooth Hill Landfill, some strategic dragging of the chain and seeing how waste stream volumes reduce and how Green Island fills for two years would be my cost-effective preference.
It would also allow us to see what the actual trucking costs are to a Limestone Quarry facility, and see if a better deal might be wrung out of AB Lime [second photo below] now that Taiko Landfill is also an option. 
My message to debt-doing decision-makers is that fools rush in, and if the ORC try to push DCC landfill spending along immediately, that would be another good reason to push for a Unitary Council.