There has been plenty of discussion recently about Mackenzie District Council moving more of our public toilet network towards a user-pays model. I think it is important that our community understands why Council has reached this point.
This is fundamentally about fairness and sustainability.
The Mackenzie District has a small permanent population and a correspondingly small ratepayer base, but we host very large numbers of visitors every year. Those visitors are important to our district and to the wider New Zealand economy, but the infrastructure they use has to be provided, cleaned, maintained and ultimately replaced by somebody.
Public toilets are a good example of that challenge.
In the 2024–34 Long Term Plan, Council identified that our public toilets were costing approximately $660,000 every year to operate, including around $415,000 annually for cleaning alone. Since then those costs have continued to rise. Council's current budget for cleaning, maintaining and operating the public toilet network is approximately $800,000 a year.
That is a significant amount of money for a district our size.
At the same time, usage has continued to increase. Our public toilet network is now being used approximately 900,000 to one million times each year. The overwhelming majority of that demand is visitor related.
Every one of those visits creates a cost.
It is not simply a matter of supplying toilet paper and having somebody clean the building. Each use means water being supplied, toilets being flushed, wastewater being collected and treated, handwashing water being provided, electricity being used, rubbish being removed and the building, plumbing, pumps, sewer connections and other infrastructure gradually wearing out.
When toilet usage increases, the number of flushes increases with it. That means greater demand on both our drinking-water infrastructure and our wastewater infrastructure. Pumps operate, treatment systems process the additional wastewater, pipes and equipment require maintenance, and eventually assets have to be renewed or replaced.
Cleaning also has to match visitor demand. Council advises that toilets are generally cleaned two or three times a day depending on their location and the time of year. High-use tourism locations place considerably greater demands on those services.
This is why looking only at the construction cost of a toilet does not tell the full story. Government funding has helped Mackenzie construct important visitor facilities, including through the Tourism Infrastructure Fund and, more recently, the International Visitor Levy. That assistance is welcomed. But once a facility is built, Council and its ratepayers are left with the ongoing costs of operating, cleaning, maintaining and ultimately renewing it.
For the average Mackenzie rateable property, Council estimated in 2026 that public toilets were effectively costing about $150 per year.
Council does not believe it is reasonable for that cost simply to continue increasing and automatically be passed back to local ratepayers.
That is why we have progressively moved towards a mixed model.
We are not proposing that every toilet in the Mackenzie should necessarily become user-pays. Some facilities will remain free. But at locations with very high visitor numbers, it is reasonable that the people actually using the facility contribute something towards providing it.
Council began this process through the Long Term Plan and the 2025/26 Annual Plan. The charge currently applying at paid facilities is $1.50 for electronic payment or $2 for a coin payment. Revenue collected goes towards the annual maintenance and cleaning costs of the district's toilets rather than simply leaving those costs with ratepayers.
The experience so far has demonstrated that user-pays can make a meaningful contribution, although current revenue of around $80,000 annually remains well below the roughly $800,000 annual operating cost of the overall network.
Government has also recognised the unusual pressure tourism places on the Mackenzie. In July 2026, $2.5 million of International Visitor Levy funding was announced to support improvements to public toilet infrastructure in the district, including opportunities to introduce user-pays systems at appropriate locations.
That is an important acknowledgement of the problem, but capital funding does not remove the ongoing operating cost.
Our objective is straightforward: maintain good-quality public toilets, continue providing appropriate free facilities, and make the funding of heavily used visitor facilities fairer.
Tourism remains extremely important to the Mackenzie. We want visitors here and we want them to have good facilities.
But with close to a million toilet uses every year, continuing to ask a few thousand local ratepayers to carry almost the entire cost is neither fair nor financially sustainable.
User-pays means those creating some of the demand make a modest contribution towards the infrastructure they use.
While I appreciate this is causing some consternation with some locals about having to pay to use the public toilets, we are in the process of investigating a locals swipe card (or) concession type arrangement so as to alleviate the 'Paying twice' stigma. Once we have settled on a suitable model for this we will advise the wider community. In the mean time staff are working on sourcing the best potential payment model that will derive the greatest benefit for the ratepayer.
Scott.
Scott Aronsen
Mayor, Mackenzie District Council.