LTCCP: HELL BOUND

So why is the Nelson City council's LTCCP such a wolf in sheeps clothing, that gives such a false appearance of prudence and belt tightening. How does it achieve a reduced rate increase while still increasing expenditure.
Simply put, it is an exercise in smoke and mirrors, achieved by putting future grocery bills on the credit card. Increased expenditure and the consequential increase in the rate burden, will be disguised and hidden by stopping payments on mortgage, rent, and hire purchase payments. Those payments, will instead, all be put on the credit card. Council intends taking what is called a repayment or mortgage holiday. Effectively what council are doing is changing the method of rates funding from cash funding to debt funding.
But nationally, economists are all unanimous in their condemnation of such mortgage holidays, describing them as

Holidays from hell.

They show their stong criticism by illustrating the debt carnage that those holidays wreak on borrowers, and because of that fiscal carnage, they all give exactly the same advice;

Those holidays from hell should be avoided like the plague if at all possible.

Credit card debt doesnt just evaporate. It bites us on the bum, by just sitting there and compounding while steeply increasing our debt levels and repayment problems. When people are forced into mortgage holidays they are always in dire financial straits.
Does this mean that the Nelson City Council has dire financial problems or is this just gross financial greed and recklessness.
The particular carnage that this imprudent holiday will wreak on Nelson ratepayers is that it, doubles the rate take [$40M - $80M] and triples interest charges [$3.5M - $11M] and just on triples debt [$57M - $170M] over the period of the plan, and that doubling of interest, rate take and debt, irrevocably locks this and future councils into imprudent ongoing rate increases of at least 11%, and probably more, plus inflation of 3%, for the forseeable future.
What ratepayers are agreeing to by this LTCCP, is a minimum of ten years worth of rate increases of at least, 11% or more, plus inflation of 3%, and that is irresponsible if not reckless.
However, even more serious and disastrous effects are created by this trip to Hell and they will be analysed next in this series.