Received today.
This leak in regards to DCC’s establishment of a new industrial zone bordered by Dukes Road (Industrial Variation 9B)…. is an unsubtle reminder of the number of Council-issued claims over the years about the extent (or lack of) industrially zoned land at Dunedin, particularly for argument in evidence (or was it lies and hearsay) at very significant plan change hearings.
Interpretations please!
[click each page to enlarge]
█ Download: DCC Confidential Report – Industrial Land 29 March 2004
(PDF, 1 MB)
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Related ODT stories:
### ODT Online Mon, 12 Oct 2015
Property sales loss $1.07m
By Chris Morris
The Dunedin City Council has spent $5.6 million buying up houses, and even a farm, to smooth the path for industrial development on the Taieri. The purchases were detailed in documents released to the Otago Daily Times, which also showed the council has lost $1.07 million after on selling many of the properties for significantly smaller sums.
Read more
### ODT Online Mon, 12 Oct 2015
Council’s treatment of couple criticised
By Chris Morris
A retired couple forced to fight for five years to sell their farm to the Dunedin City Council were left with “a noose around their necks”, Cr Kate Wilson says. William and Fiona Smeaton owned the 15 ha farm sold to the council for $1.725 million in December last year.
Read more
ODT got led down the garden path by this couple, it appears. It’s out that they don’t have to meet the rates increase while they’re farming – only on conversion to industrial use would the land owner pay $10,000 pa, you say? The poor things had to work more jobs to meet the rates demand, yeah right – TUI.
A quick look at DCC Webmaps for 91 Dukes Road shows (linked to the rates account) the land use as “12 Rural Industry : Stock Finishing”, Total Annual Rates $4,596.60…. tsk tsk.
More at this thread: DCC considers sale of “149 properties”
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Posted by Elizabeth Kerr
What if? Dunedin... 
Harland was frightfully keen on the Waterfront “A city can never have too many cafes” development. Standing in the way of this ambitious scheme were the scruffy, sometimes noisy, non-chic businesses that actually earn money doing useful stuff, and employ people in real jobs for real wages – industry. To clear the way for apartments, promenades and little umbrella-topped tables hawser’d to the pavement to stop them being blown off-site it was necessary to produce industrial land so they couldn’t complain there was nowhere to relocate to. Forget that relocation to the Taieri would be as burdensome in cost and inconvenience as moving north to where there are more markets – and possibly councils that saw the point in encouraging companies that produce stuff and bring money into the region.
The purchase of the Taieri land took place … when? What’s a name beginning with H and ending in land, that’s associated with more rates money-wasting and financial and other screw-ups than any other that springs automatically to mind? The name that leaves the one beginning with C and rhyming with null [and void] looking like a rank amateur or common muddle-head….
As a participant in the Variation 9B, I was against the use of highclass soils being zoned industrial. The release of the confidential document above, now reveals what we were up against. But first I must correct Hype O’Thermia . This Industrial land was to meet the demand for businesses
from outside Dunedin to relocate here. Not for the relocation of businesses from within the Dunedin area to this new industrial area.
What this document above reveals is that the Council was prepared to pay out ratepayers’ money to the tune of over a million dollars to buy the silence of hand-picked submitters. Who they thought could scuttle Variation 9B. How corrupt does it get when the DCC was prepared to go to such lengths as to offer individual submitters hundreds of thousands of ratepayers’ money to buy their properties, at well above valuation, to not take part in a democratic process?
Since the document above has been released. I have gone back through some of the documents that I saved from the Variation 9B hearing. It is interesting to read some of the submissions of 11 years ago. Here are a couple from the report from the commissioner of the hearing, Mr David Collins.
“Mr. John Christie (Chief Executive) and Mr. Brent Wilson appeared on behalf of the Otago Chamber of Commerce. Their organisation supports the proposed rezoning and I was particularly interested in their comments on the inadequacy of existing zoned land and enquiries they were aware of from companies considering industrial development in Dunedin.”
Question for Mr Christie. 11 years on. When can we expect to see these companies considering industrial development in Dunedin. That you are aware of actually arriving at the North Taieri Industrial site?
“Mr. Martin Dillon, a commercial real estate agent, described the difficulties he sees in developing other areas with potential for industrial development. In his view Dunedin needs to be able to offer readily developed industrial land in order to be able to compete with other centres. Mr. Dillon indicated that he has personally had preliminary approaches from industry seeking large sites.”
A question for Mr Dillon. 11 years on. When will those personally preliminary approaches to you from industry seeking large sites come to fruition in the North Taieri Industrial site ?
Would Mr. Christie or Mr. Dillon care to comment?
Anyone can say at any time that they have had “this approach” or “that approach”. Unless Christie and Dillon care to front up with names, then one assumption that could be made is that there were never any “approaches” that were worthy of being mentioned to a hearing. As for Harland – well we know quite a bit about him don’t we?
Back at the time I challenged Peter Brown (Jim Harland’s development and strategy general manager) to disclose the names of the companies ‘queuing to take up sites in the Taieri land rezoning, and he said that if he did he would have to kill me because it was so confidential. I believe it was one Forman Insulation Ltd who were rumoured to have a packaging contract with Fisher & Paykel Ltd. It never eventuated and the last I heard F&P are in Mexico.
John Christie is proven to be a quisling who has since defected to the DCC as the Enterprise Dunedin director. The whole exercise from go to whoa is corrupt and no elected councillors are exempt from contamination. Harland, Brown, Christie, Dillon, Cairns, Staynes (from F&P) are just a few who are tainted but still on the ‘hind teat’. Cull of course would not wish this to go any further.
