Council provides a huge range of services to our communities and that means we get a lot of questions. Some are straightforward, like how do we contact animal control, or what’s the hours for the library closest to me, or how do I apply for a rates rebate?
We also get questions and comments based on misunderstandings, or because people have seen or heard something from social media and wonder if it’s true.
It’s ridiculous we even have to say it, but our Council and the more-than-1000 staff who work for our city aren’t part of some massive secret global conspiracy to harm our community. We’re part of this community. We live here. We pay rates. Our kids play on the sports fields we provide. We drive on our roads, drink our water supply, use our playgrounds and community facilities, and pay the parking meters.
Like many organisations around the world, we’re facing issues with false or misleading information deliberately circulated by people to push their own agenda. Often this includes using some factual information to make untrue claims about “what it REALLY means.”
It’s concerning and harmful because these false claims can cause needless worry for people or lead them to make bad decisions. Thankfully, they are spread by relatively few people in our city, but they are spread across the country and globally and shared on local sites by groups or individuals using multiple profiles on social media.
Here’s a few common topics we get questions on:
What's a 20-minute city?
This is probably the biggest single misinformation issue we see. The main claim is that we’re working on a global plan to implement some form of global control over residents which involves locking them in zones where they can’t go more than 20 (or 15) minutes away. These claims have been debunked many times by responsible media organisations, international fact-checking sites and individual councils and other organisations.
Short answer is no, of course we’re not. The 20-minute city, for us, isn’t even a plan, it’s just a term to describe a design concept which improves people’s freedom to choose, not hinder them.
The ‘20-minute city’ simply means when we plan for the future, we think about making sure facilities and services are close to where people live. It’s not new or particularly ground-breaking, it just makes sense as a city grows, and we plan our neighbourhoods, so they work for all who live in them.
A good city is one where everyone can choose to access what they want and need without having to travel long distances or rely on private vehicles. If a city meets the aspirations of the 20-minute city concept you can go where you want, when you want, but you’re not forced to travel across town for the services and facilities you need because of poor planning.
Hamilton isn't delivering some form of global agenda
This is a favourite of conspiracy posts because it’s so wide-ranging and vague. Almost anything we do can be linked to a goal or plan somewhere in the world, especially if it’s a goal we all want like affordable housing, improving child health, or reducing poverty.
Our Long-Term Plan sets our planning for the next 10 years and is reviewed every three years. The whole community gets the chance to give us feedback on it, and the decisions are made by your elected Mayor and councillors.
We see a lot of strange claims referring to Council, “Agenda 2030’ and the World Economic Forum. The 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development was adopted at the United Nations Sustainable Development Summit in 2015. United Nations member countries, not councils, were signatories to the UN Agenda 2030.
A lot of the claims say Council’s part of a global conspiracy is trying to take away property ownership. We also see claims that we’re working towards a world where people ‘own nothing but are happy’. Naturally these claims can worry people, but it’s easy to show they are untrue.
The ‘own nothing and be happy’ phrase is not a goal of the World Economic Forum. A Danish writer many years ago wrote the phrase as part of their personal vision of what they thought the world would look in the years to come – largely based on the growth of for-hire products and services.
The phrase was used on social media as one example of different views of the future at a later date. Various groups falsely claim it’s a WEF goal, and somehow link it with the UN Agenda 2030 for Sustainable Development. This is ironic because Agenda 2030 does not advocate loss of property – in fact it’s just the opposite – the first goal includes that all men and women have access to ownership and control of land and property.
Lots of reputable sites have fact-checked the global conspiracy myths. You can find one here.
Find out more about our priorities for the city and what they mean here
Borrowing and security for Council debt
This one gets complex quick but let’s clear one thing up for a start: private homes are not mortgaged against council debt.
Councils secure their borrowings over their rates revenue, not over ratepayer's homes. This certainty of revenue is supported by legislation including the Local Government (Rating) Act 2002 which provides councils with the ability to charge rates and sets out the council’s obligations when doing so.
The NZ Local Government Funding Agency is owned by shareholdings from Government and member councils in New Zealand and is registered in Wellington. It was established to enable councils to fund borrowing at a more competitive rate than they could on their own.
The Local Government Funding Agency rules, and oversight by Government, are designed to minimise the risk any New Zealand council would default on its LGFA commitments. However, even should this happen, there is no provision for private land or property to be held as collateral or security against any loan.
Where it gets complex is around claims a Council defaulting could mean a ratepayer’s home is sold. This combination of events is incredibly unlikely but it’s an example of a conspiracy theory being developed from small pieces of factual information.
The mechanisms in place between councils, lenders and government mean no council default would result in an automatic charge to ratepayers.
It’s true that councils have the power to make a claim on a mortgage if a ratepayer doesn’t pay rates. Council can also take debt recovery action to recover unpaid rates, which in some cases could involve court action which results in the ratepayer’s assets being sold by court order. Before any of this can happen, there’s a lengthy formal process, and Council makes every endeavour to work with ratepayers to look at options before we would go down this track.
One bizarre claim we have seen is that councils are deliberately borrowing with the intent of defaulting to force the sale of private property in Hamilton under a global plan to remove home ownership. The easiest way to show this is ridiculous is, regardless of any other facts, Council simply doesn’t borrow enough to achieve this. Council’s borrowings in 2024 were less than $1b. The value of properties in Hamilton in 2022 was 71.4 billion.
