Dumping plans to collect food waste from Whanganui homes has landed the district council with sunk costs and 19,000 kitchen scrap bins. Photo: Moana Ellis
Whanganui district councillors have voted at an extraordinary meeting to dump unpopular plans for a rates-funded kerbside food scrap collection.
The decision will wipe away a 1.5 percent targeted rate increase for 18,000 households.
But the council will be saddled with sunk costs and thousands of small kitchen bins made to collect household food scraps.
"We are the proud owners of 19,000 kitchen caddies," councillors heard.
"If there are opportunities to redeploy them, we'll take them," chief executive David Langford said.
"They may, though, have been stamped with the council's logo, which would limit opportunities to re-use them."
Councillors noted unanimously that scrapping the collection was inconsistent with the council's own Waste Management Minimisation Plan approved in 2021.
The vote on Monday night came after mayor Andrew Tripe pushed to revisit the decision after the government reversed plans as part of the National Waste Strategy to make food scrap collection compulsory for all councils.
"Based on this and reflecting on community feedback, the extraordinary meeting was the right thing to do despite previous council decisions to implement the service dating back to 2022," Tripe said.
"It makes no sense to put an additional rate burden on our households.
"A decision to move ahead with this is a boondoggle (unnecessary or wasteful)."
Food scraps were to have been collected from Whanganui kerbsides from July. Photo: David Silvester
By the time the Environment Ministry's planned mandate was withdrawn on 18 December, the council had already negotiated a contract to deliver the service and work was well underway for rollout.
Council officers will now look to negotiate a variation to its 10-year contract with Low Cost Bins, removing food scrap collection from the scope of the contract. The current contract is to deliver both kerbside recycling and food scrap services.
Combining the collections into one contract was to have saved between $200,000 and $300,000 per year, Langford said.
"There will be some sunk costs that we'll need to compensate our contractor for. Our discussions on this matter with the contractor have been positive," Tripe said.
The council will negotiate to retain the Ministry's waste service levy funding meant for food scraps collection, to help offset sunk costs.
Councillors agreed to extend the collection contract by five years to enable Low Cost Bins to offset some of the costs over a longer period of time, including commitments to buying new trucks and manufacturing thousands of kerbside collection bins.
Some of the costs would be passed on to the council but there would still be "a material saving" for ratepayers.
Tripe said the council was initially keen to go ahead with the service from July, given the contract was in place, the number of sunk costs and that diverting food waste from landfill was "the right thing to do".
"But given the mandate being scrapped and after reflecting on strong community feedback, we've decided this new targeted rate is unaffordable and unjustified for many of our community."
Langford reminded councillors that food scrap collection had gone through public consultation multiple times.
"You've heard very clearly in consistent messages from the community that there was a relatively low level of community support for the introduction of the service.
"As a result of the cancelled mandate, we need to give greater weight to community views."
He said the council could consider alternative carbon-saving initiatives that would be more cost-effective.
Langford also said concern for the health and wellbeing of frontline staff was a factor in his recommendation to scrap the service.
"Staff have been subjected to a lot of abuse from the community over the last few weeks.
"I'm genuinely concerned that if we ignore the community's views we will be perceived as being pig-headed, and staff could be subject to further abuse."
He read out the transcript of a phone call to customer services: "Put me through to the d***head who came up with this f****** idea. Tell them to shove the food scraps up his a*** and see how he likes having his time and energy wasted. Do your f****** job."
Langford said customer services was an entry-level role and for some staff it was their first job out of school.
"No wonder we have such a high turnover rate."
Councillor Peter Oskam called for the council to take a moral stand and go ahead with the service.
"Our role as council is to lead, not to be led."
Councillor Josh Chandulal-Mackay said the council's process was disappointing. He was concerned about how prone councillors had been over the past 18 months or so "to relitigate our decisions".
"I do worry about our ability to confidently set direction going into the future."
Councillor Kate Joblin also criticised the decision-making process.
"We have muddled our way through."
Photo:
LDR is local body journalism co-funded by RNZ and NZ On Air.