Exactly, russandbev. I may be wrong about the link between the strange enthusiasm for the “waterfront precinct” pushed by Harland (on whose behalf? His own idea? Who was to profit?) and the need to produce industrial land. I don’t for a moment doubt Brian’s evidence but there has been sweet fanny adams sight of all these industries elbowing each other out of the way to take advantage of the rezoned highclass soils. And it’s not the first time a smokescreen of promises was puffed over procedures. Remember all theextra students that would come to OU because of the Stadium? Remember all those top class events that would see motels, restaurants and the entire minimum-wage casual hospitality workforce enjoy undreamed-of prosperity, which would without a shadow of a doubt flow on to you and me and that joker over there in a suit with a Queenstown postcode.
Actually he didn’t do too badly out of it. You and me? Not so much.
Hype, it was Chalmers Properties Ltd, Port Otago’s property subsidiary, that floated the idea of harbourside redevelopment given their property holdings – they had thoughts to bring about a Private Plan Change to effect this. In strode DCC/ Jim Harland, rightly, to host the Plan Change instead given the need for public access to the waterfront for work, recreation and leisure – given DCC has jurisdiction to the High Tide Line, and given ORC is responsible for the seawall (which needs to be substantially rebuilt) that runs under the wharves, and more etc etc. DCC approached me (as NZHPT Otago chair) to survey the area in terms of heritage values; the information gathered I flowed to Chalmers and each of the competing urban designers they shortlisted for a ‘design competition’.
Obviously, Harland’s vision (which came later) got lost in the fog – at huge expense (processing and appeal). No council chief executive should try to be a town planner in their day job. Now we have Cr Benson-Pope trivialising what the industries’ Environment Court appeal means.
But wasn’t Ron Anderson’s name linked with Chalmers Properties?
And re Harland’s pushing of the ‘harbourside vision’, this was NOT a proper role for a council CEO at all!
I would love the whole story to come out. Great shame to hear about land owners who ended up being ‘collateral damage’.
Yes, Anderson was a Chalmers Properties board member.
Remember this?
Vision for Dunedin Harbourside
Thursday, 14 July 2005, 12:02 am
Press Release: Dunedin City Council
13 July 2005
Vision for Dunedin Harbourside Out For Consultation….
http://www.scoop.co.nz/stories/AK0507/S00100.htm
Meanwhile, Carisbrook sits empty and undeveloped nearly 3 years on.
Harland operated as both CEO and Mayor because Chin was asleep at the wheel – literally – most of the while. Signing off huge long leases for a dollar because he didn’t read them was one that springs to mind. The vaccum created by Chin was filled by the little twerp who earned the title of Osama Bin Harland from his staff and it was his vision down by the harbour. And one of the first people he enrolled in the process of focus groups etc was dear old Malcolm (write off the ORFU debt) Farry. The same names crop up all the time. And who owned land down by the harbour and stood to benefit? It’s the old story – follow the money.
Look in today’s ODT and you will see who has been keeping a close eye on “What If” Keep up the good work “What If”.
ODT fails to cite What if? Dunedin – and yet What if? Dunedin voluntarily cites ODT every day as clearly and directly as a responsible entity in online publishing must do.
What if? Dunedin leaked the 2004 DCC report.
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### ODT Online Mon, 19 Oct 2015
DCC had double agenda on Taieri
By Chris Morris
The Otago Daily Times reported last week the council spent $5.62 million buying up six homes and one farm, only to lose $1.07 million on selling most of them. […] However, a confidential council report from 2004, made public last week, showed the council had one eye on the neighbours and another on undermining the legal position of the Taieri Plain Environmental Protection Society.
Read more
From that article comes a stench more vile than tyres on a bonfire, and as potent a testament to power giving not a toss about our environment and our long term enduring asset the enduring earth that nurtures us – when it’s not sabotaged by short-termists.
“As a result, the council offered five neighbouring homeowners a deal – the option of their properties being bought by the council, at a premium price, any time in the following 10 years, as long as they withdrew their opposition.”
Does the word bribery come to mind? What about “perverting the course of justice”?
Just plain breaking the law, Hype. Ironic, when the council was the consent authority which had the responsibility to fairly administer and carry out the same law. Very much like getting raped by the police….
And that, we know, never could happen, not in Godzone……
I commented on this news item this morning. But now I see no comments allowed. Mine certainly wasn’t. I said: Politics of the day? The Resource Management Act requires that high class soils be set aside for food production as a matter of national importance. So rather than being about ‘the politics of the day’, this was about the DCC’s lack of respect for the law. But that was the case then. Let’s hope Dunedin has moved on considerably from then. (ends) But it’s NOT ALLOWED to say this publicly in ODT. Why? To protect the guilty? I suppose what I said could be considered defamatory to someone. But unfortunately NZ defamation law just continues with the protection of the guilty.
Still, it rankles with me that Cull can just try his pathetic damage control as usual and attempt to sweep this WRONGDOING under the carpet and treat it as something which need have no consequences!
Maybe Peter Brown took umbrage.
Elizabeth, mimicry (in the case of the ODT) is the greatest flattery.
Gurglars, indeed. Nice to see Chris Morris is a What if? follower.
“This particular piece of larceny took place three years before I came on council,” says Mayor Dave Cull. So did the Stadium decision, the Chinese Garden, the Settlers Museum upgrade and the Dunedin Convention Centre. How bloody fortunate that none of it was his fault and he can take no blame whatsoever. What? This is an ongoing disaster by out of control staff and it is self perpetuating. No sign of any changes here, best just move on with the business of making Dunedin one of the best little cities in the world. Yeah right!