Hi everyone,

As you know, we recently attended the hearing for the renewal of the Off-Licence regarding Waikanae Beach Four Square. This evening, Katherine McLellan, the licensing inspector and Senior Sergeant Steve Sargent from New Zealand police visited my store to deliver the amazing news in person that our off-licence had been granted.

I would like to thank all of the Foodstuffs team who have helped throughout this process. A special thank you to Brian Drake for assisting me also. Another big thank you to the very positive community for supporting us – we couldn’t have done it without you all.

Kind regards
Quoc and Thuy

Another of the regular line maintenance work weekends of KiwiRail.   It’s an opportunity for Waikanae’s ‘barcode’ bridge to be steam cleaned…

In most cases, but not all, buses stop in the station forecourts.

One of the pictures in a new book called New Zealand’s Rivers: an environmental history by Catherine Knight.  Waikanae River of course has recently seen the environmentally controversial recharge system where centuries-old bore water is pumped into the river to compensate for extra draw from the river upstream of the filtration plant during the hot dry summer months (see the post from last November).  The effect of this on the river ecology is being monitored.

The millions of dollars spent on the recharge system would have been superfluous if the sensible decision had been made by the council for a reservoir dam which is still going to be needed because of population growth from the huge new subdivisions.

If you think the Church+Dougherty council in Kapiti was awful, the Auckland ‘supercity’ has been even worse.

But a concerted effort to get fiscally prudent councilors elected by the Auckland Ratepayers’ Alliance seems to have been successful:

‘The results are in: we did it!

‘The confirmed Council election results have now been released, and the efforts of the Ratepayers’ Alliance have altered the shape of the Council for the better.

‘A majority of Councillors have committed to fiscal prudence. Despite all the talk of the centre-right “Auckland Future” ticket failing (see the NZ Herald’s post-mortem here), your humble Ratepayers’ Alliance has ensured that the majority of councillors under the new Mayor have made a commitment to limit rate hikes and stand for fiscal prudence in our Super City!’

Full article

“We need a body like this in Kapiti,” you say, and we already have the makings of one in Coastal Ratepayers United.  This was originally set up in response to Dougherty’s absurd pronouncements on coastal erosion, but it wouldn’t require much for it to be transformed with a wider membership into a general watchdog to hold the KCDC to account : website

Salima Padamsey is the efficient and helpful CRU secretary.

This concrete base of the clock in Mahara Place is another public piece of the town which needs some cleaning  — someone with a strong water blaster could do it in an hour.  Why not see to it, WCB members?

And it’s free to stallholders, the info is to just show up at about 7:30 am and you’ll be allocated a space.

Fingers crossed for good weather…

Much more pleasurable than voting for politicians. 🙂  The Forest and Bird Protection Society has opened its webpage for your choice of NZ’s native bird of the year, the 12th year it has done so.  The webpage has information and photos of 53 of our native birds to choose from.  Some are often seen in Waikanae, often at the estuary, or in Nga Manu, others are very rarely seen.

You have till 30 October to make your vote.

Already Porirua is being festooned with White Ribbon month banners, and with November approaching, it might be apt to remember that last year the Church/Dougherty Council was told by White Ribbon campaign manager Rob McCann to drop the (self-proclaimed) title of ‘the first White Ribbon council in the world’. KCDC was asked to desist with the misuse of the name after Cr Jackie Elliott and myself had brought the actual – bullying and lying — character of that hypocritical council to the attention of Mr McCann. For my part, I showed how specifically Ross Church and Penny Gaylor had misused the White Ribbon name to support false allegations of attempted assault made by Cr Janet Holborow, and backed by Murray Bell, Gavin Welsh, Michael Scott, Eric Gregory, Dianne Ammundsen, and Dougherty.

The result was that Council, after unsuccessfully going into an abortive damage control and trying to ingratiate itself with WR directors, spat the dummy and did not participate in any WR Month events, including Ross Church’s embarrassing non-show at the WR bikers’ event at the community centre.

Only Crs Elliott and David Scott showed up, on their own initiative, and not as KCDC representatives. When I spoke with Guru several weeks later he was appalled and puzzled that nobody had shown up to the event in an official Council capacity.

Thankfully, some of those miscreant councillors have gone, although Gaylor now sits at the Wellington Regional Council in an immensely undeserved win against Nigel Wilson, and Michael Scott and Janet Holborow remain, as does Dougherty.

I would like to know what His Worship Gurunathan will be doing to make amends in regard to the prior Council’s disgraceful conduct re the WR Month and in regard to assuring that making false allegations and attempting to bolster them with the hypocritical misuse of the WR name is ‘not okay’? False allegations of this type made by these councillors and several staff are a travesty against genuine victims of abuse. The matter remains as an unresolved disgrace.

Dr K.R. Bolton

the White Ribbon website

We noticed this back in May and thought it showed a bit of innovative thinking that highway builders aren’t usually noted for. Particularly neat are those stepped plant beds with little friezes along the small concrete walls.  Elsewhere along a new section of this highway, other motifs were incorporated into higher walls, including some train themes (you can get from L.A. to Riverside on the Metrolink trains).