While Auckland City Council has announced the purchase of 31 new parks and open spaces in the past year, Tauranga City Council seems intent on trying to reduce Welcome Bays' reserves land. Tauranga City Council's 'survey' was sent out in May but the results now reported show a very low number of responses in favour of a supermarket on reserve land. In fact, from the data that council has supplied, there were only 725 responses that stated that they preferred Waitaha Reserve as the site of a supermarket, and the other sites were each even less favoured. The wording of the survey encouraged those in favour of a supermarket to respond (Do you want a supermarket in Welcome Bay?). Since Welcome Bay's population was recorded in the 2013 census as 8670 and it is no doubt higher now, the 725 responses in favour represents less than 9 per cent of the population. Note that I say ‘responses', not people, since there was no attempt to control the number of responses any one person could send in. So it seems that at least 91 per cent of the population is not in favour of a supermarket on Waitaha Reserve. Why then is council proceeding with investigating this option? If they really do care what the people of Welcome Bay think they should at least conduct a neutrally worded and properly controlled survey to find out before going any further with this. K Olsen, Welcome Bay.