Winston said it best, without the poles we could not have won World War One.
He was right of course.
Poles allowed the allies to have rallying points around which the Anzacs could rally before running at the German machine guns with impunity.
Poles were helpful during World War II when they proffered their land to soak up the blitzkrieg, thus saving Russia and England who were then stuffed up by lend-lease so that all of their assets were owned by good old USA.
Poles have been helpful in Dunners as they kept the sand on the beach at St Clair until the DCC came up with an alternative to get Rid of the beach. After all, why should St Clair residents enjoy themselves at the beach whilst we are working diligently on Trade Me, stealing cars, conversion, contract fraud and obfuscation?
Our Poles are a critical element in our ambition to increase wages by 10%, increase staff numbers at the DCC by 10% and increase rates by over 10%. I mean you have all voted at the website supporting our plans to stuff Dunedin, you have all voted in the absolutely useless six existing councillors. And me! You’re going to get it-
More shops empty except in buildings owned by us.
No extra Hotel rooms unless they are based on less carparks for Dunedin ratepayers.
We will support Compass- After all how can we differentiate Compass Hospital food for the needy from perks for councillors?
Look we are here to help you.
To Help you to contribute more to rates, parking fees, and any other robbing scheme to boost our personal and collective DCC incomes at your (The ratepayers) expense.
Le Baron de Gurgelaars on de French political system.
Le Interviewer: a qvestion
Le Cull de Mare- Cur, can you pls advise your council’s response to the suggestion that Delta is not involved in electricity generation.
Le Cull de Mare- Ve vill not find any vone guilty.
Le Interviewer- During 2016 your council has stuffed up on flooding, mud tank cleaning, paying Delta for a truck that did not exist in Dunedin, reducing the value of all houses in South Dunedin and not charging for water takeoff on the peninsula. What do you have to say about diese errors of judgement.
Le Cull de Mare- Ve vill not find any person guilty, particularly me.
During 2016, You personally blamed the flooding of South Dunedin on climate change. Do you believe that heavy rain did not fall on Dunedin prior to man’s intervention?
Le Cull de Mare- naturlich- Dunedin was a Desert.
During 2016- Fulton Hogan was exposed for not having any vehicle capable of cleaning the mud tanks and thus completing their mud tank contract. Did you consider a drawback of over $200,000 on their unperformed contract?
Le Cull de Mare- Nein, how can DCC staff get their Christmas bonuses without recourse to increase in rates unless they are allowed contractual licence (see poetic licence)
Le Interviewer- Today Cull de Mare, some properties in South Dunedin particularly Victoria street had reduced QV values. Whilst that will reduce their rates by 1%, their valuations can cause mortgagee sales by banks, increased weekly payments apart from divorces and suicides.
Le Cull de Mare- vot are you saying, you blame me for naming climate change for causing these personal catastrophes, you tink I am ze cause, vot u think I vant diese resulten?
Do u think I am Adolf Hitler?
De Interviewer-
Not Yet.
But power corrupts and absolute power corrupts absolutely.
—
Posted by Elizabeth Kerr
This post is offered in the public interest.
*Image: cartoonswallpapers.net – Futurama Bender the Pimp
Dilbert by Scott Adams | Billion dollars. [Stuff.co.nz 19.1.16]
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Received from Anonymous 1
Tue, 5 Apr 2016 at 8:52 a.m.
█ Message: This needs wide debate in Dunedin and NZ!
Slashing huge salaries ‘would not hurt economy’, says report as new analysis finds leading CEOs earn average of £4.6m a year.
### theguardian.com Sat, 5 Mar 2016 22.38 GMT
The Observer – Business Pay for UK bosses is ‘absurdly high’, top headhunters admit
By Daniel Boffey – Observer policy editor
Britain’s chief executives are wildly overpaid, and there would be no negative impact on the economy if their salaries were slashed, a groundbreaking study of the country’s top headhunters reveals. The London School of Economics report is a damning indictment of the state of executive pay, and comes as an analysis of FTSE 100 company accounts shows that the average pay package of a top CEO is now £4.6m a year. Interviews with the top 10 international recruitment firms behind 70-90% of chief executive appointments in recent years found a consensus among so-called corporate kingmakers that levels of remuneration for the most senior executives are “absurdly high”.
Headhunters claimed that, for every appointment of a CEO, another 100 people could have filled the role just as ably, and that many chosen for top jobs were “mediocre”.
