Or the previous property manager, whose staff member had a husband that….
### ODT Online Fri, 4 May 2012
DCC seeking buyer for Taieri land
By Allison Rudd
The Dunedin City Council is trying to sell a 4ha parcel of vacant industrial land it owns on the Taieri Plain. The Dukes Rd land had been on the market for some time but had been freshly advertised and its sale was now being “aggressively pushed”, council property manager Robert Clark said yesterday. It is up for tender, along with an adjoining privately owned parcel of industrial land of 15.6ha.
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Posted by Elizabeth Kerr
What if? Dunedin... 
It was the former DCC Property Manager, Dave McKenzie, who dreamed up the idea that Dunedin demanded more industrial land and that buying rural property on Dukes Road, paying for the rezoning costs and then paying to subdivide the property was just the way to go about it. Unfortunately he forgot to ask the industry folk if they thought that was a good idea. Apparently it wasn’t. There are no reticulated services running down that part of Dukes Road, which made any potential industry interest walk away immediately. Straight to the pre-existing industrial complex 500m up the road. Some due diligence. That site has cost money since the day they stupidly bought it. The house on the site needed major repairs. It was rented to DCC tenants for a while before being sold for a stupidly low price. Thanks mainly to the fact that it now sat smack in the middle of an industrial land zone. The remaining land sat vacant with the only activity being the free horse grazing offered to City Property employees. When Jim Harland was gaining his private pilot license, he demanded that CP pay to have all the boundary trees removed as they were making him a bit sweaty when trying to land. The biggest private loser in all of this was the Otago Equestrian Centre who ended up having to pay industrial zone rates for their riding arena instead of the rural zone rates they had been paying. Overall, a resounding success.