With the increasing frequency of significant weather events, ongoing heavy rainfall has a big impact on flood protection assets. This means more money needs to be spent on maintenance, repairs and strengthening, to ensure these assets keep working well and help protect the community.
We have also completed our annual revaluation of river and drainage assets (such as stopbanks, pump stations, flood gates) and the total value of these assets has increased from $420M to $442M. With a higher value comes a higher depreciation, so we need to fund that increase in depreciation costs to make sure we can keep maintaining these critical infrastructure assets that protect the community.
For the Kaituna Catchment Control Scheme, while increased interest rates are the main cause for raising the targeted rate, there are also increased costs on the $8M of planned capital works projects and on our existing borrowings from historic capital works projects that are already completed (for example, land management and flood protection work).