The market for executive jobs, however, has become so distorted that it would amount to career suicide for a chief executive to indicate that he or she would be willing to work for less. The study’s authors write: “If one were to offer to do the job for less, would that tip the decision in his or her favour? All the headhunters agreed that this would be a poor strategy. “Indeed, it might be that asking for a larger remuneration would have a positive effect in securing the appointment.” Read more
● This article appeared in the Otago Daily Times on 28 March 2016.
****
Received from Anonymous 2
Tue, 5 Apr 2016 at 8:20 a.m.
█ Message: A friend in Australia sent me this in anticipation of an upcoming Aussie election. Interesting! Why are we so cynical about politicians?!
This plagued text from an advertising feature in yesterday’s ODT (page 26), promoting the Westpac Otago Chamber of Commerce Business Excellence Awards: [click to enlarge]
### ODT Online Wed, 8 Oct 2014 Ratepayers ‘inevitably’ pay losses
By Chris Morris
Dunedin Mayor Dave Cull says the future funding model for Forsyth Barr Stadium will be more transparent to put an end to a “money-go-round” draining the council’s coffers. But it was still too soon to say whether ratepayers would end up carrying more of the cost, before the public release of the review’s findings next month, he said. Mr Cull was commenting after appearing to suggest, in the council’s latest newsletter, that a funding increase could be possible for Dunedin Venues Management Ltd. Read more
—
Mayor’s Desk 03 Oct 2014
The Council has started planning for the 2015 budget. Next year is also a Long Term Plan (LTP) year. The LTP is a 10 year plan that is refreshed every three years. In addition, the Government has imposed new and urgent requirements on councils around certain important policies. The three work streams are interconnected so there is a huge amount to consider and decide on. The extra work wouldn’t be so demanding if the 2015 budget weren’t already challenging.
While the Council has a financial strategy limiting rates increases to 3%, we face reducing dividend streams from our Council companies, probable higher requirements to get the Forsyth Barr Stadium on to a sustainable footing, greater government regulatory requirements and on going Council reviews. These place considerable demands on resources.
We also need to continue to implement our key strategies. For instance, the Economic Development Strategy aimed at job and business creation, the cycleway network addressing safety and transport options, debt reduction and heritage building enhancement. Our strategic framework is the interconnected road map to the future of our city. Without it Dunedin goes backwards. So savings will be made, tough choices taken and development momentum maintained at the same time. The 2015 budget will be a delicate balancing act.
Contact DCC on 03 477 4000. DCC Link
“FYI DUNEDIN” The latest FYI landed in my letterbox on Friday. Reading from the ‘Mayor’s Desk’ I was taken by Dave’s verbose message. The Council has started planning for the budget. “The work would be demanding if the 2015 budget weren’t already challenging.”
He says: “While the Council has a financial strategy limiting rates increases to 3%, we are facing reducing dividend streams from our Council companies, probable higher requirements to get the Forsyth Barr Stadium on to a sustainable [there’s that word] footing, greater government regulatory requirements and on going Council reviews. These place considerable demands on resources….”
Does he read that stuff? Indeed, did ‘HE’ write it or some muppet in the PR department? A real ‘Churchillian’ rally to the flag entreaty. Nowhere does he address the solution to the main points of the strategies. Are there any real solutions? I don’t know. But I will make some guesses. As I see it, three things are possible.
First, and ideally, there is a massive rush of blood to the head and Dave and all councillors do the right thing and call a halt on all plans, projects and lock the cheque book in the top drawer till future finances allow it to come out again. ‘Fugetaboutit’ it is not in his genome to know anything about prudence.
Second, there will be a massive shift in the rates quotient, on the plea of: ‘jeez’ times have got really tough, and the business cycle has turned against DCHL’s enterprises and the dividend stream is going to be much less than expected. So, it’s shoulders to the wheel and all must do their bit for the good of the city. We must not let it go backwards. Not a hint of reducing the department’s demands and dreams.
Third, a massive change of plan on the debt reduction front. It currently sits north of ($610 million) and we know that the city entered into a ‘multi note facility’ up to but not exceeding ($850 million). So there is around $240 million of freeboard available. Just a silent, unobtrusive drift upwards could be justified, again to tide us over till better times return.
Realistically, there is not one major programme which could not be deferred till the ship is brought back into balance. “Without it Dunedin goes backwards.” News for you Dave, Dunedin is going backwards now! and all your nonsense is accelerating the process.
