Month: May 2019

Never one to sit idle…

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Somehow I decided earlier this year that I wasn’t quite busy enough, so along with starting a new job, I put my hand up as a candidate for our local community board. It was officially announced in the local paper today.

So…why did I do it? and what does this mean? Let me explain.

Stephen and I purchased our home in Dallington in February 2011, the day after the earthquake that changed everything – so not the best of timing. Living in Dallington after the earthquakes was really hard. In the days and weeks afterward, people rallied. But as weeks turned into months and years it felt like nothing would change. After the red zone was announced, it was heartbreaking to watch our community being dismantled one home at a time. A breaking point for me was driving over the Dallington bridge one day and realising that the newly paved road no longer had driveway gaps for the houses that were slowly being removed.

It took me a some time to get my head above water, to look around and think about what I could do to help my community – it just seemed too big and overwhelming. Where to start? The issues seemed big, but the solutions might start with me and my neighbours – I wanted to follow the principle of “think global, act local”. So I got as local as I could, and joined the Dallington Residents Association. One of its objectives is to advocate for residents of Dallington, so the committee has put a lot of effort into understanding what our community’s needs are. In the two years since I’ve been Chair, we’ve run events, workshops, information sessions and drop in days – all to gather ideas from the community about what their big ideas and big issues are. It’s been a hugely rewarding role – I’ve met a lot of really great people and have a renewed love for the place I live.

I’ve also developed an appreciation for some of the big issues we face. Our people are feeling the loss of community assets – our schools and church, but we’ve also gained the beautiful asset of our red zone, and people have some big ideas about this. Annette, a member of the residents association committee lived in Dallington all her life before the earthquakes. Her grandmother grew up in Dallington, and so did her mother. Up until the clearances, Annette was living on the land passed down from her grandmother and mother. She was devastated to be forced to leave, and still comes back almost every day to tend the her former family garden. Last year, Annette and I applied to the land owner (LINZ) to take over this piece of land so that Annette can be recognised as the custodian of it. LINZ recently approved our Glenarm Gardens transitional project. It was a small thing that I did – submit an application and sign a contract, but it is huge for Annette – she’s been given back some of what she lost.

Something else that’s come up from listening to the community is that we don’t have a community meeting space. So we’ve joined with groups from Avondale and Burwood to form the Riverside Community Network and collectively we’ve been working on how we can get a community centre for our people. Working with people across the whole Burwood Ward has helped me better understand the needs of the wider East Christchurch. I love where I live and I want to see it thrive.

So that’s the why. Here’s the what…

Dallington sits within the Burwood Ward, and is represented by the Coastal-Burwood Community Board. The Board is made up of six elected members – two city Councillors (one each for Burwood and Coastal) and four community representatives (two each for Burwood and Coastal). The community board members are elected by the community to represent its interests, and to advocate for our community needs with the Christchurch City Council.

The Dallington Residents Association has worked closely with the elected members for Burwood to make sure they know about the things that matter to us. So I’ve been able to see up close how this system works, and how I can contribute to the decision-making that happens at the Board.

Here’s the thing. The current Burwood community board representative is not a local, and hasn’t been for a long time. I think that’s not good enough. It has been by walking, running, driving, shopping, living in my community that I have truly understood it. I’ve been through the same trials and tribulations as everyone around me, and I know how I can best be of service to them.

The election is in October. My job between now and then is to listen the needs of the Ward, and to introduce myself to them so that they understand why they would want to vote for me.

That bloody lake again

Bebe2 Comments

Last night I stayed up past midnight (very late for me!) watching the Governance and Administration Select Committee submissions from East Lake Trust and Regenerate Christchurch on the issue of the inclusion of a flat water facility (technical speak for a massive rowing lake) in the Otakaro-Avon River Corridor Regeneration Plan. You can watch that HERE.

The background to this hearing is long and convoluted, but the short version is that when Regenerate Christchurch was first established by Gerry Brownlee at the closure of CERA, East Lake Trust was encouraged to believe that a 2km lake would be a likely contender for inclusion in the Regeneration Plan. In the two years following, it became clear that this wasn’t going to happen, and they were not happy. The hearing is the outcome of the ongoing fight they’ve been having.

Here’s my take. I can understand the argument that some are making, which goes something like this:

The lake is good for east Christchurch – it provides a regeneration opportunity that we desperately need. It’s good for rowing. The community want it. There is only a moderate risk that it won’t be swimmable. It will only cost about $160 million dollars to build, and only take three years.

