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The core business of the Otago Regional Council is environmental protection, not real estate investment. –Eckhoff
### ODT Online Tue, 21 Jun 2016
Environmental cost to building
By Gerrard Eckhoff
OPINION The decision the Otago Regional Council will have to make on a new administration block sometimes means deciding on the lesser evil. Whatever the decision, councils don’t get much thanks for avoiding one bad choice in favour of another. The option of leasing space in an existing building, thereby leaving a large amount of capital free for the ORC’s primary environmental functions, has been summarily dismissed by the chairman of the ORC. This is despite matters of “significant investment” (such as a new building) requiring special consultation with our ratepayers, who will in turn expect that their or any suggestion will not be so easily dismissed. […] The ORC’s failure to understand that environmental inaction simply transfers cost from this generation to the next and with a multiplier effect is inexcusable. What price must environmental imperatives pay for a new building? That is the real question the ORC must ask of itself.
Read more
● Gerrard Eckhoff, of Central Otago, is an Otago regional councillor.
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Otago Regional Council meeting
█ [today] Wednesday, 22 June 2016 at 9:00 a.m.
Council Chamber, 70 Stafford Street, Dunedin
Members of the public are welcome to attend.
Download: Agenda includes minutes and reports (PDF, 2402 KB)
Go to Part C Item 7 (pages 68-70)
Report: ORC Head Office Accommodation Update. DCS, 16/6/16
The report provides an update on the Council and staff workshops held to help inform the next stage of the project.
[extract]
Related Posts and Comments:
● 9.6.16 ORC empire building again : Consultants give questionable options…
11.8.12 ODT editorial (spot on!) — ORC temporary headquarters
26.6.09 ORC headquarters [incl news items to present day]
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Posted by Elizabeth Kerr
Election year. This post is offered in the public interest.
What if? Dunedin... 
The Emperor ORC’s blighted wish for a new coat and boots [new building] chases down to torture by trees [wilding conifers] . . . . . .
emimusic Published on Jun 12, 2014
Radiohead – There, There
Song released in 2003. From the album Hail to the Thief.
The award-winning video, inspired by the British children’s television show Bagpuss, was directed by Chris Hopewell. Filmed at one-quarter regular speed, it looks jumpy, as if some of the frames are missing.
In pitch dark
I go walking in your landscape
Broken branches
Trip me as I speak
Just ’cause you feel it
Doesn’t mean it’s there
Just ’cause you feel it
Doesn’t mean it’s there
There’s always a siren
Singing you to shipwreck
(Don’t reach out, don’t reach out
Don’t reach out, don’t reach out)
Steer away from these rocks
We’d be a walking disaster
(Don’t reach out, don’t reach out
Don’t reach out, don’t reach out)
Just cause you feel it
Doesn’t mean it’s there
(Someone on your shoulder
Someone on your shoulder)
There there!
Why so green and lonely?
Lonely, lonely?
Heaven sent you to me
To me, to me?
We are accidents waiting
Waiting to happen
We are accidents waiting
Waiting to happen
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O T A G O ● R E G I O N A L ● C O U N C I L
Why are wilding conifers a problem?
Wilding conifers are an established pest in New Zealand. They degrade highly regarded landscape values, reduce water yields in already dry catchments, reduce the productivity of pastoral land and damage environmentally sensitive areas. It is estimated that wilding conifers are spreading at around 5% annually. Failure to control their spread at an early stage can quickly lead to increasing numbers of trees taking hold, and the costs of control escalating exponentially. This is the case in parts of Otago, where the cost of eradicating some areas of historically-planted conifers (known as legacy plantings) has now become prohibitive. Wilding conifers can survive from coastal Otago to the inland high country, and their seeds are easily spread, as the map below indicates.
If nothing is done in Otago to control this problem, the area infested in this region is likely to triple from 300,000 ha to 900,000ha over the next 20 years if current management approaches remain. If current management levels do not increase, the extent of wilding conifer-infested land nationally is expected to treble over the next 20 years, to 5.43m ha, 20% of New Zealand’s land area. This could result in economic losses of around $244 million per annum (Scion, March 2015).
█ Read more at http://www.orc.govt.nz/Information-and-Services/Pest-Control/Plant-pests/Wilding-Conifers/
Is this the same Feldspar consultants whose principal owns 20’Dowling st., paying no DCC rates?
The mind boggles-further.
