During the election campaign Council and Mayoral candidates were sent several surveys by different groups seeking their views.
The easiest to answer was that of Grey Power whose concern about ever-increasing council Rates and water charges to pay ever-bigger salaries to KCDC Boss Dougherty’s growing entourage of desk-bureaucrats matched ours.
The hardest to answer was that from the Kapiti Chamber of Commerce whose homage to the great god of economic growth – pdf here – was described by one of our supporters as ‘hawkish’.
Three big obstacles to business in the Kapiti Coast are:
- The ever-increasing Rates and charges to fund the Council bureaucracy;
- KCDC Boss Dougherty who in several instances hasn’t allowed local businesses to tender for council contracts;
- The sham of ‘consultation’ when decisions have already been made behind closed doors by Dougherty and his bureaucrats which then get promoted by his spin doctors in booklets full of fancy graphics with little substance.
Can the new council put right the above problems? We’ll see.
Our response to the survey, in part, was that business growth in Waikanae is only wanted in the existing town centre to maintain a status quo of activity — and not between the Expressway and the beach, which is where all the developer interest is.
Eco-tourism provides opportunities for not just Waikanae, but other parts of the district: keeping the environment pristine, diverse and natural; and improvements to facilities and amenities for visitors should produce more visitors.
But NZ’s main cities already have megamalls and another in the Paraparaumu town centre (with or without an artificial sand-dune!) won’t do anything. The council should stop wasting time and money on that.