Serious Suggestions to Abolish Councils

I've been a council abolitionist for a while - before it was cool - but now it's picking up steam across the political spectrum.  

A learned post by Gwynn Compton, a former councilor, called a particular suggestion to abolish councils "libertarian brain rot" (see his good piece at https://localaotearoa.substack.com/p/calls-to-shut-down-local-government). There are many bad reasons for good ideas. There are many bad ways of implementing good ideas. But, better things are possible, and we might even try to do good things well.

So, I suggest that we abolish certain core features of New Zealand's local government, and provide a menu for proposals to replace these features. I start with those, before providing a contentious summary of what councils do, and why they don't always work. Then I give a quick argument, ending on a high note, on why councils suck and why being on a council sucks.

The core issues with councils, as I see it, is they're not terribly politically transparent (they're hard to follow, and hard to care about), cost effective (due to a mix of weird scale, bad incentives, and procedural obligations), and not always good at doing things at any price (because councilors, constituents and council staff and consultants sometimes have dumb ideas, or do ideas of any kind badly). Their participatory, localist design doesn't map onto the real world closely, and they don't achieve things in the real world - with real world constraints - all that well. 

Core Features of Local Government that should go
The following core features are the current features of our local government system that we should abolish (and, in summary, why):
1) Having locally elected councilors (especially when the job sucks, as outlined below, and can't readily attract much talent);
2) Central government divesting the more dull delivery tasks, and more contentious hyper-local decisions, without much money, onto local councils (if the Government wants it done, it could just do it, or contract for it, and be politically responsible for this);
3) Big infrastructure decision-making sitting with local councils (whose political incentives are largely to serve landed gentry with low rates);
4) Local planning and building decisions and disputes being decided, in the first and sometimes second instance, by local councils (who face a range of legal challenges and liability for these functions, which largely, and increasingly, are bound by national secondary legislation);
5) Brutal procedural/participatory and judicial constraints on council decisions (which central government does not face, because it knows this is super dumb); and
6) Cities having fewer and bigger councils that still exist, rural areas having many and small councils.

Proposals for Replacement Models  

 I proposal the following replacements design choices to improve on the local government status quo by a) doing good things; b) being politically transparent; and c) being cost-efficient and economically-rational:
1) No elected councilors, but twice as many MPs, leaving an abundance for constituency work, and with local commissioners in each region.
2) Government gorging itself on most of the dry and controversial stuff, in the Department of Plumbing, Planning and Parks. You can leave a handful of grants, prizegivings, and library opening hours to a handful of mayors and do-gooders. Potentially, they should be picked by lottery from an approved list.
3) A handful of local corporations minding particular institutions or services, funded by a mix of targeted rates and user fees, ratified by local votes. I don’t know if I fully buy this, but Eric Crampton seems keen, and local user-pays stuff formed after hyper local referenda honestly might be less bad.  
4) Centrally prescribed plans, building regulations and consents, drafted and applied by a national planning and construction commission. The commission can draft plans and building regulations, for the Minister's sign-off, process applications and spit them out.
5) Relying on political constitutionalism (i.e, people voting in elections) at the central Government level, over procedural input (i.e, people with enough free time to be mad before a decision is made) or judicial challenge (i.e, Decile 10 suburbanites and central city business owners with carparks judicially-reviewing generally sensible rules) to incentivize good local plans, policies and service delivery.
6) Local councils, if remaining at all all, that cover entire labour market agglomerations. The provinces (which don't urban labour markets) can have governors they despise "from Wellington", who act as commissioners for the government of the day to ensure local infrastructure is run down only slowly, and primary industries and tourism can keep functioning (while being personally despised as a helpful shield for the Government). This is in tension with 1) and 2), but it's part of the same general menu.  

What does my set of proposals tend to change, and what does it tend to preserve?  
It keeps local service delivery for local services. 

It limits local elections, but in a way which preserves political accountability and decision-making through different means.

It moves the big stuff to central government in a transparent way, which controls it through money and national policy direction anyway.  

It creates more roles sensible people with ambition and talent might want. It aligns incentives with democratic government in a Westminster system generally.  

It proposes other ways of doing some really dry but important things, as well as keeping the hyper-local feel good tasks that councils don't really do. 

Basic things about New Zealand councils  
Councils are basically local authorities—city councils (WCC), district councils (...not sure what these are, appear to be outside of cities, so they're presumably for farmers), and unitary authorities that also do regional council things (such as Auckland Council and of all places Nelson City Council). These have elected councilors (by FPP or STV in postal elections), who make policies, plans, and bylaws, which are implemented and applied by the council executive (run by the council chief executive). There's a mayor with unclear authority who is directly elected and therefore may have no particular sway whatsoever.  

