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Cr Bill Faulkner Faulkners Corner www.sunlive.co.nz |
'Well, this shouldn't take long?” Chairman David Stewart asked as he arrived for this week's strategy and policy committee meeting. With only four agenda items it may have been a reasonable expectation until you knew that the first item concerned – a tree.
Trees are almost guaranteed to get most elected members going and this was no different. This tree is the Norfolk Pine near the end of 22nd Avenue at Gate Pa. Immediate neighbours petitioned council for its removal citing health, safety, property damage issues and interference with phone and power lines. Fifty-six minutes later on a vote of 6-5 the tree was gone. Residents will contribute 50 per cent of cost of removal.
Million dollar Treasury reports take two minutes sometimes.
I guess there's a message in there somewhere.
But wait – there's more. At this meeting a donation of trees citywide for ‘Project Umbrella' tree planting by Dr Paul Salmon attracted the opposition of 30 residents occupying 15 properties on Valley Road, Mount Maunganui.
It is proposed to plant 90 donated Pohutukawa trees along Valley Road, Ranch Road and Bain Street this year. Dr Salmon's tree planting programme has been running for about 10 years and is designed to provide extra shading around the city. Dr Salmon is a specialist dermatologic surgeon and in an accompanying letter he noted that the trees were not for the exclusive benefit of residents, but for everyone's benefit.
A further 49 minutes of debate followed and this time the trees won on a vote of 7-4.
Another petition concerned inappropriate use of Waipuna Park and Johnson Reserve by motorbikes, golf and intimidation of residents. This was received and referred to clubs and event organisers in about 30 seconds. Chairman David's initial comment certainly invoked Murphy's Law and/or the Peter Principle.
Building on the established
A proposal from the Elders Centre Establishment Group to develop a dedicated centre for the aging population, dating from November 2009 and requesting exclusive use of the Greerton Hall along with $275,000 to refit the hall was reported back by the establishment group. In a breath of fresh air, the group decided the focus should be on more effective communication of existing support/services available to elderly people and build on capabilities of existing organisations. Council could facilitate with favourable terms of existing council facilities. A most sensible decision and is one other organisations should consider.
Who's in charge?
More attacks on local government/ratepayers from the government with a proposal for ‘A National Policy Statement on Indigenous Biodiversity'.
A soothing preamble designed to lull councils into a false sense of security followed by eight ‘policies' laced with ‘will', ‘must' and ‘shall'.
It's all about caring for native flora and fauna. Scary stuff and Mayor Stuart Crosby waxed lyrical on its ‘over regulation'. Costs fall on local government (what's new?) and everyone would be bound by it – except (of course) the Crown.
Stuart says it was 'nonsense” and no-one disagreed.
I often wonder who's running New Zealand as the same kind of strangulation legislation seems to emanate from either a left wing or right wing government, but the same bureaucracy. Maybe the Sir Humphreys should change as governments do?
Determining the warning
At projects and monitoring committee there was a lengthy detailed presentation from council staff on the vexed issue of tsunami warnings. The previous presentation was from Civil Defence. There was a presentation from I-Text Ltd at the beginning. This system would text each cellphone in the area with a tsunami warning.
Cost for Bay of Plenty would be $250,000 a year. Apparently normal text service is only 10 texts per second, but this can be lifted to 1500 per second by the service provider. Locally, Mayor Island is the risk and if it exploded there would be no effective warning. From Japan or South America there would be 12 hours warning. A landslide collapse or volcanic explosion in the Kermadec Trench would be a two hour time frame before a tsunami arrived here. A one or two metre tsunami wouldn't require evacuation, but above that it would. There are 51,000 people to move off the coastal strip. As a measure it took two hours to clear 17,000 people from Baypark Stadium after the Super 15 rugby match. Sirens were discussed at length. When would you sound a siren? It takes between an hour and one and a half hours for the Tsunami Warning Centre to analyse the data after an event and issue the warning. Texts require the phone to be switched on. In house ‘Meerkat' alarms (similar to smoke alarms) require you to be home to hear them. TV and radio are great provided you aren't asleep. You could also wait for the next day's Bay Times to alert you! In recent weeks people overseas ring New Zealand friends and relatives in the dead of night once it's on the news networks.
Risk management
Then there's the level of risk versus cost issue. What level of risk do we accept? Like stormwater, where we have a service level of coping with a one-in-50-year event. Of course nature doesn't know about this and there is nothing stopping two one-in-50-year events in one month. It's just a level of measure. Maybe we could accept the risk just like we do when we get in our cars. There is the risk of living, being struck by lightning or meteorite. Council will be considering an issues and options paper shortly where all contingencies will be outlined. Evacuation plans, details and realities will be involved. A friend who has lived at Papamoa for 20 years told me he and his wife were quite happy and lived with the risk. As he said – when your time is up, that's it. In the event of a tsunami he intended to get in his motorhome and hope it floated! A pragmatic solution if ever there was one.
This week's mindbender from Sir Peter Ustinov: 'Courage is often a lack of insight whereas cowardice in many cases is based on good information.”
