The region's rates look likely to increase by 14per cent on average after a “process error’’ was discovered by the Central Otago District Council (CODC) finance team.

Council chief executive Peter Kelly formally apologised for the mistake at an extraordinary council meeting in Alexandra yesterday.

Peter acknowledged a mistake where two live links had been used to input financial information had been discovered.

“There are a number of consequences that have fallen out from this.”

The finance team picked up the errors last week when opening tender documents for some of the new work going out in July.

“We realised that the numbers that were in the existing long term plan didn’t look quite right,” Peter said.

The numbers for water had been put into a previous spreadsheet, and that resulted in an increase of 1 per cent in rates, with the remaining 1.5per cent being the new contracts being entered.

“It was a process error and I take full responsibility for that. I regret having to bring this matter up and the timing is not ideal,”

Staff were looking through the tender documents and luckily the error was picked up, “so it is in some ways good that we did detect it when we did.”

In her report, group manager - business support Saskia Righarts said it had been uncovered there needed to be some amendments made to the three waters operational budgets. 

At the same time the budgets were also adjusted to reflect the value of the recent contracts being tendered in three waters. 

Those two things combined have resulted in the average draft rates increase changing from 11.63 per cent to 14.03 per cent.

The growth apportionments for the Omakau Water Supply Treatment Plant upgrades and the Omakau Wastewater Treatment Plant upgrades have also been increased to better align with the growth assumptions. 

This has resulted in a large increase in Omakau for both the water supply and wastewater development contribution charges.

Cr Tracey Paterson said it was ‘’disappointing’’ and questioned whether they could stomach another increase for their ratepayers.

The current numbers were still not reflective of what the final figures would be, and the amount could be greater still, depending on what the community told them, she said.

Mayor Tamah Alley reflected on their position of asking staff to go away and make more savings, like they had last year.

“There are costs that are outside of our control, and in the interim I don’t think they are going to magic up a 5 per cent reduction unless we say we’re not going to do something.”

She hoped what she was hearing around the community would result in many submissions, so they could have an accurate reflection of what people wanted to pay for, and what they did not.

Deputy Mayor Neil Gillespie said nothing was final yet, “this work has not finished.”

The final document would come back to council on March 17, and then be out for public consultation from March 19 to April 16.

The consultation document would then form the basis for the final 2025-34 Long-term Plan which was planned to be adopted by Council in June.

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