What people think councils do is, like, libraries and community group funding. This is pretty marginal given cost constraints. Half their jobs are very dry (rubbish collection, getting yelled at over carparking), half are increasingly difficult, expensive, and controversial (massive building and infrastructure plans generally, water infrastructure specifically, and a ton of plan-making - or stopping plan-making - to keep up with planning and environmental law reforms).  They sign off on buildings and get sued over it because they're required to be building consent authorities. 

They raise money through 'rates' on the value of land and/or its capital improvements, have a mechanism for borrowing money, can charge a range of user fees, and are generally unpopular when they do any of these things. They are also unpopular if they cut anything.

They vary wildly in size. Some of the smaller ones are shitshows. Worse than the more well known large ones, which are also to some extent shitshows. 

I won't focus on regional councils, because they look like they’ll get abolished—they largely do some environmental regulation that looks like it’ll be turned into a central government function. They also have some public transport responsibilities, but most of our cities with any public transport will probably have a single, agglomerated city council with NZTA micromanagement anyway.

Basic issues with councils  
They're too big and too small.  

Too big to be all that responsive to communities which exist in particular suburbs and towns. Most councilors anywhere big represent a small subarea. And unlike the rather general rules and range of spending in Parliament, council spending proposals are hyper local. Which would be ok, but everyone solely wants to do stuff for their area. Getting consensus on what to pay for or cut is a nightmare. See the Wellington City Council, where the ruling bloc of pro-spending, pro-highish-rates progressives had to make hard calls on cutting because all the hyper-local conservatives were anti-spending elsewhere and pro-spending on their suburbs and dumb pet projects.  

But they're too small, they can easily externalise a ton of costs. So, of course they do. Wellington councilors didn’t care about its housing crisis. That largely becomes the other councils in the region’s fault, as the desirable core becomes uni students, yuppies, and rich people.  

When I lived in Lower Hutt, for most purposes the regional council that ran trains and buses, and the Wellington City Council that ran the places I drank, cracked-down on bottomless brunches and went to in my free time mattered much more to me than the Hutt City Council. The boundaries were nonsense - too big to represent particular communities; too small to actually reflect the size, and interconnection of cities. And the Hutt City Council was if anything unusually competent (this was early on in its post upzoning building boom, pulling in the senior advisors that Wellington City was pushing out through high housing costs).

But neither agglomeration nor disintegration can solve some other key issues around their funding, autonomy and design. 

They're tending to have their funding constrained. The Nats are annoyed that rates are spiking, which they are because they were unduly low for far too long.  They will deal with this by imposing, or posturing that they will impose, rates caps and so constrain funding more. This is not a particularly brilliant idea. 

Councils are increasingly service-delivery wings of government. Central Government has realised it is actually meant to set National Policy Statements and the like under the Resource Management Act, tightly controlling councils' powers. Government has become the dominant figure on transport and other issues, generally through funding. 

Councils also, crucially, legally limited-scope yet still quite general-purpose bodies. They cover a ton of area but rarely dominate the field. Local authorities don't even control public transport, even though people think they do. They get blamed for stuff they don't control, but have influence in a range of fields. It is an unpleasant job share situation at best, and doomed set of powers and incentives at worse. 

Also, NZ is a city-state with a hinterland. It’s Auckland, a few mid-size cities and towns, and a few primary industries and tourist spots around low-density rural areas.  

Being a councilor sucks, councils suck  
Just today, I was Directly Messaging (on X, the Everything App - formerly known as Twitter) a very qualified and sharp poster, who was being nagged into running for an important seat on an important city's city council by a locally popular party. She advised that she’d rather kill herself. And the opportunity cost for this poster of entering local politics was unusually low. 

Being a councilor is an awful job, with limited autonomy, no real progression, often awful colleagues. You are high-enough profile to get abused, but not to get ahead in life. It’s amazing we get as many good councilors as we do. There are, perhaps, only a slight majority of meh to awful councilors. Most major councils even have a handful of competent people that do the work (I'm told its perhaps 7 out of 25 on Auckland Council). This is surprising. It is a bad gig that repels talented people who care about their cities or districts. 

The average mid-career professional, in a bigger entity and with less profile, can be better paid and achieve a fair bit more autonomy—with better outcomes. This likely avoids abuse from the public, dealing with the geriatric sleazes and morons polluting our councils, and mind-numbingly long meetings and reports. 

The current format of local councils, with elected representatives, is in some sense dependent on elected representatives being baseline competent and supported by constituents. The competence point is not universally the case, as outlined above, and honestly it is the case more often than you'd expect. But the number of uncontested seats - I think read there were 5 in Hutt City - is pretty high. People don't really want to do it. Turnout is dogshit - people don't even want to vote. They don't even want to know. 

So, we should abolish councils.