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Post by fish on Sept 8, 2024 11:39:54 GMT 12
Not quite free but $20 at Pukekohe. It's about $35 at a good place in Whangaparaoa, or I can do it at home. Although getting the missus into a good enough mood to want to give me a buzz cut normally costs more than just going to the barber (and it is a lot quicker) I was just bemused as to why the Council is getting involved in personal grooming. I assume it is something to do with homeless people, which is a worthy cause, but the big question around that is who's responsibility is it? Rate payers? There is a wide array of charities and NGO's in that space, along with the billions we spend via MSD, via central govt. Perhaps the highly paid brains at the Council think if they give all the homeless people haircuts, they wont look homeless and we will all think there is less of a homeless problem in our city? |
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Post by ComfortZone on Sept 24, 2024 14:28:56 GMT 12
from KB www.kiwiblog.co.nz/2024/09/remember_these_when_the_wellington_city_council_claims_it_had_no_choice_but_to_increase_rates_20.htmlDefenders of the massive 20% rates increase in Wellington would have you believe this has nothing to do with decisions made by Councillors, but it was instead just due to the need to spend more on water infrastructure etc.
So the next time you hear someone claim this, recall the following decisions made by WCC:
$593 million on social housing
$400 million for a sludge minimisation facility at Moa Point
$330 million on rebuilding the town hall so we have another music venue
$240 million on Civic Square
$236 million on food recycling
$189 million on Te Matapihi library
$180 million on the Takina convention centre
$160 million on cycleways
$139 million on removing cars and redeveloping the Golden Mile
$55 million to “upgrade” Thorndon Quay
$42 million on renovating St James Theatre
$32 million to Reading Cinemas (attempted but failed)
$13 million on a carpark building
This is why rates are going up 20%. That’s well over $2 billion in non-core expenditure which comes to over $25,000 per household.
Wellingtonians keep electing Green/Labour dominated councils, they deserve everything they get.
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Post by jim on Sept 24, 2024 15:06:49 GMT 12
we've just endured a 17% increase in the whakatane district - there was a public meeting (could have been a brawl) which quite a few councillors avoided. the bottom line of the meeting is that the mayor and 2? other councillors voted for expenditure only on must-haves but were out numbered by the wokesters and panderers
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Post by fish on Sept 24, 2024 15:30:42 GMT 12
we've just endured a 17% increase in the whakatane district - there was a public meeting (could have been a brawl) which quite a few councillors avoided. the bottom line of the meeting is that the mayor and 2? other councillors voted for expenditure only on must-haves but were out numbered by the wokesters and panderers There is a fundamental problem, nationwide, with the focus and performance of Councils. I don't know what the solution is just yet. There was once a poner time when communities got together and formed Councils to provide core services such as rubbish collection, water, wastewater, drainage and roading. That soon expanded to cover parks and recreational areas. The current problem is an utter lack of focus on the core role. The other issue is the inability to acknowledge the financial ability of the community to be able to afford everything. That includes affording the maintenance or operating cost of existing items. |
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Post by muzled on Sept 24, 2024 18:04:22 GMT 12
What I'm loving about the rates rises, is all the bitchin'/moan'n lefties that nearly required triple bypass surgery at the thought of Wayne Brown becoming mayor, have now had to drink a big hot cup of stfu with his 6%? rise.
He did a grab via wateridon'tcare but that's just smart politics imo.
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Post by DuckMaster on Sept 24, 2024 18:19:53 GMT 12
Do we even need local givernment? In a country our size I would think that everything could be run out of central.
I feel that local council is a hang over from when we communicated with snail mail.
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Post by eri on Sept 24, 2024 19:41:09 GMT 12
with the rise of neoliberalism in the 90s many lefties gave up on national gov. introducing their policies and so moved into local gov. to change their 'core objectives'one cunning trick has been to label 'social housing' and 'the arts' as 'social infrastructure' ' and then divert rates traditional spent on 'infrastructure' to the new sub-category of 'social infrastructure' this was always going to leave 'core infrastructure' under-funded they knew this and didn't care their social mission wasn't being picked up to the degree they wanted by centre-right central gov. so they got it done through making local gov. centre-left massive rates rises were always going to be the eventual result............as we see in wellington but as they'd only be charged to home-owners and not renters they saw it as necessary 'wealth redistribution'the only solution is for rate-payers to take local gov. elections seriously and start voting in councils committed to fiscally responsibility auckland has C&R 'citizens and rate-payers' group for those wanting fiscal responsibility wellington has tons of civil servants wanting wellington to provide more 'services' en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Communities_and_Residents |
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Post by muzled on Sept 24, 2024 19:52:58 GMT 12
Do we even need local givernment? In a country our size I would think that everything could be run out of central. I feel that local council is a hang over from when we communicated with snail mail. 'We will continue to be your single source of truth' Sound familiar? I think that line put a lot of people off central control for a good few generations. If local councils stuck to their knitting and removed the ego's involved with various vanity projects I think they've got a lot of advantages over a bunch of fiefdom building bureaucrats in Wellington. |
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Post by ComfortZone on Oct 7, 2024 7:12:08 GMT 12
Peter Williams on the farce that is the Hastings mayor appointing members of the local youth council to various council committees. As he says this is the latest in the disturbing trend of councils appointing unelected people to committees with full voting rights:
excerpt All of which is a long winded preamble to the decision by the Hastings District Council to appoint the seventeen members of the Hastings Youth Council to District Council committees and give them the right to vote on those committees.