McDonalds does not sell burgers. McDonalds is the largest property company on the planet. https://books.google.co.nz/books?isbn=1409216241
McDonald’s is a property company which sells hamburgers. …. Not that the corporation is abandoning its most important customers: more children’s Playlands … http://www.mcspotlight.org/media/reports/trans.html
Gerry Eckhoff has, as usual, got the point and expresses it very well. Buying property worked for McDonalds but that’s still no reason for the ORC to get carried away no matter how seductive is the thought of property ownership.
Instead of looking to a multinational for inspiration why don’t they look local for a spine-chilling example of how bad it gets when elected bodies and their staff forget core business and run amok with the credit card?
Then core business makes its presence felt, shabby, neglected, unfit for purpose, in urgent need of mending – and the only money in sight is in the red column: DEBT.
Take photos of the Stadium to South Dunedin and the flood waters recede?
Fly over Otago towing a blow-up banner of the deeds to a new ORC building and “core business of councils such as water, sewage, drainage and environmental degradation” will all be brought up to acceptable standard as if by magic.
And the names of those who caused this spend-up of the rates we pay for core business to get done, will go down in history as (inspired leaders)/(blood brothers of Farry, Harland, Chin, Cull and the gullible me-toos).
For a number years this website disputed the late (Cr) Richard Walls’ contention about “intergenerational equity” being the way to go for Dunedin City Council enhancing its civic asset holdings and building a stadium. The “paying forward” idea – or was that on the “never never” – strengthened his resolve that “Equity” of the sort was not extremely dire or painful to all who follow in our footsteps. So I consulted my accounting dictionaries (joke) and argued for use of the term “Intergenerational Debt” to meet him half way, eventually slamming him into the ground with a flying tackle.
Thu, 23 Jun 2016
ODT: ORC changes its approach
The Otago Regional Council yesterday approved a “milestone” annual plan, reflecting a change of approach, and including funding for a higher-profile Otago harbourmaster and wilding conifer control. Cr Trevor Kempton told a council meeting the annual plan “marked quite a milestone” for the council.
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This would be the Otago Regional Council Annual Plan which DOES NOT mention the potential multimillion-dollar spend up on Diligence (what diligence) for a new headquarters building in the Dunedin CBD; and which includes diddly squat expenditure on wilding conifers.
Hi Trev, love the rhetoric.
How’s your construction company Naylor Love these days. And the Feldspar boys ?
Q: When is a milestone not a milestone?
A: When it’s a typo for millstone.
What struck me out of that announcement was just how naive Trevor Kempton and the rest of the councillors appear to be. I do not include Gerry Eckhoff who writes consistent common sense in his various opinion pieces.
But the rest of them!!
I get the distinct impression that the ORC believes it receives rates from Otagoites, one to prop up a few unemployables, two, pay for a few regular pissups and three, build a brand new building with a few Ralph Hoteres in reception.
If this is so maybe we are better off just disbanding the outfit.
My biggest concern would of course be if the DCC were to take the ORC over. Just imagine the graspers and troughers at the DCC getting their hands on all that lovely ORC rate money and nothing to actually have to do.
Worse, DCC has no hope of looking after the Otago hinterland, even if gilded with Port Otago Ltd gold.
Imagine the folly of Dunedin telling Queenstown burghers how to run business. [Mr Eeee Edgar would have to run as Mayor of Dunedin. Yikes.]
Town Clerks instead of CEOs, serving the city and putting councillors’ decisions into practice along with permanent City Engineer etc, people who knew the patch and had staff who knew St Leonards from St Kilda, from St Paul’s which is not a suburb. Staff didn’t have scope for pushing their own fads, and a good Town Clerk kept councillors’ impulses corralled by supplying them with home-grown facts and figures.
Catchment boards, rabbit boards, definite jobs to do and not enough funds to get ideas about buying expensive real estate for their own glorification and seat-warming.
So right Hype!
The modern tendency to amalgamate in the interests of savings has in fact not only had the opposite effect, but has meant that in fact no one including DCC and the ORC actually know what their core responsibilities are.
When there was a rabbit board it was pretty self evident that their job was to eradicate rabbits. Too many rabbits, more or better shooters required.
Now we have a whole layer of overpaid local body managers whose major responsibility is to deny any wrongdoing or failure. This is most evident. National public servants have had masters degrees in obfuscation as Yes Minister so aptly demonstrated, but smaller councils did not have the scale necessary to supply hiding places.
This has now all changed.
Whilst philosophically the amalgamation of the DCC (a seemingly necessary if over-staffed bureaucracy) is amalgamated with the ORC (a waste of space) one would imagine greater efficiencies.
Reality has shown us that bigger is never better and as such we should resist such amalgamation strenuously, whilst agitating for greater accountability and frugality in both monoliths.
In particular any new building for the ORC should never be approved by citizens.
