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May 15, 2012

Take heed, Hawke’s Bay Councillors! It could be contagious.

This particular ‘Dump Council’ campaign is far off in Hamilton. There, it appears some folks have simply had enough. Billboards are going up (you might recall the consternation one billboard created on St Aubyn’s street during the 2010 local body elections!). And check out their ‘Concerned Citizen’ website. This Hamilton protesting makes A Better Hawke’s Bay look like a bunch of polite schoolgirls.

But the virus could be coming to a Council near you!

While dissidents in Hamilton are a bit further along, rumblings are already sounding in Hawke’s Bay (currently about 3.6 on the Richter scale). Especially in Napier precincts, where some big names are contemplating political futures.

Three engines of protest are warming up here in Hawke’s Bay …

1. Folks fed up with the myopia of certain Councils on the need for reorganisation.

2. Folks who think current Councillors are absolutely clueless regarding ratepayers’ intense distress over ‘business as usual’ spending, with commensurate rate increases, in the looming long term plans.

3. Folks who fear the Hawke’s Bay environment will be shafted by the Regional Council’s dam-building and other water policies.

Whether one agrees with all, some or none of these critiques, the political reality is that a ‘perfect storm’ of protest is a-building.

At present, these three constituencies barely overlap and have yet to find each other. However, as the saying goes, ‘politics makes strange bedfellows’, and they do agree on one key starting point … they don’t like many of the incumbents.

Stay tuned!

Tom Belford

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May 14, 2012

I received an email this morning from a BayBuzz reader, which included this:

“I enjoyed walking along Karamu Stream in Havelock North walkway last week and the restored stream banks until I came to opposite Anderson Park and saw 12 cattle beasts in an unconstrained paddock beside the stream. No fencing even electric. They had worn down the bank and were obviously crushing it to get to water. A shame.

Regional Council said it was being taken up at a higher level. So much for wet bus tickets.”

As I replied to him …

One might ask: If the HBRC can’t keep cows out of the Karamu Stream in the middle of Havelock North, how will they ensure that ‘best practices and environmental protections are enforced over 25-30,000 hectares of ‘intensified farming’ after they’ve built a dam in CHB?

Tom Belford

P.S. Over 75 readers have endorsed my proposal that the Regional and Hastings Councils, in their respective LTPs, provide live web streaming and online archiving of full Council and major committee meetings. Let me know by Tuesday if you support (see my post explaining) and I’ll add you to my LTP submission.

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May 10, 2012

Our councils have recruited Peter Winder, former chief executive of the Auckland Regional Council and chief executive of Local Government New Zealand, to conduct our region’s ‘performance’ study.

Without question, Winder is an experienced local government practitioner.

He also, as a consultant to the HB Regional Council, completed a recent examination of ‘shared service’ opportunities for HBRC. That study focused on potential collaboration between HBRC and other regional councils, reflecting HBRC’s predisposition at the time the work was commissioned to deflect focus from structural reorganisation within Hawke’s Bay.

Now Winder comes to town wearing the ‘regional performance study’ hat, with terms of reference whose vagueness leave to the imagination how seriously he will look into local body reorganisation.

So the first question we should ask when Mr Winder arrives on the scene is this: Do you see your brief as including a robust examination of the capacity of HB’s current governance structure to meet the region’s future challenges?

It’s a simple question, but one our elected ‘leaders’ have managed to dance around for months.

Mr Winder shouldn’t earn a dime until he is crystal clear with the region’s ratepayers on this point. After all, we’re paying his fee.

And speaking of who is paying his fee, a second question arises: How does Mr Winder plan to include public consultation in his inquiry? Extensively, we hope and should expect. But again, the terms of reference sidestep this issue, with our council leaders merely asking for his advice on this matter.

So, just two simple questions for Mr Winder. How he answers them will determine the ultimate value and credibility of his undertaking.

Tom Belford

P.S. Looking at my notes from Mr Winder’s presentation on March 14 to HBRC, I’m struck by two comments he made:

First, in response to a Councillor inquiry, he characterised shared services initiatives in HB to date as “quite limited”.

Later he observed: “To make any progress, you need higher level meeting of the minds of Councils to willingly and constructively explore the opportunities.” Uh, oh!

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May 8, 2012

I need your help!

In my Annual Plan submissions last year to the Hastings, Napier and Regional Councils, I proposed that these Councils fund live web streaming and online archiving of their full Council and major committee meetings.

This year, both the Hastings and Regional Councils are seeking public comments on this proposal in their Long Term Plans (LPTs). Each has investigated such service, establishing that the costs are minimal – $45k to install and $25k per year to operate for HDC, and $26k to install and $38k per year to operate for HBRC. A tiny, tiny fraction of their public propaganda outreach budgets.

