Brian Anderson The Western Front www.sunlive.co.nz

George and I were given the opportunity to speak at hearings for the regional and district council Annual Plans last week. Hearings like these are the only occasions for individuals to go face-to-face with a council. Conversation or debate is not allowed, but individuals can have their say and walk away with the hope they will have sown a seed, which some day may prove to have been worth their effort. I will be reporting my experiences and progress of our submissions over the next few weeks.

No Yellow Brick road

An annual plan really is only a budget; with most priorities for projects already approved. Submissions should only be asking for a revision of the priorities and not normally be seeking new projects. Unfortunately both hearings were overwhelmed. More than 800 of the 1000 submissions to WBOPDC were requesting support for a Home of Cycling project. Even worse, only five copies of the District's Annual Plan were available to the public, but the folders also included submissions on Dog Control which were interspersed with the Annual Plan and were over fifty percent of the documents in the folder. There was no online copy of the submissions available to allow any sorting or searching by topic and it took me over three hours to find and read submissions other than those on dogs or cycling. Very little review or consolidation of submissions was possible and the hearings can have achieved very little in furthering the councillors' understanding of the community priorities.

Rates

The rates information pamphlet was distributed well before the final plan and submission forms were made available, so very few individuals submitted on rates at all. Omokoroa and Waihi Beach Community Boards warned that their targeted rates for sewerage were only paying half the interest on loans. The Omokoroa sewerage projected interest charge of $1.2m this year had to be increased to $2.1m and this pattern, if it were allowed to continue, will be unsustainable. Omokoroa wants the whole cost to be added to rates across the district.

Our submissions

We were allowed only ten minutes by WBOPDC to submit on four major topics. This meant I had two and a half minutes for each topic; storm water over the whole region from the rural areas to stopbank design; Tauranga Harbour Integrated Management Strategy and the Recreation Forums; Katikati Town Centre Plan changes and lastly; the implications of the new local government requirements on community representation with urgency needed on some of these issues. It was an interesting ten minutes. No councillor questions of clarification were allowed. Instead, I was given a little lecture from the Chair. The restricted time had meant that all I could report was where the council was going wrong, but not much more. It might have seemed abrupt, but what else did they expect from two submitters on four topics in ten minutes?

We received a summary of all of the regional council Annual Plan submissions and contacted a number of fellow submitters. I covered the same topics in my submissions to the regional council and because the council was already under way with most of these projects, I was given a better reception. I hope our comments were supportive and helpful. To compare the performances of the two councils on some communication ability index might be a little premature. We should wait until we can compare their responses before assigning any score. Stay tuned.