Much hoo-haa over a very expensive community pool.
Who pays for it.
Andrew Whiley probably loves former Greater Dunedin candidate Irene Mosley (Taieri Community Facilities Trust aka Pooling Together) who appears to support taking major projects off DCC to project manage privately….
[Carisbrook Stadium Trust tricks].
Or, does the mayoral and council hopeful love – So Much – For Votes – the residential developers carving up Taieri paddocks with bunker-style housing on cul-de-sacs, who might or might not say no to a ‘greater Dunedin’ rates-funded pool complex over their back fence. Dunno.
Would Professional Rugby rather its own pool complex at the Logan Park sport and recreation hub ?? Since Mosgiel is far flung, and all that’s really needed is an upgrade to the township’s existing pool !!
Now, about targeted rates for the Taieri Area population to afford their Expensive Four-Pool Complex.
What Should happen.
Consider very carefully who you rate when voting.
Received today:
█ For more, enter the terms *mosgiel*, *taieri* and *pool* in the search box at right.
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Posted by Elizabeth Kerr
Election Year. This post is offered in the public interest.
What if? Dunedin... 
Whiley by name?
‘Whiley Coyote’ not the ‘Roadrunner’.
Runnem out of Town!
Andrew is in there to split the vote with the hope of getting Dave Cull back.
Irene Mosley, the kingmaker has managed to create a gerrymander of her own by barring two possible Mayors. They must have indicated their dissatisfaction with the Mosgiel pool fiasco!
https://www.odt.co.nz/news/dunedin/dcc/mayoral-candidates-left-out
Today at ODT.
Cr Whiley’s strange ‘mayoral’ profile claims:
[from the believe it or not files]
https://www.odt.co.nz/news/dunedin/dcc/dunedins-business-story-needs-be-heard
Fact or Fiction (via ODT)
“How would you deal with South Dunedin issues of flooding and climate change?
[Whiley] The residents of South Dunedin would accept a 30cm flood once every 20 to 30 years. The last flood they had was in ’68. They would accept that. What they won’t accept is when a 30cm becomes a 50cm flood because of infrastructure failure. We’ve got to have better maintenance, better infrastructure, we’ve got to invest in that. We’ve also got to invest in South Dunedin as a community. We haven’t supported the community. We’ve also got to make it consent-friendly.
What about the long-term future?
[Whiley] South Dunedin could be below sea level. The Dutch live below sea level. Engineering will work with us to make it viable.”
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Did people really say that ?
I think South Dunedin people are way more sensible than that. For godsake.
How wide was his canvass. Mouth getting ahead of brain.
Question. A responsible Councillor ?
Question. A responsible Mayor ?
Have filed as COMPLETE AND UTTER JUNK.
Wile E. Coyote: Member of the Looney Tunes brigade, always chasing, never winning; usually blown up by adversaries. Wile E. hid behind a rock while road-runner Dave dispensed with democracy. Happy to inundate South Dunedin: how bloody outrageous!!! Not worth a single solitary vote.
I must say I am getting rather down about flakey candidates for mayor and council. There are a whole lot of them.
Gone are the buzz words of ‘transparency’ and ‘sustainability’ for this election. No mention of seeking greater accountability after all the fraud that has taken place within council for years. Probably because it doesn’t sound nice/positive. Everyone seems to have figured ‘niceness’ wins votes. (Don’t worry about being ineffectual).
Has anyone noticed how several candidates are now parroting each other about telling of Dunedin’s great ‘stories’ and the need to get them out there to attract investment dollars from….. elsewhere?
Some seem to be telling the lie that it is only their candidature that will ensure more jobs come about for Dunedin. They have The Answer.
Bullshit. It’s the economy, stupid.
Wiley Whiley, Whiley Coyote.
The Coyote never changes its stripes.
No Peter, it’s not the economy. The economy technically is booming.
However, business in Dunedin is in the doldrums. There is at least one simple reason for this. The DCC cannot create business in Dunedin, because bureaucrats survive by saying no. If a bureaucrat says yes, there is no reason for his existence. I mean an entrepreneur has a plan, he executes and it either happens or it doesn’t. If it happens and succeeds he runs out of time to do everything and employs staff to get him to the next level. The greatest thing the DCC could do to encourage business is to get out of the way. Wests Cordials proves this.
What the DCC needs to do in offering the mythical red carpet Greater Dunedin campaigned on – three long years ago is Get Out of the Way.
Some small examples of things they could do is create more free in-street car parks, get rid of traffic lights, eliminate in-street incursions, make it possible to quickly drive around the city and complete multiple tasks.
Just how many entrepeneurs, budding or actual travel by bike?
The Green Machine – Are we designing, building, creating electric cars in Dunedin? No, so Give it OVER.
“Are we designing, building, creating electric cars in Dunedin?”
