Posts Tagged ‘Porirua’

Council buys up beachfront properties while cutting back on services, confusing ‘nice to have’ with essential

It’s hard to make sense of this: the Porirua City Council pays $1.125 million for two prime beachfront properties in Plimmerton while hitting households with one of the heftiest rate rises around, after supposedly making some “tough decisions”.

Even if the council  had a quiet ‘mill burning a hole in its pockets, it has chosen to invest in one of the wealthiest suburbs in its gaff instead of starting or reviving projects in poorer parts of the city.

Among the tough decisions it has made are a deferral of a new roof on the Cannon’s Creek swimming pool, delaying work on the Titahi Bay seawall, slowing an  upgrade of  council-owned flats and halting the city’s Housing New Zealand’s community renewal programme.

So if you ignore our financially straitened times, shrug off  the mismatch between the council’s walk and the talk, forget about fairness, squint a bit and turn your head on one side, it might look justifiable. But only just.

Basically while households, businesses and central government agencies have had to cut their  cloth to fit, to stick to essentials, the local council has splashed out on a nice to have.

To make the situation worse for Porirua households, their cloth is about to get that bit smaller thanks to the council’s planned 5.8% hike in rates.

What would help to get your head around whether this purchase was a good thing or not would be for the council to be a bit more upfront about what it plans to do with the land. I suspect it doesn’t know exactly. They just had to have it.

Based on local newspaper reports (there’s nothing on this on the council website), the council bought the land because “it’s an investment in public access and open space”. Whether it becomes a car park or a park is yet to be decided. Mayor Nick Leggett has indicated any decision is some way off.

Leggett argues the land is “essential” – an investment in the future and that the council wouldn’t be thanked later if it had let this opportunity slip by.

Essential, hardly; an investment, ummm I can think of better ones; thanked later, maybe. At the moment the purchase just looks plain ugly, not even a “nice to have”.

Possibly I’m missing some information here because, according to local papers, the council decision was made behind closed doors, was the subject of  a short debate and resulted in a unanimous decision.

Update 11/5: Surprised by lack of public concern about this. So far, just one letter to editor of local paper that was more concerned about an alleged conflict of interest. The issue did make the front page of the same paper. Mayor Leggett has added a third justfication for the Plimmerton purchase – the council was guarding against inappropriate development. So we can now expect the council to buy every property that comes up for sale on the Plimmerton beachfront.

[Declaration of interest – I’m a member of the Paremata Residents Association. This post does not reflect any official association position.  It’s also not an attack on Porirua’s relatively high rates. The BigCake household moved to Porirua knowing rates were high.  But like many Porirua residents we're not happy with our already high rates rising faster than the rest of the country's.]