Regional councillors did not hold back in their criticism of the government proposal where all 11 regional councils will be replaced by a new structure.
The council’s finalised submission outlined the thoughts of the council after various meetings and workshops over the past couple of months.
Under the government proposal there will no longer be regional councils. They will be replaced by a combined territories board, made up of the district’s mayors with the board set to prepare a regional reorganisation plan.
The regional council strongly disagreed with the territory board structure, saying mayors did not stand for the job and and would create conflict of interest and undermine integrity.
Cr Michael Laws said he had fundamentally changed his view on the process to shake up local government since the proposal was introduced in November and central government was already considering last year’s proposal as historic.
"Because [of] the reaction they have met from these changes, they have decided they have to go a lot further, be a lot more radical and not be so timid," Cr Laws said.
"If we were to start the conversation all over again I would say we only need one regional government in Otago and one unitary authority."
Cr Laws said the structure the government needed already existed in Auckland and that was what would be followed.
He said the proposal introduced made no sense.
"It is poorly written, drafted by bureaucrats who used AI when it was in a hallucination state and drawn up by people who had not passed their NCEA literacy tests."
He said the media release about the proposal centred on getting rid of regional councils, but the proposal the council had to make a submission on was about getting rid of regional councillors.
All the changes would do was create another layer of bureaucracy.
He said the power was going to territorial authorities, but when examined they were a disaster. He pointed to the sewage problems in Wellington and the smell in Bromley in Christchurch.
Cr Gretchen Robertson agreed with Cr Laws that a lot of the changes made no sense.
Simplification of government might lead to fragmentation, she said.
She said a coastal unitary council and inland unitary council may be seen as an option but it was not that simple. The Clutha River, the biggest river by volume in the country, would straddle both proposed unitary councils and would lead to differing interests.
Cr Neil Gillespie said the basic premise was that they were trying to make something simple that was not simple. Whenever governance was involved it would not be simple.
Cr Andrew Noone said it was not the mayors’ fault they were put in this position. They were all new, so needed to work together with the regional council and get the best thing for the region.
Council chairwoman Hilary Calvert said the council needed to focus on areas it needed to improve.
She said though some of the government had the attention span, at a maximum, of an A4 page, all councils needed to show they could work together and why it was important to show what "we do what we do".
