These were some of the ideas from Invercargill Mayor Nobby Clark that he believes could help keep rates down.
Consultation on the Invercargill City Council annual plan started on Thursday , and Mr Clark was urging residents to submit against the council’s proposed rates increase of 9.47%.
He reiterated his view that council should have an increase of no more than 3.9% in the next financial year.
"It is clear to me that the community and central government wish councils to keep our next rate increase to an absolute minimum.
"This whole financial stuff is only probably a two-year issue. After that, you’d expect the economy to pick up. That’s what the economists are saying.
"That doesn’t mean that the council gets more money. It just means that when the economy’s better, the impact of rates on the community is much lower than what it would be when things were really tight."
Mr Clark said the difference between the original rates increment proposed by the council, which was 14.67%, to his suggested increase was about $7 million to $8m.
He believed council’s management could achieve those savings through several measures.
The first would be reducing employee costs.
Mr Clark believed expenditure for contractors, consultants and legal advice should be cut from $4m to a maximum of $1m.
He also believed the council should reduce its staff by 10% through a combination of existing vacancies, future vacancies and a small number of redundancies.
An assessment made by deputy mayor Tom Campbell showed there was a 44% increase in employee costs in the past five years.
This included staff, contractors, consultants and legal advice.
"Our turnover rate in staff, [council’s management] tell me, is about 12%, so if you work that out, that’s about 35 full-time equivalent vacancies per year.
"My view of the world is that if you’ve got 40 vacancies a year, you’d fill 10 or 12 of them — the most important ones — and you’d hold the others and wait a year before you fill them again. That takes a bit of juggling around, but it means nobody loses their job so it’s not a matter of making people panicky."
Mr Clark also believed the council could increase the charges of some services by 10%, including dog licences, consent fees and entry to Splash Palace, as well as sell some of the land it owns for housing.
He had already brought this idea to the council table a couple of times, but he was adamant farming land at Donovan Park, which was about 36ha, could be used for retirement homes and a village.
Mr Clark believed this could generate between $20m and $30m for the council.
"It needs to be changed with the minister of conservation so it can become residential.
"But the other thing is, it’s got what they call LUC2, which means it’s designated to be highly productive farmland. How you can call that land, with a few sheep running on it, highly productive land is nonsense.
"So I’ve got some work going on with some ministers of the Crown to say ‘hey, we haven’t got this right in this case’.
"I’ve been asking for two and a-half years for that to happen and apparently they’re going to start doing the paperwork to the minister in May this year."
Another potential asset the council could sell was the civic administration building.
The council announced last year it would soon relocate its staff from the Te Hīnaki Civic Building to temporary offices at the Invercargill Central mall and the adjacent HWR building to address the ageing Te Hīnaki Civic Building.
"Well, I don’t know what it’s worth, but it would have to be at least $3m.
"I suspect a future landlord would probably want to create inner-city apartments or maybe SIT [Southern Institute of Technology] might be interested in student accommodation. Who would know? But there’s money to be made on that building."
A document with those options was sent to his colleagues, but he had not heard feedback from them yet, Mr Clark said.
In the meantime, the council has started on its consultation this week and it closes on April 13.
