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

I have many memories of important people driving pegs in the sand and declaring some new project for the Bay of Plenty.

The pegs disappear quickly, lost in the sand. The plans still hang round and are consigned to history while council continues building expensive sand castle projects that collapse and are washed away only to be replaced by more sandcastles. Smart Growth is our biggest and most ambitious document for direction in planning. It designs a large number of pegs but puts very few in the ground. The rest are there as tools for council planners. The new document is an upgrade of the first five-year plan and might seem to be a little premature. Logic says that it should have been delayed until the new census figures are available in December but there are two major reasons why the plan had to go ahead.

Council's planning was becoming more and more irrelevant. In 2011, SmartGrowth reported that projected growth figures from 2007 had been far too optimistic. The reality of growth flattening out and a resulting loss of income for council projects had not been picked up by councils. The profligacy mentioned by Larry Mitchell in the Local Government League Table this year was not a matter of carefree overspending. It was caused by a council that failed to upgrade the projections each year. The 2012 Annual Plan saw amazing mathematical shifting, of the 2012 base for projected income, to adjust to council's idea of reality for their spending but council debt and consequent rates bills soared.

Council's planning has becoming more and more fairy tale every day as their sandcastles in the sand washed away. The only urban growth plans allowed in Omokoroa plans were stillborn. There is to be no change to urban growth limits because this might prejudice their current planning. The Matakana Island Plan was the most succinct in describing council's current thinking. They can choose to do nothing, continue with the current plan or work it out later. Most residents and developers recognise this ad hoc planning as the normal image of council's operation procedures. Nothing is changing but the costs are mounting and the rates to pay for mismanagement and delay are becoming prohibitive.

The second reason is that the Government has promised a total revamp of local government authorities and the change for the Bay of Plenty will occur in the next three years. If the council's dream of an amalgamation with Tauranga is ever going to happen they will have to get their house in order before the Government does it for them. More and more council documents are referring to governance and policy revisions. They are even revising policies that don't exist. BOPLASS, an early form of council controlled organisation has to be totally rethought and is one of the main reasons for Mr Snelgrove's assurance that some quality assurance targets have not been met. Another missing policy, on building houses in flood plains, has never been addressed which accounts for why council has no rules for building on flood plains. Most of the council's projects are built or planned on flood plains, estuaries or sandpits.

Houses built on shifting sand or floodplains are now known to have liquefaction problems. The liquefaction risk contours on the Matakana Plan map show the foreshore of Matakana as yellow and orange or low risk. Large part s of Tauranga and all of Papamoa are coloured purple representing the highest risk of liquefaction during flood events. Waihi Beach is not on the map but it must be close to having its mean high spring tide contour shifted back to Wilson Rd. Maybe council's flood plain policy is too late for many properties in the Bay. Rewriting a policy might make council feel a little safer but soon we will have to draw a line in the sand. We might have been better served by our councillors if they had been ordered to spend time building sandcastles on the beach. We may not have achieved much more but we would have saved on pegs, on consultant fees and halved our rates.