Property values don’t change how much we collect in rates
This is one of the biggest misunderstandings about how we set rates. The total amount of rates we collect is determined by the projects and services we need to fund. A budget is set every year and is based on a long-term plan which is reviewed every three years. Individual property values are also reviewed independently every three years.
Council uses these values to share the total rates budget across the city. Higher value properties pay a greater share of rates than those with lower values. If property values go up or down it doesn’t change the total rates budget, but it might change how the share of rates are split across the city.
If everyone’s property values moved by the same percentage there would be no change to the share of rates. Or to put it another way, even if every property doubled in value, this wouldn’t drive any change in your rates bill or the total rates we collect. If your property value has changed more than the average, then you may pay a slightly greater or lesser share than previously.
Council’s legal status and ‘sovereign citizens’
Council’s purpose, role, status, powers and functions are set out in the Local Government Act 2002.
That Act defines a council as a corporate body which continues to exist despite changes in membership. As a legal entity it can hold property and enter contracts in its own name. It is separate to any of the individuals that comprise the elected governors or management. The purpose of local government is to enable democratic local decision-making and action by, and on behalf of, communities.
Councils and the wider legal system have seen a rise in people making claims that New Zealand law doesn’t apply to them, and therefore they don’t have to pay traffic fines, dog registrations, taxes, or rates.
These claims are often supported by ‘pseudo-law’ documents which can run to hundreds of pages of official-sounding references citing historic law or overseas documents.
Individuals and social media sites offer online advice to others and present templated documents to use to become so-called ‘sovereign citizens’ or to challenge councils.
Dealing with these pseudo-legal documents costs councils and adds to the costs we have to pass on to our ratepayers.
But more importantly, it causes real damage to people who are led by others into falsely thinking they are exempt from the law.
The courts have consistently held that it is an abuse of process for a litigant to attempt to employ sovereign citizen concepts in seeking to avoid or defeat any State, regulatory, contract, family or other obligations recognised by law.
Claiming you are a ‘sovereign citizen’ or using pseudo-law to challenge a council charge or process is not going to remove any obligations to comply with the laws of New Zealand. Simply refusing to pay a lawful charge is likely to cost you money and time and can have severe consequences.
If you can’t resolve an issue with us and believe there are genuine legal grounds to challenge any decision of council, please seek professional advice. This could be from the Citizens Advice Bureau or a member of the NZ Law Society.
Water services, meters, and water conservation
Water meters
Government policy under Local Water Done Well has introduced new requirements and opportunities for Councils, including making it easier to create new council-owned organisations (CCOs) to take responsibility for wastewater and drinking water services.
Government has indicated it sees future water services in metro council areas being charged to consumers based on usage (volumetric charging via water meters). We also expect metering to be a future requirement of both the Commerce Commission (as the economic regulator) and of resource consents. Council is unable to charge by usage without metering of residential properties.
In the last Long-Term Plan, Council allocated funding in 2026/27 for a study to look at whether universal metering offers benefits for Hamilton in the future. Council already has around 4000 water meters on commercial properties.
Water meters encourage people to conserve water. Kapiti Coast District Council reports a 25 percent reduction in water use throughout the district since installation of meters, much like other areas of the country that have introduced them.
Why water conservation is important
We’re limited on how much water we can take from the river, and we are required to promote efficient use of water. At current usage levels Hamilton will exceed the amount of water it is allowed to use from the Waikato River before our next consent review in 2044.
More efficient usage also means very expensive assets like our treatment plants can do the job for longer, which saves money down the track.
There are three main misconceptions about our city’s water supply. The first is that there’s a limitless supply in the river, the second is that we should have built more storage or treatment capacity, so we don’t have restrictions in summer. The third is that we see water charging as a new revenue source.
To tackle the last one first: we are unable, by law, to charge for water. We can only charge for the actual cost of treating and delivering the water, and the costs of maintaining and upgrading the network. Introducing meters would not mean we could charge more for the water, we could only use metering as a way to calculate how we divide the actual cost between users.
The other two issues, around water storage and availability, are largely driven by our consent conditions. We have a legal agreement with the Waikato Regional Council about how much water we can take from the river. That’s because there’s thousands of users along the Waikato River, and individual consents make sure there’s enough for everyone, and we don’t damage the river systems.
Our current consent expires in 2044. At current usage, we’ll need more than our consent allows before then, so we have to get smarter about using water wisely and reducing waste.
In summer, our water use doubles. For a few weeks, we run our treatment plant at close to its capacity. We use restrictions on outdoor use (sprinklers, hoses etc) to help manage this demand. It’s not a storage issue, it’s about how much we are allowed to take from the river, and how much we can treat in any given day.
It doesn’t make sense to spend hundreds of millions of dollars on a treatment plant that can produce 200 million litres a day when our average use all year is around 55 million litres per day. It’s far more cost-effective to manage demand at peak times, especially if most of that demand is being sprayed on lawns and driveways.
As our city grows, we’ll invest in upgrading the treatment plant and getting new consents. But the smarter we are with water, the best value we can get out of the assets we already have.
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Last updated 24 February 2025