Hut Fees
I am a little on the fence about paying hut fees and this is my main reason:
Every dollar that goes into hut fees is another step foward for DOC to instantiate the privisation of NZ's hut and track system. Back in the day (well before my time) huts were free of charge as you paid them once with your taxes. Then 'user charges' were introduced.
First was the billing of the public health system which was of course protested by the thousands with the slogan 'pay once, dont pay again' - debt collectors started knocking but the resistance was too strong and the government realised that it was beaten and retreated.
Then after a period of 'still' the government tried the same trick on backcountry hut users which hut fees were introduced in 1988, how did they gather the initative to do this? They decide to cut DOC's funding and sure enough it got its way because the FMC's signed up for huge discounts on annual hut passes and services.
And this leaves us to where we are today.
So inconclusion, should our taxes be apart of DOC funding and wipe out hut fees, or pay once and keep paying?
41 comments
Doc haven unusual way of accounting for things which is a large part of why they want rid of huts and are not always that keen on major renovations.
Everything has to be defined as an asset and every asset defined a value. So far so good but there is this dirty little secret called depreciation. The depreciation is treated as a normal expense and is therefore funded out of the operating budget. I dont know the percentages but if we assume 10% and take a hut like Totora Flats which opened some years ago at a well publicized price of 500K then each year Doc has to find 50K to fund that depreciation.. If that hut had still been the 2nd hut built for at a guess 60K then that amount would of been 6k. This is one of the reasons they want to offload ownership of huts to other organizations as they can give a hut away and no longer depreciate it.
When the new hut is built at Waitararu it will not be owned by Doc even though they will supply a fair chunk of the funding and the hut will be on the same terms as every other standard hut in the Tararuas
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| Forum | The campfire |
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| Started by | [Deleted] |
| On | 30 September 2016 |
| Replies | 40 |
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