From the Mayor’s office
Waikato District Mayor Allan Sanson talks about how our district is represented in his September message.
We review our district’s representation arrangements every six years because populations and communities change and we need to be sure political representation fairly reflects those changes.
The review involved looking at the number of wards, ward boundaries, community boards and the number of councillors we have representing our current population of about 65,000 people.
In part of the process we looked at what are called mesh blocks. These are population grids generated by census results for all over New Zealand. We used these to help distribute our district so that each councillor would represent, on average, 5000 people.
The information we gained from the review showed us we needed to reconfigure how our residents and ratepayers are represented. The council’s initial proposal included reducing the number of wards by one and reducing the number of council representatives by one.
Thank you to everyone who made a submission; it’s important that we know what our community is thinking. We received 34 submissions on our initial representation arrangements proposal.
As a result of these, we only made one amendment to the proposal, which is to extend the existing Raglan Ward boundary to incorporate the area along the Raglan deviation.
We received two appeals on the adopted proposed representation arrangements and they have gone to the Local Government Commission to process.
Once a decision has been made, we will be able to let you know what our district will look like for the 2013 elections.
