An opportunity to dust off old plans, reject the failures and determine future directions is being presented to Tauranga City Councillors as they begin Ten Year Plan deliberations.

Ten Year Plans are a legal requirement, though one that Councillor Bill Faulkner says are only relevant for the first three years of the 2012-2022 plan.

The councillors start on the good stuff – depreciation – a policy councillors are now required to pay attention to under the Local Government Act.

Depreciation is an expense that recognises the ‘using up' of an asset over time.

For most organisations it's an accounting adjustment with little or no impact on the cash flows.

Under the Local Government Act, councils are required to fund depreciation.

This means rates are collected based on the amount of depreciation in council's accounts.

At this week's meetings, Tauranga City Council staff will present an overview of how depreciation is calculated, why it is required to be funded and on what uses council (per its depreciation policy) can use these funds.

Also coming up for deliberation on day one of the possibly three day process are the neighbourhood plans: the Greerton, Merivale and Mount North plans.

These plans were all the rage in 2001-2007, but are now largely superseded.

There was previously a part time council staff member responsible for the neighbourhood plans and for their monitoring.

They left that role in 2008.

The neighbourhood plans are now more than five years old and many actions are either complete, outdated or simply not going to happen for various reasons.

Key organisations and community people involved in the plan development left and there doesn't appear to be much handover with regard to the ongoing review and implementation of the plans.

Tauranga City Council as an organisation doesn't support community development initiatives in the way some other councils do, where a specific division within the organisation is called 'community development”.

Tauranga City Council now is more likely to play a supporting role through the various projects and processes that it delivers, and it has in areas such as Arataki, Welcome Bay and Merivale.

Other topics for discussion on day one, Monday, include the wastewater asset management, stormwater asset management and the water supply developments changes and operations over the next 10 years.