Talking to communities

One of the surprise finds when I was sent down to Gisborne to fix their hospital was to discover that they have a single District Council down there that operates without Regional Council or Community Boards. The result is a district wide focus and signs of prosperity are everywhere from the wonderful main street upgrades to the steady spread of prosperous businesses and opportunities for young locals.
Nevertheless while it may be a good goal to have a single unitary authority up here, the fact remains that we don’t and hence our district council needs to make better use of its community boards and it needs to have a much clearer and more workable arrangement with the regional council.

If we are to have community boards we may as well use them as much as possible and that means giving them tasks that are meaningful and useful. There are plenty such tasks, including managing the local streets, rubbish collections, public toilets, pothole repairs, footpath extensions and minor local works such as clearing stormwater drains that just never seem to get done by a centrally managed bureaucracy.

In addition there is much of the consultation burden that can be handled by community boards in a manner better suited to the task than by central planners. Good examples are relatively small building improvements that may have some minor intrusion across a street boundary, such as a commercial canopy that may turn out to have been occupying public space for years without a problem, but once a planner gets their teeth into it the simple solution of a boundary adjustment gets biffed out.

Other subjects better handled at community board level include fluoridation, which may or may not be a popular choice in various parts of the district. We do not have a district wide water supply by council. Many residents are on tank supply and many, like me are supplied by private water companies. Community boards could get the majority view from each council supplied water network and we could have some areas with fluoride and some without, depending on what the majority of local ratepayers want.

With regards to the Regional Council, all ratepayers should be made aware of which organization is responsible for what. If stormwater in the roads is to be a district responsibility and within rivers is to be Regional then it should be clear as to where the change in responsibility occurs. Into this mix Transit needs also to be clear and locally represented. If governments are to generously supply all these busy body groups they should at least be made to have offices up here so ratepayers can meet with all bodies at one time to sort out what we want.

Simple eh!