Friday saw my 10 year old’s tennis team playing away in Spreydon.  Lovely tennis courts.  However, as we were (like always) in a rush and running late, a couple of the girls needed a nervous trip to the loo before striding out onto the court. 

Three of them headed over to the nearest loos within the complex, at the Kereru Sport and Cultural Centre.  However, they were turned away by the receptionist, and told they had to use the public loos, somewhere quite far away in the park.

Now, aside from making us even later to start to play, and aside from the (unfortunate) risks of sending young children to public toilets in parks, I was a bit intrigued by the lack of access to community assets.

So I went to my mega grants database to see who they received funding from, and the Societies website, to check out their financials.  Christchurch City Council is one of their funders.  For those who have not looked, the CCC has some great comments on organisations within their funding applications. Check out page 28 of the Community Board agenda. 

What is interesting here: the note to councillors states that the building is leased from CCC.  So – the building itself is a rate payer asset.  The group does pay rent, presumably to the Council: in 2015 based on financials that was $4,300, which seems fairly peppercorn.  The other interesting thing is that the tennis club is not a part of the Kereru group.  I see from the tennis club accounts that they do own their own building (which in fact was not open when we were there) but lease the land from CCC for around $1k per annum, again fairly low.  Neither of the teams playing were from Spreydon, but this seems to happen a bit, and does make sense to best leverage community assets.  And not that its relevant to what I am writing about, but there is almost $250k sitting in Kereru's accounts as a term deposit. 

I guess the Kereru Sport and Cultural Centre do need to clean the loos, and quite possibly they do get sick of children playing tennis traipsing in and expecting to use those toilets.  It’s interesting to consider however, that the venue was open itself, presumably for the bar which generated almost $30k in sales for them in 2015.   But this action was slightly off the staff assessment statement from the funding application which stated “The Club is family oriented and aims to keep fees as low as possible enabling low income and single parent families to use its services.” 

For a family oriented club, it’s a bit galling to turn away kids from using the Council owned loos in favour of those at the bar.  From a “getting kids moving” point of view, the sport they play really is quite irrelevant: if Kereru were living their vision on family orientation, then perhaps they would not be so hard nosed about this.

It’s quite interesting to contemplate, don’t you think?  The role of rate payer assets under management by community organisations?  The bar verses the sports element of such asset ownership and leasing?  Would love to talk with you if you think this is vaguely interesting.

I was trying to convince someone that they needed to spend some money with me to look at funding in their region, so thought I’d have a wee look at the gaming trust spend in their area.  Class 4 gaming trusts operate in New Zealand under prescriptive legislation. You may recall that Canterbury’s Community Funding (i.e., money that goes to community groups from all sources of grants) is about 52% from gaming trusts, Otago’s 29%, so I reckon they are not something to be sneezed at if you are wanting to understand the whole funding ecosystem.

Then I thought it would be interesting to look at this for the country. 

Below is from the DIA website added up for the year, and then summarised by my take on province.  I took the quarterly figures, added them together, and multiplied by .4, which is the minimum return that gaming trusts provide to their communities.  Of course some trusts over stretch this and provide more to community groups.  These figures show pokie income by region.

There are a couple of things I found quite interesting. 

The total dollars available for the country is over $340m. This compares to Lotteries 2016 spend of $182m, the Combined Community Trusts (the regional trusts which came out of TrustBank) of $105m.  The other big player will be local bodies, but the data there is simply too difficult to find.  However, the conclusion does not change: the gaming trusts are big in terms of returns to community.

The second thing is looking at the hypothetical contribution back into the communities which generated it.   The above chart shows income.  Where its spent is another story.  Earlier I have looked at the dollars that came into Otago in 2015.  This showed that in 2015 Otago gaming trusts put around $6.5m INTO the community.  Yet in 2016 they took $10.7m OUT of the community.  Canterbury figures are a bit more balanced, which (I suspect) is driven by earthquake spend.  Of course, gaming trusts do spend with national groups as well, which presumably has benefits to the communities the money came from.

The third thing not mentioned here is casinos.  They operate under different legislation of course, and, in the case of Sky City, is owned by a bunch of investment funds (i.e., our super), or privately held in Christchurch Casino’s case.  I found something quite interesting on the DIA website: in 2016 they reported gambling expenditure of $527m.  If they had the same community requirement as Class 4 pokies, then they would have given $210m back into the community.  Instead they are reported (from the DIA website) to have passed just over $4m through to their community trusts.  Less than 1% of the reported gambling percentage.  Profits from NZ operations of Sky City are around $160m (check out the annual report).  We can’t see Christchurch Casino as that’s privately owned.  Of course these entities pay some tax, and our managed funds invest in casinos, but its quite interesting to contemplate, don’t you think?  Perhaps we should be re-defining gaming trusts as a social enterprise? 

Would love to talk with you if you think this is vaguely interesting.