At the request of Cr Kevin Gilbert and some other councillors, council staff have prepared a report about the viable options for a unitary authority for the Otago region.
The Otago region is comprised of five territorial authorities — the Dunedin City, Clutha District, Waitaki District, Central Otago District and Queenstown Lakes District Councils.
A report has been prepared for discussion tomorrow.
The report suggested there were three ways to form a unitary authority for Otago, which were for Dunedin and the other four Otago territorial authorities uniting with the Otago Regional Council; Clutha and Waitaki district councils taking on the regional council’s functions with the regional council remaining in place for the other two territorial authorities; or Dunedin taking on the regional council’s functions for the city with the regional council remaining in place for the other four territorial authorities.
The report noted the council last took part in a review seven years ago that was undertaken by the Otago Regional Council on behalf of the Otago territorial authorities.
"Since then, there have been a range of cost-effective related developments, partnerships and collaborations."
It comes as four southern councils are looking to pull together their resources to manage their Three Waters infrastructure, while the Otago-Southland regional land transport plan, the regional waste assessment, the civil defence and emergency management joint committee and the future development strategy have all involved councils working alongside each other.
Should the councillors vote in favour of one of the three options at tomorrow’s meeting, then the proposal would be further developed by council staff.
More work would be needed before staff could present the information to the other Otago councils, the report said.
"The main advantage in holding discussions is to explore and establish issues of mutual interest with other Otago councils to determine the level of interest in unitary authority collaboration options.
"If there is enough interest, then this would lead to further investigation on a suitable type of unitary authority as outlined in the above scenarios."
Should the council vote to continue discussions about a unitary authority tomorrow, then it would need to decide what would be the best forum to do so.
Local government specialist Dr Andy Asquith, of the University of Technology Sydney, said debates about unitary authorities happened all the time, but typically did not progress much further beyond the discussion phase.
"To put it simply, if you take say four councils and put them into one, then that means there will be a single mayor, and turkeys don’t vote for Christmas.
"But there’s a realisation from the public and even councils that many councils don’t have the capacity either from a financial perspective or a human resource perspective to tackle the challenges that councils are facing."
Dr Asquith said a "radical proposal" would be to merge councils’ operations, but keep the same number of councillors.
However, this was unlikely to happen, because "if you look at submissions to representation reviews that each council offered every six years, then a constant theme in that is that there are too many councillors".
Dr Asquith nonetheless thought New Zealand as a country had fewer councillors than it needed.
"One of the problems local government has at the moment across the country is a growing disconnect between people and local government because they can’t see what local government is, what it does for them, or who their councillor is."
Clutha District Mayor Bryan Cadogan said creating a unitary authority would have "huge ramifications" for the region and his council already had a very good relationship with the Otago Regional Council.
"With so much turmoil and unease in the local government sector, I think it would be great if we all just push on and not get caught up in the labyrinth that such discussions lead to."
