Yes I am standing for election to the Wanganui District Council, after months of watching the pitiful waste of money by Council on so many things I have chosen to stand to hopefully make a difference. I have posted under notes a selection of letters to the editor of the Wanganui Chronicle, that have been published in the last three months. Also I have posted a copy of my submission to the Annual plan for your information. What I want to see in Council is more accountability with a more frugal approach to spending. There are so many activities that the Council indulges in, that are outside its core business that a review is needed to ensure value for money is being achieved and complacency is not the norm. What do I know about Council? Not much of a few things, but a lot, about a lot of things that matter and are currently under debate. I have invested hundreds of hours studying Council reports, talked with the people that matter to obtain the information necessary to provide sensible comment and be able to provide common sense argument at the Council table. It is my view that Council is a bit bloated with lots of smoke and mirrors that make it hard for an outsider to get a grip on the actual. I notice that a new CEO in Nelson City has undertaken a restructure of that organisation with 70-80 jobs up for review with elimination of up to 10 positions a prospect. During my working life I have had dealings with the Council on an on-going basis, mainly with subdivision work. I have built streets and footpaths, laid pipes both water mains and sewage, even built a sewage pumping station on my own. The Councils manager of Infrastructure at the time said “I’m not having a defunct chook farmer building my pumping station”. I built it anyway and when the manager of waste water did his inspection to sign it off, he declared it to be the best pumping station they had. I ran an entertainment business for ten years in the City with a Saturday night dance after which we provided a free bus to Aramoho and Castlecliff for the kids to get home. That was a challenge, one night the driver got so worked up (he suffered high blood pressure) he took the bus straight from the dance to the Police station. The kids were unloaded and headed back to Fun City where the Police rounded them all up and put them back on the bus, a Constable and I, then had to accompany them around town to drop them all off. The kids thought it was hilarious. A reporter asked me a couple of days ago what I was going to do for young people and the entertainment of them. When you think about it nothing has changed in 50 years as far as entertaining kids go except they now have a multitude of things delivered to their screens that we never had before. Running public functions for kids 12-17 is a hazardous occupation with so many factions all wanting to challenge each other, the costs will in the main always beat the income. If that was not the case we would have entertainment centres all over town. I have interests in Forestry and own in partnership a large forest North of Wanganui. We planted our forest in anticipation of there being a processing plant available in the City. Sadly the processing plant has come and gone while the trees were growing. Collectively around the city rural Districts there are several million tons of timber ready to be harvested over the next 10 years. Wanganui is unlikely to see any financial benefit from this other than supplying labour and services to do the harvest. The proposed offshore ironsand mining is one economic activity that Wanganui should get a piece of with the opportunity to supply services and labour to the operators. A recent survey of the inner shoreline down and around Foxton produced evidence of a sustainable clam fishery that could yield $50 million of export clam meat a year. It is possible that we also have a Clam bed off our coast, we should be looking to provide a base for the boats harvesting the Foxton beds. That could extend to processing the product and the creation of jobs here. If indeed there proves to be a fishery off our coast we will be well positioned to take advantage of it. I hope I have proven to be worthy of your Vote.
Posted on: Fri, 16 Aug 2013 02:42:33 +0000
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