Brian Anderson The Western Front www.sunlive.co.nz

This headline in papers on the weekend was music to my ears.

For too long council vision has concentrated on Omokoroa and Matakana and planning for the residents of the future. They have put the current residents on the back burner, with token consultation to keep us quiet. I read on and my little moment of joy collapsed when I found that it was the Auckland Council that was offering the invitation and not Western Bay.
It was still encouraging to hear news of a council communicating and trying to meet the needs of its residents. I have been waiting for a discussion on a vision for the overall development of the Bay for a number of years, but the district plan actually states there will be no overall planning until they have sorted out Omokoroa. We seem to have been left in limbo in the Bay, while the new Auckland super council seems to be alive and kicking and ready to involve the whole community. I then read the fine print.

Auckland Council has placed a copy of their 1500 page plan in every library for a million people to study, share, discuss, analyse and then prepare submissions on Auckland's future in one month.
If this is the new wave of community involvement we can expect in a super city we don't want it. Then I read in our local papers that Mr Cronin of regional council was thankful that we have SmartGrowth to get us out of the recession. I couldn't believe it. Many people know that SmartGrowth has taken over council planning and is directly responsible for the mess we are in now. Was Mr Cronin out of his mind?

I went back to early SmartGrowth documents for any clue to Mr Cronin's optimism and discovered there was a different emphasis in SmartGrowth in 2002. It said, ‘Our growth has been based on migration, but what is not understood is that it is based on NET migration, lifestyle attracting people to the Bay balanced against people leaving because of poor job opportunities. For years there has been an in/out ratio of 2 to 1. If migration patterns in the future do not continue to produce the sort of migration gains the Western Bay has experienced over recent years, growth will diverge downwards from the projections, resulting in the Western Bay losing ground in terms of relative economic position nationally.'

SmartGrowth is okay. Where it has gone wrong has been when the adrenaline rush of growth has not been balanced by giving enough attention to looking after the lifestyle of people in the Bay. We have been bringing people in, but not keeping them. We are ‘diverging downwards'.

The SmartGrowth mechanism could be ideal for helping councils work together on recovery from a recession, but to continue the current policy of gambling on future non-existent growth would be totally irresponsible. We have to consolidate our areas of expansion and find ways to preserve and enhance the main economic driver for the Bay, the enviable lifestyle of the current residents. The councils will need to learn new ways of communicating with people. They may not have to hand over vision to ratepayers, but they sure will have to find new ways of communicating.