Are we buying brand-new cars in Dunedin? NZ-wide?
No we ain’t.
The proportion of NZers getting by on less than the average income is climbing. Housing, putting a roof their heads, is taking a higher proportion of their income. So there will be an increase in the numbers buying NEW cars? Pull the other one!
We already drive old cars.
There’s a point in “older” that makes them a great choice for people with not much spare money, it’s before everything was electronic. Old vehicles can be repaired, parts replaced, by the mechanically minded person in most neighbourhoods. Mates help mates, it’s like that TV commercial with the kids. It’s the way people get by when they don’t earn enough because wages are too low.
Electric cars would have to come down a long way in price to compete with the realistic decisions real NZers make.
Another thing, the people who buy electric cars are also the ones who cycle to work, esp if they work somewhere with no or ruinously expensive parking, esp in Auckland where the weather turns on frequent rain, but not icy-cold piercing rain like ours. It’s a middle class thing. Poor people spend the bicycle money on a shitbox car to haul kids, groceries etc and get between work and home in the quickest time to get back to children, or go to the 2nd job.
Hype, your way is too practical for politics. Politics is about making the possible impossible, making the likely unlikely and making the other bastard pay for my lunch.
Gurglars. Sorry about the confusion, but I was meaning that what is happening nationally and internationally re the economy is what ultimately has impact here.
As for ‘cutting red tape’…..something we can do locally…..this is a double-edged sword. We could have done this for the 28 storey Sing Song hotel, but clearly this was a project that would have done little for Dunedin in terms of where the profits ended up, not alone the visual harm done to our built heritage environment. This is something we can bank on as a selling point, a point of difference to other bland NZ towns, like Christchurch, that gives people an incentive to come here. (What a jewel the warehouse area is now. Imagine what effect that eyesore hotel would have created.)
The ‘red carpet, not red tape’ argument is usually trotted out at election time by people who don’t really know what the council is bound by in terms of following its own rules to regulate unsympathetic, chaotic development.
Peter, so business people are victims? In some way you are right. Banks send off up to 80% of their loans to non productive housing thus inflating the already dangerous bubble of house prices. The government by legislating Australian banks to loan 60% to small to medium business and less than 25% to housing in one stroke would bring down the housing bubble AND encourage small business people to get out of student flats into actual productive businesses.
If councils were forced to divest moribund “businesses” not paying dividends like Delta and others, DCC workers would have to create businesses to pay their mortgages. Necessity is the mother of invention.
If researchers were not just paid millions to discover various new ways, but that entrepeneurs were married up with them to develop these concepts commercially, then Dunedin would be using the University expertise rather than the University existing in a non commercial bubble.
There are plenty of business opportunities where the DCC just gets in the way, not just the Chinese student hotel. And as to profits going offshore, this is inevitable when the only risk capital is provided from offshore and not from NZ banks. The benefits from the snowball effect of developing such a hotel whether you like the design, the location or the effects on heritage values are as follows:
The increase in income to builders, electricians, plumbers, architects, planners. The increase in wages for staff, administrators, accountants and lawyers.
So Dunedin cannot afford to be Xenophobic about its investors whether Chinese, Mongolian or Russian as New Zealanders (banks) won’t provide the capital needed and the DCC will try to stop any major investment they don’t directly benefit from (see DCC car park locations as an example).
“University existing in a non commercial bubble”- it’s not. Good up to a point but it has incentivised quick short term results and cut the opportunities for blue-sky research. BSky is often the route to a whole new set of $-realisable enterprises, but nobody knows which BSky will >> profitable and which will demonstrate that there’s definitely “nothing out there”. The latter is not useless information, by the way.
Don’t get too carried away with enthusiasm. “The benefits from the snowball effect of developing such a hotel whether you like the design, the location or the effects on heritage values are as follows: The increase in income to builders, electricians, plumbers, architects, planners. The increase in wages for staff, administrators, accountants and lawyers.”
There is no guarantee that much of this work would be done by Dunedin people using local materials. There is every reason to think it probably wouldn’t be, not when the project is owned by overseas investors.
Don’t you remember the local tradies supporting Fubar Stadium because of all the work they’d get? But didn’t? Forgotten already?
As we all know and reported here, larger-scale construction projects such as Science, Dental School and ahead, the hospital, are going to companies outside Dunedin following the direction of University of Otago accountants. Note the lack of other commercial and industrial building work at #DoldrumsDUD. The housing bubble is a crime.
The effects economically of a cheap and nasty “$100M-formula” waterfront ‘hotel’ (excuse me, more like 75% student shoebox apartments in a leaky building) are very short term, with the completed building profits headed offshore.
Crap value and crap suspicious creatures putting these up in the Pacific Rim. Avoid like the plague. No quality – destroy the cultural heritage value that Dunedin is finally learning to bank.