I don’t agree with any of this. I can see that there is a potential economic benefit to the lake, but I think the bad outweighs the good by a long way. If economics was the main driver for our decision making, then we should pave over Hagley Park, and close all our libraries. But from where I stand, it looks like the ecological and social benefits of NOT building a lake vastly outweigh the economic ones of having it there. I am not sure most people truly understand how big the proposed lake is, and the impact the lake will have on the people of East Christchurch. And not just my little suburb of Dallington. The proposed lake would close New Brighton Road, which is a main through-route from the Inner East to New Brighton. This would be hugely detrimental to communities that are already struggling with the loss of large parts of their suburb, and just beginning to adjust to having a green zone right through the middle of them. A gigantic lake is only going to exacerbate already existing issues of social isolation and feelings of being cut off from the rest of Christchurch.

Just to understand the scale of what is being proposed, here is my very crude attempt to fit the proposed 2.2km lake into Hagley Park – it’s a green space most people in Christchurch can bring to their minds eye.

The blue blob is HUGE! I get the impression that a lot of people in Christchurch think of the Red Zone as a vast empty space that they can do anything with, and forget that it’s surrounded by communities that need to live with whatever is built. Not to mention that the lake proposal would necessitate the removal of MORE housing in Dallington to accommodate it. If you lived in Merivale, how would you feel about this? It would be massively impactful, as will this proposed lake for the east.

Why has no one asked if there has been a social impact assessment to go with the ecological and economic ones? Why is social benefit not given the same weight as other benefits? I am skeptical of those that argue that the lake will be beneficial for the east – that’s what we were told when they closed our local high schools and moved them. It hasn’t worked out well for us – we now have NO schools in Dallington. It was a sneaky trick, and I suspect this would be too.

And don’t even get me started on the idea that a small group of rowing enthusiasts can waste many thousands of dollars of public money arguing about this, and casually note that the lake will “only” cost $160 million, give or take 10%. Putting aside the estimate of $200m+ from Regenerate Christchurch, do we really want to spend this much on ANOTHER sporting facility for our city. We have Metro sports, we already have a rowing lake, and now we need another one? Can we rebuild our lost social housing first? The Christchurch City Council has run out of money to replace the housing stock that was lost in the earthquake, much of it in east Christchurch. I would like us to focus on the basics before we build more monuments.

And finally, if you’ve made it this far through the rant, Garry Moore recently posted about this in his Tuesday Club – he sums up the issue quite well I think:

During the week I made a submission to the Christchurch City Council’s Annual Plan. I sat through Annual Plans and Long-Term Plans 15 times as a Councillor, and then as Mayor. I always enjoyed the exercise. It goes like this; the staff produce a budget which more or less is around what the Council table finds acceptable; then submissions are called for; then every person/group come to the table and ask for the earth, without suggesting what should be replaced to pay for their excessive demands; then the Council finds that the staff have discovered additional costs which were not known when the budget was proposed; then prima donna Councillors play to whoever they think would be impressed with their excellent understanding of finances, adding items to the budget and standing strong that they would not support any rates increases which are above the rate of inflation; then the horse trading begins, and somehow the rates increase is around what was announced in the first place.
As I sat at the end of the table on Friday I wondered if we have the wrong process, and that the exercise is a complete waste of time. The Council politely listens to all sorts of decent people who care about the City and the groups they work with, and for. People are not challenged to see where their demands fit into the grand scheme of things. They are not asked to consider that there might be other groups with a better call on the resources of the City. Instead they present in good faith what they expect, and then get disappointed when nothing arrives in the mail confirming that they have got everything they demand.
I’ll give an example. One group before me was the East Lakes Trust. This group want us to fund a lake for them to enjoy rowing, at our expense. I have heard the most preposterous claims from these guys. “It will enable schools like Aranui to participate in rowing” etc.  Yeh right. Look who these low decile schools are up against. Christ College, St Andrews, Villa Maria, St Bedes. All schools with bottomless pits of money. I listened, when they presented their case to the Tuesday Club, to one of their prominent promoters (where are these guys when a group want to promote sporting facilities at Aranui, or Hornby?) advocating that the course could be built “within existing Council resources”. I rang up a Council engineer I trusted, and asked him was this possible. His response was not polite but he suggested that some of the major infrastructure of the City passes through the area where this lot propose us to construct their play pool. The cost of shifting it would be eye watering. It took one phone call to find a major hole in the East Lake Trust’s argument. Regenerate Christchurch did an excellent job in sinking this proposal. Despite this, here were these guys in front of the elected reps last Friday pleading for more public welfare for their expensive sport which already has two world class rowing courses in the South Island.
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