Rubbish and recycling costs responsible for Central Otago rates rises

A small Central Otago town is facing a 16.5 per cent rates hike to cover increasing rubbish and recycling costs, growth and pressure from central Government.

Ratepayers across the region will be hit with hefty rates increases, but Roxburgh residents will be hit the hardest with the average rates bill there jumping to $2407 (up from $2068). Cromwell faces an 11 per cent increase, Alexandra 13 per cent and Clyde 14 per cent. 

Teviot Community Board Chairman Raymond Gunn said Roxburgh’s population of less than 600 would struggle to stump up with the extra $75,000 rates charges.

“It’s not easy to tell someone on a fixed income, an elderly person in somewhere like Roxburgh, their rates are going up a significant amount. But it is something we can’t avoid.”

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Central Otago District mayor Tim Cadogan said the council’s budget was rising because of costs put on it by the Government and growth. The region’s population increased by 20.5 per cent (to 21,558) in the last five years, according to 2019 census figures. 

Nearly a third of the extra money the council needed to raise was because of increased recycling and waste management costs, “much caused by overseas countries refusing to take our waste away for us”.

A staff report in January outlined the council’s conundrum in finding places to send its kerbside recycling to. It had been forced to store up to 100-tonnes of recycling in a Cromwell company’s transport building since July while it looked at options in Timaru, Invercargill and Frankton.

The shed was full within a month, but some of the material had since been transported to Timaru and Invercargill

The council had been sending recycling to the Frankton Materials Recovery Facility in Queenstown, but facility shut its doors to Central Otago in July until the “backlog was cleared”.

Last year, Central Otago sent 1030 tonnes of recycling through the Frankton facility, and the processing cost had increased from $99 to $165 per tonne.

The volume of rubbish going to the Victoria Flats landfill on State Highway 6, between Cromwell and Queenstown, was also increasing and costing more to process.

A new multimillion-dollar gas capture and destruction system being installed at the landfill had raised costs by another $20 per tonne, the report says.

Central Otago is expected to send more than 10,000 tonnes of waste to landfill this financial year – 8 per cent more than last year.

Rubbish transfer station prices were also set to increase from $270 to $293 per tonne.

Cadogan said significant increases in some property values last year had also driven up rates. The latest valuations, released in December, showed an average capital value increase of 36.6 per cent. The average house in the district was now worth $531,000, while land values had increased 72.7 per cent to an average of $266,000.

“It is important to note though that if your property value went up 30 per cent, your rates will not be going up by that same amount.”