For the benefit of those who weren’t there, these were the four set questions by the Waikanae Beach Residents Association:

1. If elected will you support the zoning of Waikanae Beach as Beach Residential as a matter of urgency? (Note: Otaki Beach, Raumati and Paekakariki are zoned Beach Residential)

2. What are your views that the only commercial development at Waikanae Beach should be small-scale based around the existing shops to develop a village atmosphere?

3. Will you support the community aspirations resulting from the Futures Project in the preservation of Waikanae Beach?

4. What are your views on the KCDC rates policy?

Geoffrey Churchman’s answers in brief are:

1. Absolutely
2. No to strip malls and supermarkets; yes to cafés and small shops selling certain product lines near to the beach front.
3. Definitely
4. The KCDC can not continue to increase rates well above inflation; even a 5% annual increase is more than most ratepayers get from their occupations.  A close scrutiny of all spending, preferably by the whole council, obtaining independent expert advice where appropriate, must be a high priority by the next council.

A Facebook page here has been created to present the views of the two candidates — Guy Burns and Janet Holborow — for this council seat.  A set of 39 questions is answered by each candidate.

We particularly like these two questions:

Q26. I would like to ask incumbents for examples of when they’ve rejected management proposals on significant projects. Too many councilors just rubber-stamp management decisions. And I’d ask everyone how they intend to keep a watch on council spending (not that I’m pushing cost-cutting, just that the council often fails to get value for money, then claims it can’t fund other projects that have significant value to the community).

Q27. Are you prepared to challenge council staff (regardless of how senior their position) on their decisions? Too often councilors only take advice from staff accepting everything they propose rather than representing the concerns of the community. How do you balance this?

Like the Otaki Community Board, all four candidates for the Paekakariki Community Board were elected unopposed.

Candidates take turns to address the audience.  Geoffrey Churchman, still with his ankle in plaster, is the one with the walking frame. Gerald Rys in the left background was the MC.

Some 40+ beach residents came along today to the hall in Rauparaha Street to hear the candidates for the council seat and the four community board seats.

All the candidates were there except Iride McCloy (council candidate) and Jill Lloyd (WCB candidate), both of whom are overseas at present.  Each got 5 minutes talk time plus a follow-up question from the audience. The MC was a little generous in some cases with these time limits.

The agenda had been set by the meeting organisers — three questions specifically on beach policy and a general one on rates policy.  Answering the last alone would have taken more than the allotted 5 minutes, and other candidates made a speech more on general whole-town policies, which is going to be the theme of another candidates meeting scheduled for Saturday 17th on the other side of the railway tracks.

There was also a general question from Quentin Poole to all the candidates on the coastal hazard issue, which is particularly pertinent for Raumati people, although severe storm damage from climate change threatens the whole coast.

One of 4 paintings with this collective title by New Zealand artist and ecologist Fr Peter Healy SM, exhibited at the Mahara Gallery in Waikanae last year. Source

“Waikanae is my home -– and to me a unique place woven from the beach, river, estuary, bush, farmland and rich bird life — captured in the work of talented local artists and artisans.

“I will champion Community Board process that produces:

1.      Stronger community centred consultation around the scoping of emergent local issues

2.      Increased rigor within planning decisions through active involvement of local expertise

“I will advocate for local issues inclusive of:

·       * A permanent access to Waikanae East that does not compete with rail movement

·* Strategies that optimise the benefits of the expressway and protect both critical connectivity and the unique fabric of the Waikanae in which we have chosen to live

·        * Keeping Waikanae strong through an attractive, dynamic business and retail heart

·        * Affordable, accessible medical care

·        * A safe environment supporting mobility for all

“Invest in my skills and experience —

Community Centred Advocacy

·        Effective Consultation

·        Successful Collaboration

·        Experience within the process of Local and Central Government“

All we are doing, this will be distributed to the town’s 5,000 letterboxes over the next week or so.  Being opposed to billboard proliferation, we felt it would be a little hypocritical to plant our own. There will also be the short all-candidate ‘sound bite’ profiles in local publications and in the official booklet.

(Click for big views)

Margaret Stevenson-Wright, one of the candidates we recommend for the Waikanae Community Board, asked the KCDC under the OIA what information is held in council files on this, as the only figure we have seen is that cited by Michael Scott of $27 million.

The response above states “no documents have been found in council files that show an associated cost for the options discussed” (in 2009 by a design workshop in which the NZTA, the KCDC and the GWRC participated).  Thus the figure of $27 million just seems to have been pulled out of the air.

The document cited in the above letter – here – has these figures for what is termed ‘the Waikanae Grade Separation’ project:

A three-year project cost of $3 million and an estimated total project cost of $44 million.

However, there is no precise statement of what this would have involved. But in a document attached to the OIA request reply, there is this paragraph:

It’s important to note:

1. At the time, 2009, there had been no decision to build the Expressway and the general belief was that the now Expressway route would be the much less elaborate Western Link Road, while State Highway One would be upgraded including though Waikanae.
2. If State Highway One was to stay on the existing route, the underpasses would need to be much more elaborate than for a local road, which is what the present SH1 will become in December.
3. The concept cited above, ‘Local traffic in underpass’, would indeed be very expensive as Michael Scott claims, but that isn’t what we propose, which is much less involved.

It’s believed that the developers of the Lindale area just north of Paraparaumu a decade ago spent about $5 million on their SH1 underpass, and that seems a realistic ballpark figure for what we propose for Elizabeth Street.  We are going to try to get professional opinion on this.

The white elephants of previous KCDC Mayor Rowan and her council pale into insignificance compared with the Casa Poporului of the late communist dictator Nicolae Ceaușescu in Romania, who was executed in 1989.

Now called the Palace of the Parliament (Palatul Parlamentului) this massive complex, located on Dealul Arsenalului in central Bucharest, is the second largest administrative building in the world, after The Pentagon in the U.S.: 84 metres high, an area of 365,000 square metres, 1,100 rooms, and a volume of 2,550,000 cubic metres. It is also the third biggest building in the world (after the Vehicle Assembly Building at Kennedy Space Center in Florida and the Temple of the Feathered Serpent in Teotihuacan, Mexico.)  A total 7 square kilometres of the old centre of Bucharest was cleared to make room for it.  It is said that in the communist years, a third of the state budget was spent on it.

Unsurprisingly, Ceaușescu started a reconstruction plan of Bucharest, with the People’s House the centrepiece of it, as a replica of Pyongyang, the capital of North Korea.

Perhaps though, Mayor Church will expect a big bronze statue of himself outside the KCDC building when he leaves office?

A copy of its response to an OIA request is shown below.  The total amounts to an impressive $1,696,000 for the past three years, or an average $565,300 a year.  Good revenue for the lawyers involved, not good for the District’s ratepayers.

We need to find out what poisons are being dumped in the catchment area of the Waikanae river by DOC and/or the GWRC, see earlier post.

Full article on Tongariro on the Rangitikei Environmental Health Watch blog