As I said a year ago, I expected some Councillors, even some BayBuzz readers, to react … what are you, nuts?!

But I think the case is clear:

1. In terms of public information and civic education, easy and convenient access to Council proceedings should be the paramount consideration … far more citizens can participate in local government.
2. In terms of accountability of elected officials to their constituency… sunlight is the best disinfectant.

Three councils in NZ are already webcasting and archiving their proceedings for ‘on-demand’ online viewing – Taupo District Council,  New Plymouth District Council and Hamilton City Council (and the Auckland Council has put out tenders for the service), in each case significantly increasing public knowledge of Council deliberations.

BayBuzz has received comments from each of the mayors whose Councils are webcast. Here’s what they say:

Mayor Rick Cooper, Taupo – “From my own personal point of view I believe web cam is one of the single most effective tools we now have in our tool box. It records meetings accurately; it helps keep councillor behaviour to an acceptable level; it also helps people who can’t or don’t want to come to meetings see how a decision was reached. Our system archives meetings and if you have a concern about a particular agenda item you can retrieve that item and watch it at your leisure. We seem to fluctuate around 200 people watching live time.”

Mayor Harry Duynhoven, New Plymouth – “We webcast our main council meetings and the Policy Cttee and Monitoring Cttee, excepting obviously the public excluded sections. There has been a modest cost to set up the equipment, but the running cost is minimal. We use internal staff to run the video system and only a small amount of maintenance is needed. To date I think we are the only council doing this and providing the ability to retrieve sections of all meetings on line. This is a very useful feature.” He adds that numbers viewing have “steadily grown”.

Mayor Julie Hardaker, Hamilton – “Hamilton City Council has been live streaming and (archiving) on-demand council meetings since the middle of last year. Our council regarded this as another way of ensuring transparency and also to encourage the public to find out more about what their council is doing. Our council considered various options for this and one of the important features was clarity of image and voice. Feedback from the public has been very positive.”

I’m in the process of tracking down more specific viewing numbers for each Council, but in the case of Lake Taupo, live streaming has ranged from a dozen or so viewers per meeting up to 275. Archived ‘on-demand’ segments are often watched by several hundred unique viewers (972 in the highest instance).

As against that, often I and just one or two others are the only public witnesses to what happens at Council meetings. It’s not a pretty sight! Often Councillors are stunningly uninformed, mired in minutia instead of addressing the big picture, and/or surprisingly petty and parochial. Unfortunately, Councillors have gotten accustomed to operating in this anonymous, unaccountable environment. And the level of deliberation shows.

If you think I’m being harsh, attend yourself. Or, hopefully in the future, watch them online.

One can at least hope that bringing more public witnessing to Councillors’ deliberations might raise the level of discourse. Wouldn’t you try to clean up your act if you knew several dozen or hundred ratepayers might be watching?

Councillors would be less likely to say things they know to be downright untrue or misleading, which I’ve seen too often. They might do more homework. They might not be as likely to dwell on procedure as opposed to substance. They might not be led by the nose by staff as often. They might not spend hours re-arranging parking spaces. They might think twice about dissing (or mis-representing) their neighboring Councils and Councillors.

Indeed, a key benefit of webcasting and archiving meetings might be Councillors and staffs across the region monitoring each other!

Most importantly, you, in your own home and at your own convenience (since all council meetings are during work hours), could watch how your elected officials dealt with fracking, moving your community hall, and spending your ratepayer dollars on really big ticket projects like international hockey fields and sewage treatment plants.

Maybe all this improvement is too much to expect. But I say, let’s give it a try. It’s surely not a budget-buster — in fact, easily absorbed within current public communications budgets.

Nevertheless, the Hastings Council staff has placed the proposal ‘below the line’ in its draft LTP, meaning we need to lobby Councillors to fund the service.

And in the Regional Council, sentiment was mixed when Councillors put the proposal in the draft LTP … some arguing no one would be interested in watching.

So, it’s important that you show your support … right away! Here are the ways you can do that …

1. Make your own submission on webcasting to HBRC. You have only until May 16 … here’s the form.
   Or lobby for webcasting by sending an email to: chairman@hbrc.govt.nz
2. For Hastings, send an email to Mayor Yule at this address: lawrence.yule@hdc.govt.nz
   Formal submissions on the Hastings LPT are closed, but you can still lobby.
3. Or simply flick me a response to this post: tom@baybuzz.co.nz
   I’ll be verbally presenting to both Councils, and I’ll be happy to note your endorsement of webcasting.