As with Select Committees at parliament, much of the real decision making at local council level is made at the committee level. The decision of the committees is often brought back to the full council for final approval, for the rubber stamp if you like.
Therefore the Hastings District Council has given 17 unelected young people aged from 15 to 21 the ability to vote on council decisions. Some of them are not even old enough to vote in the actual elections for district councillors!
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Post by ComfortZone on Oct 24, 2024 13:51:01 GMT 12
from the Ratepayers Org, citing the Horrid AT's Safe Speed Programme (which has seen blanket speed reductions across our roads) has received ✨glowing✨ reviews by consultancy, Abley, which Auckland Transport has used to help justify its policy.
It turns out the Abley staffer Lewis Martin preparing the reviews had not just previously worked for Auckland Transport – but actually developed the very same programme he was now tasked to review!
I cannot speak to the veracity of the report – although colleagues have told me it was "statistically cooked". But what I can say is that I know a conflict of interest when I see one. Either AT (and Abley) are dim, or they know exactly what they were doing. Four successive independent reviews of Auckland Transport’s contentious speed-reduction programme were produced by an engineer who previously worked at AT developing the programme — a situation one critic called “marking your own homework”.
Transport engineer Lewis Martin worked on Auckland Transport’s (AT) Road Safety Team for three years, starting in..(rest behind their pay wall)
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Post by ComfortZone on Nov 4, 2024 8:19:35 GMT 12
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Post by fish on Nov 4, 2024 8:43:03 GMT 12
Wouldn't it be good if at each election, instead of twattling on about inclusion and diversity or what not, each Mayor and Councillor published the change in debt and council head count under their watch?
I'm sure the information is available buried in some boring report somewhere, but if it was actually given profile, perhaps by the media at each election, we'd probably get a much better idea of what was going on and who to vote for.
Occasionally we get the headlines on how much your rates are going up, but we never, ever get any underlying detail as to financial stability of the Council.
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Post by ComfortZone on Nov 11, 2024 7:19:35 GMT 12
never a problem to splash ratepayers money around www.newstalkzb.co.nz/news/national/auckland-council-agency-spent-737k-on-campaign-to-boost-positivity-about-city/opens Auckland Council’s cultural and economic agency, Tātaki Auckland Unlimited, has defended the cost of a campaign aimed at getting people to feel more positive about the city.
Figures obtained by RNZ under the Official Information Act showed Tātaki spent a total of $737,208.58 to address what it said was a decline in perceptions of Auckland among locals and the rest of the country.
The ‘Happy Guide’ campaign followed ‘Eerik’, a ‘Finnish tourist’ enjoying activities around the city, including a dip at Mission Bay, a beer at The Occidental in the CBD, and a kebab on Dominion Road. and Of the campaign’s costs, $300,000 was funded by Auckland Council’s city centre targeted rate, a special rate paid by commercial and residential property owners within the city centre. The remainder was funded from Tātaki’s operating budgets.
Auckland Mayor Wayne Brown has previously criticised the campaign.
The mayor told RNZ it was a waste of money.
“I am very dubious about the merits of this particular campaign,” he said.
“Spending over $730,000 of ratepayers’ money on some bloke from Finland having a sauna and eating a kebab while telling us Auckland makes him happy doesn’t sound like value to me.”
He criticised Tātaki’s evaluation of the campaign as a success.
“When you boil it all down, the survey only sampled 163 people who actually saw the campaign.
“Even taking Tātaki’s figures at face value, only 30% of people surveyed saw the campaign and only 48% of them felt better about Auckland. Therefore, it only worked on around 14% of people.”
Where is the oversight on these useless bludgers
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Post by sloopjohnb on Nov 11, 2024 7:26:49 GMT 12
Not only that there are probably 10 people on $200k, thinking of these hair brain ideas.
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Post by ComfortZone on Nov 11, 2024 7:38:27 GMT 12
Not only that there are probably 10 people on $200k, thinking of these hair brain ideas. probably a whole lot more than that when you read
ps, a comment from KB Instead of trying to convince me that the city is good why not make the city actually good?
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