Cr Aleisha Rutherford said maintaining services alone would need a 1 per cent rise. “The rates we have set are fair. There’s [a] huge level of investment in areas that affect vulnerable members of the community.” Mayor Grant Smith said the council kept rates artificially low last year during Covid-19 to support the community. “Nobody likes to raise rates, it’s a very unpopular decision, but sometimes you need to pay the piper. “The city is growing and we’re not the same as we were a year ago.” He said the council needed to maintain its infrastructure spending, otherwise there would be burst pipes, potholed roads, groups with no funding and the community would be much poorer.
Smith said he believed the council had to start somewhere to reduce the growing levels of booze-induced violence he was reading about in reports from Safe City Hosts. He wanted the policy to be a local response to local issues, rather than allowing national players to dictate the ground rules for the sale and supply of alcohol. Rachel Bowen was left as the only councillor who did not support adoption of the policy, a decision she said she had found difficult. “On one hand, I strongly disagree with this one element. “On the other, I wish we could have gone further.