The mood of mayors around New Zealand, and including Tauranga Mayor Stuart Crosby, is that local government processes are too cumbersome and costing too much.

Stuart says council bureaucracies have become a barrier to efficient city leadership and reform is needed to rectify this.

Mayor Stuart Crosby says the time has come to address the barriers bureaucracy are creating for city leaders.

This could include council mergers, such as the Auckland ‘super-city' merge, as discussed by Prime Minister John Key and Local Government Minister Rodney Hide in their addresses at the Local Government New Zealand conference on in Wellington.

'We are all screaming out for reform,” says Stuart.

'The way we go about our business now is too bureaucratic too complex, too time consuming and we want to speed things up.”

He says the slow pace at which decisions are made owing to multiple layers of process is expensive and frustrating for both politicians and the community.

'We go through large planning processes and they take sometimes two to three years to finish and yet the whole world can change, as it has changed in the last there years, so by the time we finish that process it is out-of-date or not relevant.”

A key concern about speeding up the processes is to make sure that the public has an opportunity to contribute to it, and protecting this right is something Stuart advocates.

'One of the themes I constantly talk about, as well as other speakers at the conference, is about keeping the ‘local' in ‘local government', and that communities are part of the decision making and are well communicated to.”

A major discussion point at the conference is how merging councils would assist in improving local government efficiency.

'I believe there will be a more strategic shift to more regional decision making to address cross boundary issues,” says Stuart, who believes in time council mergers in the broader Bay of Plenty are likely.

The Auckland merger is being used as the ‘guinea pig' with Rodney Hide saying central government is closely observing the council operation over the next 12-24 months before considering any other merger possibilities.

Stuart says the Bay of Plenty would benefit from some degree of council merging.

'So Auckland is the new model of how we go about doing things and I think having gone through a similar process in 1989, when we joined up Mount Maunganui, Tauranga, Papamoa and Bethlehem, it shows there is a time when you need to align everything and it's not until everything is aligned that you get the efficiencies.”

Improving efficiency is not an option as the role of local government increases.

'I personally believe the way we go about our business at the moment is unsustainable for the future,” says Stuart.

'We are getting more and more put onto local government and in some respects that's fine, but we need to change the way in which we conduct our business and sooner rather than later.”

Stuart says the positive effect of finding efficiencies would mean improved service for the public, more effective leadership and reduced costs, which at rates review time could mean reduced rates increases.

To achieve these positive outcomes, however, like with any council decision at this time, requires a bureaucratic process.

'The biggest barrier to all of these things is the bureaucratic processes we legally have to go through.”