New Plymouth has a new Mayor, Max Brough

The city of New Plymouth has a new Mayor, Max Brough, winning more than twice as many votes as his nearest rival David Bublitz.

The majority of the voters in New Plymouth gave Max Brough a strong message that they like his policies and direction.

The Daily News interviewed Max the week after the election, this is a summary of comments in that article:

Everything is up for review. Everything will be looked at to see if there is a better way.

Rates caps resonated with voters and the city is at breaking point with exceptionally high rates rises.

Max wants the public to have access to business cases for big projects, minus the sensitive costings, so ratepayers have a better understanding of where their money goes.

He will only be a one term Mayor - so he intends to operate at pace.

A full rating review across the whole district will be one of the first things to happen, so when the new water entity starts, a new rating model will have kicked in alongside it. He wants everyone to have their say about these changes to check if the NPDC has got it right.

Max doesn’t want an endless round of workshops for the Councillors to attend. He wants to get the new Councillors up to speed on policies, strategies, the goals of where they want to get to, and legislation, quickly. Then combine that with the experienced Councillors knowledge so when making decisions in the chamber, there is not a stream of questions.

He wants an independent chairperson, from out of town, to head the Councils Finance Audit and Risk committee which will include an accountant and a lawyer. These 2 positions were originally on this committee in the last term, but they disappeared at some point. The Alliance is very pleased to hear this level of expertise will be returning to a committee which makes some very important decisions on behalf of Ratepayers.

There are plans to introduce a hearings committee to give the public a forum to be heard. This would not be restricted to a 5 minute slot to speak, once every 6 weeks, which was the preferred method with the last Mayor. This will be a less formal structure and Max states people will be listened to.

We like the sound of much of this – but we also realise making changes does not happen overnight.

The Alliance is also having a review of our goals going forward. It would be terrific if we were no longer needed – but there are a few things we would like the new Council to consider on behalf of Ratepayers and Renters, so we will work on an opportunity to present these ideas to the new team.

We are also planning to ask questions of our supporters, to gauge what’s important to Ratepayers and Renters as we all move forward.

We hope to have an open and engaging relationship with this new Council team, as we hope will be the case for all the residents of New Plymouth.

The first meeting of the new team is on Friday 31^st October at 4pm, we understand this is when the new team will be sworn in.