Central government announced late last year it was proposing to get rid of regional councils and replace them with a board made up of district mayors, possibly along with commissioners, to make decisions.
The government has asked for submissions on the proposal, due next month.
Otago Regional Council chairwoman Hilary Calvert said the proposal had too many fish hooks.
Mayors in the entire region, who would come to sit on the new board, would become hopelessly conflicted, she said.
"They’ve got plenty to do, but they cannot serve their own area and then sell their area down the river by suggesting any sort of merger or something. And that’s what the government clearly wants — fewer councils," she said.
She thought a good idea would be to base the boards around catchments, as they would have similar interests.
She said it was madness the Waitaki catchment had different regional councils on either side of the river.
In her opinion it would be best to set up a board which would look at the entire South Island and carve up areas under representatives who knew those areas and would not be conflicted.
The mayors were not the ones for those jobs, she said.
"It’s just bizarre. But what I think the government thought was, ‘let’s have a go at doing this. We need to do it sometime’. And then they thought, ‘well, if we had the mayors in there, we could say these people were chosen by the people.
"But they [mayors] have all this change happening and all the water — they’re in the thick of trying to make their Three Waters stuff work and things.
"They’ve got more important things to do than this stuff.
"How could they properly supervise a council like the regional council when they’ve got their own one to look after? And one of them said, in a meeting we had recently, ‘so what do you guys do anyway?’ Really? I mean, they don’t need to know what we do, but from that sort of standing start, not a good look."
She said mayors had promised to serve their district but they would be compromised when sitting on the boards.
"I will do things in the best interest of, in my case, I said Otago. In the mayor of Dunedin’s case, she said Dunedin. So how is she about to be on a group that might eliminate Dunedin as a council? And if it works, she’s certainly not going to get elected to the new unitary council. So I just can’t see how it can work."
She said the best thing to do would be to let the current regional council finish its three-year term and make the changes then.
"It’s by far the cheapest and most effective way to do it. Put a change board in charge of actually saying this is how you’d carve up the South Island and this is how you’d carve up the North Island.
"So there’d be fewer councils. Everybody thinks they’re aiming for 30-35 total councils. There are ways you can do it, but let’s do it better than the way they’re proposing."
There are 11 regional councils, five unitary councils and 67 territorial authorities.
The meeting tomorrow will just have councillors expressing their thoughts and a full council meeting on February 11 will finalise the council’s submission.
