Marlborough District Council To End Rates Remission For 2022 Storm Damaged Properties

Thursday, 20 February 2025, 10:05 pm
Article: Maia Hart - Local Democracy Reporter

Red and yellow-stickered properties damaged in Marlborough's August 2022 storm will be entitled to one final rates remission.

The Marlborough District Council had provided rates remissions to the owners of properties with red stickers, meaning they were unsafe to enter, or yellow, meaning there were restrictions on entry.

After the August rain event caused slips and flooding that damaged many properties and roads, there were 88 houses red or yellow-stickered.

The average remissions were $1200 for red-stickered properties and $725 for yellow-stickered properties, according to a report that went to the council's economic, finance and community committee last week.

Marlborough District Council financial services and planning manager Chris Lake told the committee they wanted to offer the remission for one more year, but it would be the last.

Lake said the number of people that had applied for the remission had decreased each year.

A graph in the report showed fewer than 10 property owners had asked for a rates remission this year. In the 2022-23 year, there were more than 20.

"When they apply for that they have to put details of the issues that they still have at present," Lake said.

"That's why I suspect that those have dropped off."

Marlborough Sounds ward councillor Barbara Faulls said she really supported the proposal.

"Obviously a lot of these properties are in the sounds, and a lot of these homeowners are still battling with insurance but also the delay in terms of Marlborough Sounds Future Access Study and funding for roading repairs," Faulls said.

"In a lot of cases some of these properties are below where the road is set to be fixed, so it really has been living a nightmare still."

The committee agreed to the final remission, subject to full council sign off next week.

The Marlborough Sounds Future Access Study assessed options on how to repair the damaged Marlborough Sounds roads.

The estimated repair bill for the roads, badly damaged in both the July 2021 and August 2022 storms, was $230m. Some of this included road improvement costs.

The NZTA board last year approved $100m in funding for repairs. Further work was needed before NZTA agreed to any funding for improvements.

The funding was approved after the Marlborough District Council finalised how it would pay its $104m share of the repair bill for the roads at a meeting in June, after consultation with the community through its long-term plan.

After considering hundreds of submissions, the final cost to ratepayers was tweaked from the council's draft plan, released for consultation in April.

It drastically reduced how much Kenepuru ratepayers would pay by slightly increasing the charges to non-Sounds zones. Kenepuru had the largest repair bill of the five Marlborough Sounds zones.

LDR is local body journalism co-funded by RNZ and NZ On Air.

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