Submissions: A waste of our time?

Cr Mike Baker claims that I have taken his letter to me out of context, and that in fact councillors take all submissions into account.
Of course this is not the first time that I have misunderstood Cr Baker. When he first put himself up for election, he said that he was going to get spending under control, and I thought he meant just that and not that he would vote for almost every inflationary scheme that was put to him.
He now goes on to say that of course they don’t act on just one submission as it would not be representative or reflect the wishes and desires of the residents.
Now I’m curious, and would ask Cr Baker to answer the following questions. How many submissions does it take before councillors take them seriously. There were hundreds about the library and the council still went ahead and increased charges.
The second question is, could Cr Mike Baker please give the readers 10 examples of public submissions that the council have acted upon, it would also be helpful if he gave us the aprox number of submission in each case.
Once these facts have been published I am sure that we will all feel a bit more confident that it is worth our time making a submission.
Until we have the facts my personal point of view is that is a waste of  time.
Chris Laycock, Otumoetai.

Mike Baker responds:
Regarding the response of Chris Laycock I somehow suspect that regardless as to what I say he will still want to believe that making a formal submission to Council is a waste of time but I encourage people to continue to make submissions to Council, as contrary to what Mr Laycock says or may think, we do listen.
Where has the correspondent been? as whilst he is correct that we did receive hundreds of submissions opposing a proposal for library book charges but for him to then say that we went ahead and increased charges is plainly bizarre, as we did not and the papers widely reported this.
As requested I will give a number of examples of public submissions that we have listened to such as agreeing with the community on issues such as the proposed Oceanbeach Road cycleway which subsequently did not proceed.  There was the proposed one way roading system for the Mount peninsula, along with additional angle parking, which also did not proceed as proposed, following public submissions.
We also listened to well over 500 submitters who supported users pays for Route K and agreed to increase the tolls and during the recent annual plan process we again listened to the community and managed to reduce the rate spend by close to $600,000 resulting in a lower rate increase than earlier predicted.
We also listened to the community on issues such as proposed residential intensification in the Greerton and Arataki residential nodes which subsequently did not proceed and there are of course many other examples.
But is this what Mr Laycock really wants to hear, or does he wish to continue to believe that making submissions to Council is still a waste of time? The offer for Mr Laycock to make direct contact remains open and I look forward to hearing from him.
Cr Mike Baker, Bethlehem.