Cut the staff numbers to fit the building.
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{Moderated. -Eds}
Very good, Gurglars.
I’ve been massively against amalgamatoon of ORC and DCC for years – it’s this that causes me to Not vote for certain Mayoral and Council candidates.
The last amalgamations of Otago district councils into DCC has not been a golden egg or an efficiency that prevents major rorts and corruption. Still massive clean up required “close to home” which could very well be thrown out with the shitty babywater in an ORC / DCC lovefest brought on by (the…) players for the October elections this year and for the immediately following trimesters. Beware in the city and hills. And beware Central Government forcing our hands to loss of democratic representation.
This sleepy hollow is up to stuff.
We wanna spend your rates money any which way ’cause we are SO IMPORTANT we Should be indulged.
This is what ’30 June end of financial year’ does to sycophants and leeches, they breathe and expand again, flushed with new cash and open books for the INSANE to happen.
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Wed, 29 Jun 2016
ODT: ORC open to parking building idea
The Otago Regional Council is keeping an open mind about the possibility of a car parking building being built in Dowling St on part of the site where it hopes to establish its new headquarters building. ORC chief executive Peter Bodeker made that point yesterday, after the ORC resolved earlier this month to investigate the Dunedin car park site further, to concept design and project estimate stage.
I wonder how much fossil fuel is involved in creating a building to park cars in. All that machinery – manufactured how, out of materials made and extracted where and how? All the materials in the building, likewise.
All that rates money taken from us to pay interest to offshore banks and eventually pay off the principle. And who’s going to get the profits from it? ORC to offset costs and perhaps contribute to lower rates demand next time? Or those verrucas on the city’s sole, brought here by our own rates funded investment geniuses?
Mightn’t it be a good idea to free up more on-street parking?
The EU has 750 representatives, and a back up staff of 10,000. They got their staffing ideas from the DCC during the Harland era.
ORC coin-cillor and DELTA director Trevor Kempton is PALACE BUILDING. He majority owns the construction firm Naylor Love. He wants to use Your Rates Money, doesn’t he ?
Is Trevor Kempton a credible regional council representative, one without real or perceived conflicts ? What has he declared ?
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Tue, 12 Jul 2016
ODT: Possible win-win for car park
Parking issues, and the probable need for a new parking building, are looming large as talks begin over plans to build a new Otago Regional Council headquarters in Dowling St. ORC chief executive Peter Bodeker confirmed “constructive” preliminary talks had been held recently between senior ORC and Dunedin City Council staff. Part of the discussion focused on parking and the need to meet public and business requirements, he said.
Um, I thought parking was undesirable in Dunedin, as it discourages people from cycling, walking and taking the bus. Social engineering faction vs empire- and profit-enhancement?
At Facebook:
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Thu, 23 Feb 2017
ODT: ORC mulls office site
By John Gibb
The Otago Regional Council’s proposed new head office project in Dowling St is moving closer to reality, and a new multi-storey car park building nearby also seems likely. The council’s preferred head office site is in part of a Dunedin City Council-owned off-street car parking area at 15 Dowling St. Some kind of potential reciprocal land arrangement could be part of the mix. The DCC has some interest in a larger area of land bought by the ORC about 10 years ago, near the harbour, in the Birch St-Kitchener St area. This purchase was made as part of an earlier ORC head office initiative, that was not taken further. Regional council chief executive Peter Bodeker told an ORC council meeting yesterday that a heads of agreement had been signed this week between the regional and city councils over the new head office initiative. Cont/
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More shoulder tapping for the rich boys:
‘ORC building reference group met the project design team in December’
Tue, 21 Feb 2017
ODT: Preferred tenderer named
By John Gibb
The Otago Regional Council has named its preferred tenderer for architectural design services for the council’s proposed head office building project. Discussions on the potential purchase of the council’s preferred site, at 15 Dowling St, were “progressing” with the Dunedin City Council, ORC chief executive Peter Bodeker said in a report to tabled at an ORC council meeting tomorrow. The preferred tenderer was a collaboration, mainly between McCoy Wixon Architects, of Dunedin, and a national firm, Warren and Mahoney. Secondary consultants included Holmes and Powell Fenwick (engineering and fire protection), Tonkin and Taylor (geotechnical), and Boffa Miskell (urban and landscape design). Cont/
This palatial-aggrandising squander of Otago rates funds on a new ORC headquarters at Dunedin blisters the financial prudence test…. [meanwhile, DCC obstinately fails to admit fault and budget for replacement and upgrade of the Otago power network].
Local and Regional HELL is nigh.
Priorities Out The Window. And the Fat Boys get laid.