Cr Bill Faulkner Faulkners Corner www.sunlive.co.nz

Elected members met individually with new CEO Garry Poole during his first week at council.

It was an ice breaker meeting where we could find out a little about each other and the elected member can give a steer of their aims, objectives, hopes and aspirations. Imagine being Garry – trying to make heads or tails about 11 very different people's views on how your city should be run and coming to a consensus conclusion. As Garry is still with us it can't have been too bad.

The future is looking good with Garry at the helm. He hit the ground running – has already made some hefty decisions within the organisation and will be announcing his management team this week – probably before you read this as The Weekend Sun deadline has been moved ahead because of Anzac Day. The city hall organisation has been bereft of hard decisions for some time now and Garry's arrival has been a breath of fresh air in my opinion.

Hard decisions
Some more hard decisions will have to be taken by elected members in the wake of this last weekend's floods – pun intended. In my book it is untenable to have on-going flooding of property, especially people's homes. I attended a flooding, for the third time in 24 hours at Matua on Sunday night. It is devastating seeing people mopping and pushing floodwaters out their doors. In my view its poor council infrastructure, in this case it seems the storm water drain runs uphill. When there is torrential rain in a short time it backs up and runs back to the lowest point and explodes like a geyser flooding nearby homes in about three minutes. It's not the current staff's fault. They are doing a good job with the resources they have but there's not enough resource in light of the changing weather patterns which produce flash flooding. After the 2005 floods, council allocated some $80 million during 10 years to address the issue. Projects that have been done to date, work well. Otumoetai Golf Course, which is also a flood plain, was drained quickly this weekend thanks to the remedial action done.

Much more flood remedial work needs to be done in a much shorter time span which means more money.
Clearly ratepayers are up against it financially so the option is to once again have a hard look at spending priorities. It's a tough call but council simply can't have ratepayers homes flooded on an on-going basis because of poor historic infrastructure decisions. Just as well we never embarked on projects like the waterfront museum and to those who said that council should 'nourish the mind as well as the body”, and other socialistic nonsense, I say go and look at devastated homes and devastated residents and tell them that their rates dollars would be better spent on 'mind nourishment”.

Report released
The Government's report looking at improving the cost-effectiveness of councils' provision of infrastructure has been released. The title of the reports authorising group is an indication of where this is going. The Local Government Infrastructure Efficiency Expert Advisory Group – comprising of our own ex-CEO Alan Bickers – no less, Fran Wilde and five others.

Call me a conspiracy theorist if you like but this could end up in corporatisation or privatisation of council's water and waste water undertakings. At a recent conference I button-holed Alan and tried to discuss it with him. Alan and I have had robust discussions about these sorts of things during the years and to some degree my take is that Alan is gamekeeper turned poacher. Certainly, he donned his hard hat and flak jacket and headed to his bomb shelter during the brief discussion. It's easy to see why a Government would want to get its hands on water and waste water infrastructure. It might go like this. Take it off the councils for a nominal amount – just like electricity undertakings. Pay council's crumbs then on sell to the private sector at diamond prices. These capital investments then have to produce a return on investment so up goes the price of water. Yes, you've seen it all before with electricity. The GST take goes up too. Directors fees – Mark Ford, chairman of Metrowater in Auckland is on about $600,000. And like electricity, water and wastewater is an essential commodity – so control of it is the ultimate investment monopoly – and we at the bottom of the heap have no choice or options other than to pay. And remember Government clips the ticket at every step via income and company tax. Corporatisation or privatisation of water is one of the last untapped gold mines and of course it will be touted as being in your best interests. Like last time they had a go, I will be encouraging Local Government, elected members, parliamentarians and all New Zealand to resist and oppose what would be worse than a land grab for all of us.
Annual plan submissions closed last Friday and there are about 100 submissions.

At the time of writing, there didn't seem to be any one major issue concerning submitters. It's a long way from the heady days of 1300 submissions and 2500 pages to read from just a few years ago. Council is now receiving regular updates on clearing the Rena wreck from the top of the Astrolabe Reef. An $11.3 million Limitation Fund has been constituted to reimburse businesses affected by the disaster. The insurers and owners 'preferred option” is to leave the rest of the wreck there. For future generations to cope with?

This week's mindbender from Vince Lombardi -
'The winner is always part of the answer.
The loser is always part of the problem.”