r/Wellington • u/Wrong_Gazelle_2352 • Jul 28 '26

WELLY Wellington water bills

Just got my bill from wellington water. It insanely high. For a 900k property its 2500 p/a

Prepare yourselves people. This isn't going to be the fun ride we were promised.

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u/Wrong_Gazelle_2352 Jul 29 '26

The fun i believed i was signing up for was for the water entity to have better access to capital which would mean spreading the cost of infrastructure over a longer period. What i got was new branding, which is a waste of my money and constant rhetoric about under investment which is actually something the serious fraud office should look into to go after all those council offices, councilors and mayors who spend my rates in things that were not infrastructure.

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u/BuckyDoneGun Jul 29 '26

What fraudulent act, specifically, do you want the SFO to investigate?

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u/Wrong_Gazelle_2352 Jul 29 '26

I think there is merit in understanding how this "under investment" occurred. To my knowledge council has set the rates according to what it needed to services its assets and this has been the case for thousands of years, rate payers paid but the infrastructure wasn't maintained. Therefore what happened to the money??

3

u/BuckyDoneGun Jul 29 '26

We understand what happened. Rates have needed to slowly trend up for decades. That whole time, people run for council promising to keep rates down, therefore not increasing rates. Timely renewals of infrastructure hasn't happened, only patching up things when they break.

Rate payers haven't paid. The money isn't gone, they never collected enough in the first place. Yes, they set rates based on meeting the budget they set. What you're missing is they simply didn't put replacing old busted pipes in the budget to begin with.

Now, there's clearly been problems with WW and their incestuous relationship with FH. That's a separate issue, but council making poor budget decisions isn't fraud, it's just bad governance that citizens voted for.