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

A couple of weeks ago an elected member raised the question of how Tauranga City Council's legal bills had reached about $6.5 million in 2011.

He speculated on the number of hours this must have needed and the hourly charge-out rate. From memory, the speculation he said (he had in his mind) was that the hourly rate was about $900 per hour. But after staff research we have been supplied with the real facts.

The facts
The council dealt with 25 legal firms in 2011 and the top bill went to Simpson Grierson at $5,270,407. But before you too get outraged over this, $4,427,609 was for property-related settlements. Likewise, $1,392,879 paid to Cooney Lees and Morgan comprised of $1,144,193 in property-related settlements. The lowest earner was Hobec at $215.
The point is that it is very easy to jump to conclusions at council expenditure without finding out what's really involved. Council, by necessity, has extensive legal dealings including property; and ranges from dealing with government agencies to individual litigation. Council's legal services are subjective to competitive scrutiny from time to time by the chief executive. There is no political input into how and where staff can procure any service.

No quick fix
At Projects and Monitoring committee, elected members were advised of progress staff are making with storm water flooding remedies. We have budgeted more than $100 million in the 10 year plan for this. Even this may not be enough. To be called the ‘Integrated storm water project' it will cover the entire city with two dimensional computer modelling that produces accurate detailing of where the water goes in rain events. It's not a pretty picture in many areas. It depends on how quickly the rain falls to be sure. But the situation hasn't been helped by building on overland flow paths and allowing suburban infill. This is one case where it would be folly to rush in to provide a quick fix only to find the problem has been shifted downstream.

Complex situation
Elected members held a confidential workshop after the public part of the meeting where individual problem areas were discussed. It's a very complex situation with possible remedies solving one problem and possibly creating another two. But this council is united in providing as effective resolutions as possible (we can't provide absolute resolution to every extreme rain event) in as short a time frame as possible. This is likely to take two-to-three years. But in the interim council will do what it can with short term flood prevention, such as providing sand bags, and looking at some local barricading and localised pumping to try and provide relief and peace of mind to residents.
As I've said before it was a great pity that previous councils, by majority vote, confused their priorities and spent ratepayer money on ‘nice to haves' instead of focusing on core infrastructure like storm water and waste water issues. In over-simplified terms, one cause is the storm water pipes are too small and then it gets complicated. This project is set to be the biggest item in the next 10 year plan in my opinion. Once again no-one from the daily print media turned up for the public part of the meeting for what was an item of strategic importance to the city.
A follow on meeting is being called, as this column went to press, to come up with a high level strategy to bring some definite responses to those affected in the April downpour and to provide direction for policy in the event of further downpours and flooding. It's been four months now since these homes were flooded. Insurance has repaired the damage in many cases but it is unlikely that insurance companies would continue to cover repetitive floods.

Not guilty
Elected members listened to the submissions to three draft management plans. The subject of Coastal Reserves and Mobile Vendors received a few submissions, but by far the most responses were to the so-called Freedom Camping proposal. Foisted on to Local Government by the Central Government it is not a well thought-out piece of legislation. MP's should be made to sit and listen to the issues raised by submitters instead of us. For once we are innocent. For example it's legal to park a camper van anywhere where parking is permitted – say on Marine Parade at the Mount – where there are no time restrictions; and provided the vehicle is legally compliant you could leave it there for years. You could even visit, have meals, watch TV, read and generally use it as your beachside base. But you can't sleep in it at night. A nap during the day is probably okay. So how does the council enforce a ban, which is in effect, a ‘no sleeping at night' ban? When is night? Say an enforcement officer knocks on a van door at 5am and the occupants tell him they have just arrived from Auckland.
Residents have horror stories of the activities of some occupants and their reported disgusting behaviour. The nub of the problem seems to be non-compliant sleeper vans that have no self-contained amenities – the combi/transit van types. Proper self-contained motorhomes don't usually create problems other than intruding on ‘visual amenity' for residents, we were told. But there is no visual amenity at night, and the vehicle is allowed to park there anyway. You are just not allowed to sleep overnight and what is the definition of overnight? Just around in circles we go. Decisions will be made shortly on a very complex issue and some things are certain. There will be unhappy punters from one sector or another, ratepayers will have costs added for monitoring and enforcement – and council will cop the blame. Oh well. As the Governments whipping boy, we'll just add it to the list.
After a lengthy and emotive debate, the Pohutukawa tree in Second Ave has had a stay of execution by majority vote and will be trimmed and managed. Boy do trees get people going.

This week's mindbender from Thomas Macaulay: 'The measure of a man's character is what he would do if he
knew he would never be found out”.