Annual Report 2024-2025

 

Over the past year, we’ve focused on following through on our long-term planning—working to deliver the services, budgets and projects we committed to in Year 1 of our Long Term Plan, while staying flexible in the face of some big challenges.

The 2025/25 Annual Report is now audited and adopted—so did we deliver on what we promised to our communities and ratepayers?

Our year has focussed on delivering the essentials. We've had to stay flexible in the face of a tough economic climate, rising business costs and fast-moving changes from central Government that have kept us on our toes. Despite the challenges, we’ve wrapped up most of the storm recovery work to fix our weather-damaged roads and infrastructure, staying on budget while continuing to invest in the core assets and services that keep our towns running well.

Our approach has been one of collaboration—partnering closely with residents, iwi, community groups and agencies to get things done, and ensuring that we not only recover but are well prepared to adapt to the future.

Key highlights included:

• $5.75 million in funding from the Ministry of Environment to start construction on the new Whitianga refuse transfer station site
• Completing storm recovery works at over 30 sites across the district
• Investing more than $700,000 in stormwater improvements to protect homes and harbours
• Investing $8.3 million to implement necessary upgrades in response to increased drinking water standards
• Supporting community projects from youth employment to food resilience and emergency preparedness
• Starting work on the Whitianga Esplanade redevelopment 
• Stabilising major slips and storm damage at Hot Water Beach, Colville Rd and Thornton Bay 
• Three major consultations for our summer kerbside services, our rating system and our proposal for the future delivery of our three water services. 
• 42 communities supported with emergency preparedness training
• 31 young people placed in jobs through the Mayor's Taskforce for Jobs
• Over 142,000m² of roads resurfaced to keep them safe and reliable

A Message from Our Chief Executive

“Following several years of disruption, we can report a year of relative stability, albeit with challenging economic conditions affecting our businesses and communities, while driving costs within council business. We have also faced a storm of reforms coming through from Central Government that will impact our communities into the future.

Operationally, we have had the time and space to complete much of our 2023 cyclone recovery work, and to focus on getting back to delivering our business as usual. This, at its heart, is about looking after our communities – providing the leadership, infrastructure, facilities and services that help our communities thrive and adapt to changing circumstances.

Our year has focussed on repairing and maintaining roads, upgrading our water services in line with new government requirements, collecting rubbish and recycling, maintaining our well-loved parks and reserves, and building capacity within our communities to withstand future natural disasters or economic shocks.

We ran three major and overlapping consultation processes during the year. Each process came with legal requirements that set out when we had to run it and added time and cost to the process. We work hard to communicate with you in the ways that suit you best and give you easy options for sharing your feedback.  We are grateful to those who engaged and helped inform our decision making on our waste services, our rating system and on our proposal for the future delivery of our three water services.  All of these decisions are now made and we are in the implementation phase.

Financially our performance was strong. A focus on cost control and delivering within budgets has seen controllable operating costs come in below budget. Council has maintained a relatively balanced budget, despite the drop in our development-related revenue due to challenging economic conditions. The focus on our project management processes has shown marked improvement in our project delivery from previous years. 

At year's end we have delivered a higher percentage of projects than previous years and have a number of multi-year projects contracted for delivery. For the first time we have conducted a community perception survey, forming a good basis for measuring how the community views our performance in the future.”

Aileen Lawrie
Chief Executive
Thames-Coromandel District Council