Another council year heading to the end

2005 is almost over and council goes into recess next month. It is getting harder and harder to be publicly supportive of our Mayor. We are still having far too many talkfests which achieve far too few results given the amount of time spent on issues. Any majority vote that goes against the Mayor’s personal opinion just results in the same matter coming back to council again and again. So much time (and talking) has passed, yet we still do not know what the Mayor wishes to achieve in this term. I, for one, would love to know what her plans and aspirations are for the city!

We are very busy with the Long Term Council Community Plan process, with numerous workshops and briefings. There are two problems with this. Firstly, councillors are being brought up to date with, at times very complex, information to enable us to make informed decisions when it comes to finalising the LTCCP. Some councillors appear to have difficulty understanding complex issues. However, the bigger problem is that in having discrete workshops on a per-subject basis, they tend to focus attention on individual issues. Now, this is good when people are aware that we are getting information on individual aspects that combine to form a whole, but its not so good when people cannot understand the “big picture”. We can no more direct all council’s attention to water supply, to the exclusion of everything else, than we can decide, “ok, this year we will do roads and forget the rest”. Everything has to be balanced and its importance or otherwise looked at in terms of (a) how it leads to the outcomes we desire for our city, and (b) what is affordable, and when.

Without a vision for our city, with no goals articulated by the leader of our council, I predict that this LTCCP process will become one where there is much attention on individual items, much haggling over which community group gets what single-figure grant, and very little strategic direction on the whole of Palmerston North. I hope I am proved wrong.