Please support this important measure for transparency and accountability.

Tom Belford

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May 6, 2012

Has the amalgamation issue gone mainstream?

Judge for yourself. Here’s the latest Tui billboard at Pandora Pond in Napier.

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May 2, 2012

The Environment Court this week is at the last stage of hearing appeals to the Horizons Regional Council One Plan, which proposes a comprehensive scheme for dealing with all of that region’s natural resources, including inter-related land management, water quality and biodiversity issues. The Horizons Council oversees much of the lower North Island, about 8% of New Zealand’s land, including the infamously polluted Manawatu River.

The One Plan is being appealed from all directions — Federated Farmers, Horticulture New Zealand, Fish & Game and the Department of Conservation, among others. 308 out of 441 appeals against the Plan were settled by mediation, so the Court is now focused on the tough nuts, with nutrient management at the top of the list.

At the core of the dispute is whether and how to regulate what farmers do on their land, insofar as those activities impact water quality. As one agribiz consultant is quoted in Farmers Weekly (30 April 2012), the Court’s ruling will have “huge impacts” on how people farm and grow in the region … “What comes out of the Court will set huge precedence for the rest of the country.”

Moreover, this will be perhaps the most significant Environment Court decision to come forth since the new National Policy Statement on Freshwater Quality was issued last year. The NPS ups the ante in terms of requiring more proactive water quality management by regional councils, and requires the regulation of “non-point discharges” — that is, farm run-off.

With its water storage scheme, a looming CHB sewage discharge consent, and Regional Plan changes about to set water quality standards and water allocation rules, the Hawke’s Bay Regional Council is grappling with the same set of issues as the One Plan.

Heaps of people and interest groups nervously awaiting the Environment Court outcome.

Tom Belford

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April 30, 2012

The Central Hawke’s Bay District Council is stumbling its way toward a decision on how to deal with its wastewater dumping into the Tukituki.

Last week, Friends of the Tukituki (FOT) offended CHBDC by indicating in their LPT submission that they would sue the Council if it failed to meet new tougher pollution standards by late 2014. Both the tougher standards and the deadline were set several years ago by the Environment Court.

FOT’s warning is understandable in light of CHBDC’s slow motion approach to meeting the approaching deadline. And also understandable given historical doubts about the Regional Council’s resolve to force compliance.

But there was another submission on the matter which is hugely important … potentially.

It was the Regional Council’s submission, which warned (download in full here):

“The existing consents authorising the Waipukurau and Waipawa discharges to water require a significant upgrade of level of treatment, which is to be fully in place and operational no later than 30 September 2014. The existing consents set a range of water quality standards that any discharges to water must meet after the upgrade is in place, and these were confirmed by the Environment Court in 2006. That has allowed you a period of eight years to determine which method of treatment you wish to install and then construct it.

It is the Hawke’s Bay Regional Council’s continued expectation, and that of the wider community, that by 30 September 2014 the Central Hawke’s Bay District Council will have constructed and commissioned a treatment upgrade that achieves the water quality standards set out in the existing consent. Depending on the method of wastewater treatment your Council chooses alternative resource consents may need to be sought from this Council, but it is important that you are made aware that the water quality standards imposed on any new consent will be as stringent, if not more so, than those on the existing resource consents.” (Ed: emphasis  added)

In this commendable submission, the HBRC has made its strongest statement to date regarding the quality standards that must be met. This is a statement that BayBuzz is certainly gratified to see. And we — and no doubt Friends of the Tukituki — will hold the HBRC’s feet to the fire on this.

Not only is meeting the standards the necessary thing for CHBDC to do simply to rectify its own pollution situation, their compliance (or not) is part of the bigger picture of managing and reducing the overall pollution load in the entire Tukituki catchment.

As the HBRC submission went on to say:

“The National Policy Statement for Freshwater Management (NPS) was issued by the Minister for the Environment in May 2011 and the planned change to the Regional Resource Management Plan relating to the Tukituki River will have to meet the freshwater objectives set out in the NPS. Noncompliance in water quality runs the risk of compromising other initiatives underway that are focused on better management of the Tukituki catchment in its entirety.”

In other words, HBRC has bigger fish to fry. If it wants to build a water storage scheme in the upper catchment — one that will bring intensified farming and associated nutrient run-off — it must be able to protect the entire catchment. That requires less pollution from CHB.

Demonstrating that it will in fact be rigorous in monitoring and enforcing CHBDC’s compliance with more stringent water quality standards is one of the most important boxes HBRC will need to tick if it wants environmentalists to support its grander ambitions for the catchment.

The submission indicates the right intention. But the deeds must follow.

Tom Belford

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