It seems Councillor Faulkner, as shown by his weekly column in The Weekend Sun, is jaded by the public consultation and submission process. In his borrowed analogy of library users as greedy piglets he has forgotten two things. The first - unlike the piglets the library users have paid for their ‘meal' through rates funding of $145 per year.
Secondly - they have continued to pay through user charges of $2 for two weeks on many items.
He comments that the ‘Save the Library' campaign made it sound like a library was being closed. Aren't 7 staff cuts, 60,000 books removed from the collection, and $2.5 million of budget cuts the equivalent of a library? And maybe there were only 988 submissions received requesting the library proposals not go ahead. This is vastly more than the 137 received in favour of the Papamoa Library, convincing council to build it.
Councillor Faulkner would receive more respect and support if he had viewed this submission round as a chance to candidly interact with his constituents rather than ridiculing them as emotive timewasters.
Kate Clark, Pyes Pa.