Further to the article about the Te Tumu land purchase, and Mr Faulkner's brief mention of it in his weekly report, I have been interested to see that the $10m payout (as well as $5m from WBOPDC) for the land was made to Tauranga's biggest and richest developer to stop them putting a rural subdivision in the middle of land set aside for the future Te Tumu development.
Somehow this would have impacted on Te Tumu. This development has since stalled.
The land cannot be sold to offset the loan as the developer has the option to repurchase the land at any time in the ten years between 2016 and 2026. Talk about a deal set in Heaven! To make things worse, the $10m council borrowed for us has not had any interest paid on it (this has been added to the loan or 'loan funded) nor any of the principal paid so now the debt is about $13m.
Now I don't know about anyone else but the whole shady saga smacks of incompetence to me and it seems that Council have been outmanouvred by a very slick organisation. Council's own monster, the bureaucratic system, is designed to examine projects such as this so they don't impact on the ratepayer. Why we should pay out so much to protect the Te Tumu developers is a mystery to me.

Dan Russell, Welcome Bay.