A few readers have raised the question: If the Tauranga Art Gallery is a done deal and therefore history, why bother blogging on about it?

Because, somehow or other, I and quite few other bill-paying ratepayers I know missed the how, why and when part. None of them was aware that their elected representatives had, way back in 2004, approved the City Hall-driven idea of council taking over ultimate control of the gallery's reconstruction project.

That's my beef. Councillors never gave us (rate-bill-paying ratepayers) the opportunity to say whether we wanted anything to do with bailing out the failed art gallery fund-raising effort. It wasn't as if the city couldn't have survived without it. As it is, that $1,000,000 a year to keep it going is likely to come back and haunt us when the real pain of the coming recession hits us next year.

And what on earth were the councillors of the day doing while all this was going on under their drooping eyelids? Sure, some of them objected strongly to the grant and on-going cost, but not one of them said a dicky bird about how we would feel about stumping up for Grand-Design building.

And let's not forget that rate-bill-paying-ratepayers were the single biggest contributors to the project when everyone thought it was a community-driven charitable trust undertaking - $2 million dollars worth. Collectively, councillors doled it out, so, considering it ended up as a council project, don't you think they should have taken a lot more interest in how City Hall spent our money?

Incredibly, according to the Bay of Plenty Times, Cr David Stewart's contribution during the debate on the granting of close on a million dollars a year operational funding went something like this: "After careful questioning, Cr David Stewart was persuaded the gallery would not become a financial drain." Apparently a million dollars a year forcibly extract from the pockets of ratepayers is in Cr Stewart's view, not a financial drain.

Here's how is happened: In the year 2000, locals learned via press reports that the trust planned a modest "refurbishment" of the recently purchased BNZ building (cost, $1.7million) on the corner of Wharf and Willow streets. Further, in late May of that same year we learned the trust received a grant of $1,000,000 from the Tauranga Community Trust. The trust's chairman at the time said that this would cover the operational costs for at least three years. A modest $300,000 or so a year.

Back then most of us would have been aware that before the turn of the century a group of enthusiastic art lovers formed the Tauranga Civic Art Gallery Trust. Their overly ambitious idea was to raise $11 million or so - the kind of money never before raised for an art gallery by a city the size of Tauranga.

But, all credit to them, they did bring in pledges amounting to more than $5 million. And this in the first 12 to 18 months of setting up their trust. A remarkable performance by any standards. But the fact is, once expected government funding dried up, they were never going to achieve their goal of building and running an Art Gallery on their own.

Demolition and 'renovation' of the old BNZ building on the prime-site corner of Willow and Wharf streets began on February 2, 2006, years after council had accepted the idea of taking over. In other words, there was plenty of time for the public to comment on whether they wanted a Grand-Design Art Palace, a modest refurbishment or ditch the whole expensive idea altogether.

All we got was a public notice published in the Bay of Plenty Times on Saturday 18 and Wednesday 22 of December 2005. You may well have missed it. After all, it was Christmas week and most of us have other things on our mind at that time of the year.

Further, if you had read it, you probably would have shrugged and moved on. It read: "Tauranga City Council has decided to adopt a recommendation to establish a Council Controlled Organisation to deliver its Public Art Gallery services." How many would have got past that point?

The notice continued: "The principal role of the CCO will be to provide and operate a Public Art Gallery in Tauranga City to serve the Western Bay of Plenty."

The notice then went on to explain that submission forms and a summary of information would be available at various points and that the period for receiving submissions was between December 20 2005 and February 18 2006.

That ". . . provide and operate . . ." is the one and only reference I have been able to find in council documentation about building an art gallery. No wonder councillors let it slide through without opposition. I suspect they didn't know about the real impact of the CCO either!

The only hope homeowner ratepayers have of a brake being put on council spending is for them to stay awake to the necessity of reining in a definitely expansionist council bureaucracy intend on Tauranga becoming the country's leading cultural and leisure activity city full of ratepayer funded status symbol City Hall Iconic Towers.

Meanwhile, back at the coalface, covering open stormwater drains and providing footpaths in central city streets can wait another century or so.