However much it eventually ends up costing the one sure thing about the Tauranga City Council's mouldy building issues is that the ratepayer will end up paying.

Costs are already heading for it being a million dollar event, and that's at the early stages before all the bills have come in.

Ratepayers can look forward to paying for the council mouldy buildings.

The issue for council finance and risk committee chairman John Robson is how ratepayers are going to pay.

The council does have a $50 million overdraft facility, but like any bank loan the money has to be paid for, and paid back.

John thinks it more likely the money will come from somewhere else within the organisation, but the answers are not going to be known until all the bills are in and the councillors have been able to debate the options.

That won't happen until March, and the council long term plan meetings where the budget is set for the next three years, are at the end of January.

'Without numbers one can't know,” says John.

'I imagine we will get an update when we get back we are being fed information as and when appropriate. We know it's a million and going north.

'The question is how you approach that. If it is only a million and it's going to be resolved over ten years, it's not a major.”

But until they get the scale right, whatever is decided in the long term plan should be prudent.

'We should allow for the fact that things happen. This perhaps shouldn't have happened, but sometimes things do happen, and we have to be prudent and allow for that.

'It shouldn't affect the quality of our strategic thinking, but I imagine it will make us even more prudent than we would have otherwise have been.”

Ultimately there will be a trade-off, says John.

It's the second million dollar legacy issue the current council has had to deal with since being voted in 15 months ago in a an election that saw seven councillors replaced.

In June last year, it was made public that one of the last acts of the previous city council was to confidentially approve the spending of $1.34 million on the city council computers.

The new management team highlighted a number of areas of investment to, 'drive improvements and reduce risks for the organisation across the council and inter-council network”.

The council's backup capacity needed to increase to cope with growing volumes of data on council systems, to bring security in line with good practice and to upgrade to from Windows XP to Windows 7, as XP was about to be unsupported.

The decision remained confidential until after the end of the financial year because of the sensitive information about council and inter-council networks and the commercial negotiations required to buy the hardware to address the issues.

The basics of running a council are to ensure the assets, the staff, have the right tools to do their jobs, and that they are properly housed, says John.

'Clearly in the past for whatever reason, previous councils haven't focussed on making sure the buildings we are in are in good shape.

'Which is a pretty serious failing on the part of previous councils.”