Political association One BOP is hitting back at detractors today saying the local body election ticket involving regional and city council candidates is not an amalgamation platform.

'Our proposal is to save ratepayer money through more cooperation and collaboration between the councils of the region, not by amalgamation,” says regional councillor and One BOP candidate Doug Owens.

Comments trying to portray One BOP as being in favour of Auckland style unitary councils for the region are wrong, says Doug.

'We support retaining local democracy throughout the region. In fact we are the group proposing a solution to the cost of local government with councils sharing a wide range of services, rather than councils duplicating the services of every other council.

'It is a ridiculous that every council in the region has its own IT systems, HR departments, engineers, and procurement departments when we could simply jointly develop and share the same services.”

The six district councils and the regional council could save millions of dollars of ratepayer money by the councils working more closely together, says Doug.

Chief executive officers in Bay councils have identified tens of millions of savings across the region, which could be achieved using the shared services concept.

'The attraction of shared services is that it can be implemented quickly through BOPLASS (Bay of Plenty Local Authority Shared Services) and there is no need for expensive amalgamation.

'Amalgamation puts the cart before the horse,” says Doug.

'We believe that local decision making must be retained but we must have more efficient governance. The present system is not efficient because each Council is doing its own thing.

'A simple example of this is the recent the farce of councils having different rules for election signs. We can't even get that right.”

The One BOP group is fielding five candidates for the BOP Regional Council and one for Tauranga City Council in this year's election, all of whom support more cooperation between local authorities across the region to achieve savings for ratepayers.