We have been working hard over the past week or so to keep next year’s rate rise as low as possible in the face of serious challenges, such as the level of Government compliance expected on our drinking water schemes.

The quality of our drinking water has traditionally been great, but now we need more evidence to prove it.

So budget talks in the past week have included business cases for things outside of what we expected in Year 2 of our Long Term Plan.

We think the largest single portion of your rates will be spent in the drinking water area meeting new quality assurance rules that are coming down the line from the drinking water regulator.

Some of those rates will go towards new assets, like planned treatment plant upgrades, but a lot more will go into equipment that provides data, for our community schemes to meet the required standards.

New filtration and UV disinfection equipment is needed at six water treatment plants, with $2 million needed for the large Ashburton scheme alone.

New sampling equipment is needed across some schemes to take, test and automatically report the result online to Council staff. If there’s a problem with nitrates, chlorine levels, or protozoa, officers will find it in real time, not hours or even days later.

Some water treatment plants that deal with water that can be affected by turbidity, like Methven’s, also need new instrumentation. All the new information gathered from the new online equipment will be fed into our telemetry system, which tracks what’s happening on our drinking water schemes.

On top of those additions is our renewal programme, which has $1.5m of water pipe replacement planned. Replacing older pipes before they start to deteriorate has been part of our good management practice for years.

These drinking water things are on our must-do list. There are other things on our nice-to-have list and our can-be-delayed list.

We are trying to strike a balance between rate rises that help Council meet expected levels of service and what ratepayers can realistically be expected to pay, given all that is going on in the world at the moment.

The price of many things, from water pipes to maintenance contracts, has been hugely affected by covid and the rate of inflation, which was 5.9 per cent for the past year.

We have to decide whether to budget more money for the works and services we had planned for the 12 months beginning 1 July 2022, or cut works and services to fit the budget we originally allocated.

While our draft budget is still a work in progress, we know that we will be spending a good portion of it on roading and ensuring our roads are up to standard, sealed or unsealed.

We have heard the message loud and clear that roads are an issue and we must do better.

Council maintains one of the biggest roading networks in the country and some of those roads take a beating from heavy vehicle traffic. The network was also hammered in places by last May’s big rain event but we are almost finished with those emergency repairs.

So, there is much to do and we must cut our cloth accordingly.