“STOP!” You already are stuck with the one big “Tar Baby”, in the FB Stadium. If you think you can get that onto a ‘sustainable’ (that word again) footing without pouring vast additional capital into it then you are dreaming. Patronage is the proof in the pudding. It never has reached anything like a feasible level, and is actually in decline at the principal activity, rugby. It is being intravenously dripped to the maximum by around $8 million pa by Aurora now, and we are served notice that this could be in jeopardy due to DCHL’s situation. You have already upped the ratepayers’ input to $2m pa to supposedly shorten the payback period. The rent to DVL is heavily subsidised due to DVML’s inability to generate enough to pay out of revenue. If you look at the DVL reports it is treading water furiously. It has reduced its stadium debt from $146.6 million over four years to $138.586 million, and at the same time brought forward a ($13.656m) deficit. To me that looks like $5.642m backwards. That is notwithstanding capital call ups of the $2 million from the shareholder for the attempt to shorten the loan period. The directors of DVL have comfort in the knowledge that when DVL was established it was capitalised on the basis of 245,000,000 $1 shares, of which to date only 79,688,931 have been called and fully paid up. So you can see that 165,311,069 shares are still available to be called. Dave, you just don’t seem to realise the predicament which the ratepayers (shareholders) are in. That you believe that the FB Stadium can ever crawl out of the financial swamp is tantamount to your understanding of the position.
So, I wonder just how many good folk will be taken in by your ‘glib’ summary as outlined in the FYI bulletin? My guess, not many.
Porter says leaders must decide which customers they are serving and then work out what are the needs of those customers that the business is a “master” at fulfilling.
“We can be pretty good at some things, but what are we going to stand out on? Customer services? Product design? Customisation? Which particular needs of that set of customers do we really want to meet and what price will we ask?”
Leaders should decide what the value proposition is and how it compares with competitors.
“Because, unless we have a unique value proposition, unless we have different answers to these questions than our competitors, then we have no strategy. We are just competing on operational effectiveness,” he says…..”
The university / rugby / stadium would do well to look at that and ask how their “marketing” lines up with that sensible advice.
Tourists and other visitors do not come here for a stadium. Some come here to watch a game, a concert. Where it is held is of little importance. When it’s what they want to see – it’s what they want to see.
Over-filling accommodation and eats and drinks venues once in a while is poor business. It’s a big boom, long bust strategy. It’s temp staff working their guts out, then days and weeks, possibly months, of having short hours and thin paydays.
Amusements as an attraction to students is likely to attract young people who are more interested in prolonged privileged adolescence than the quality of the teaching and research available. Fostering these people as bar clients is an effective way of parting them from their money, at some cost to the rest of us in terms of messy antisocial behaviour, and isn’t doing them any long-term favours. We have seen something in the drive to cater to students, that is not unlike the cynical placement of disproportionate numbers of pokies in low-income suburbs.
Dunedin, March 2010. Benchill (Wikimedia Commons).
### ODT Online Fri, 3 Jan 2014 Streetlight ideas from US trip
By Debbie Porteous
Seeing the bright lights of some major American cities has given the man responsible for a street lighting revolution set for Dunedin some solid ideas. Dunedin city council roading maintenance engineer Peter Standring went to the United States last year to look at different technologies and visit cities that have started updating their street lighting. Read more
Puzzled. The news story says Peter Standring went to USA.
But lower down, it says (our emphasis):
“Los Angeles was in many ways the world leader in the procurement, installation and development of LED technology, and the group was “very lucky” to have had one and a-half hours of Mr Ebrahimian’s time, Mr Standring said.”
What group? A DCC group? (or a USA group he tagged along with?) What have we paid for? A 2013 trip for one person to Los Angeles, Durham, Racine, Chicago, Phoenix and San Francisco —or a trip for a group of staff and their wives?
Clarification, please.
****
[via Upstart Incubator (@UpstartDunedin) who tweeted at 9:29 AM on Tue, Dec 31, 2013]
### mckinsey.com September 2013 How to make a city great
By 2030, 60 percent of the world’s population will live in cities. That could mean great things for economic growth — if the cities handle their expansion wisely. Here’s how.
What makes a great city? It is a pressing question because by 2030, 5 billion people — 60 percent of the world’s population — will live in cities, compared with 3.6 billion today, turbocharging the world’s economic growth. Leaders in developing nations must cope with urbanisation on an unprecedented scale, while those in developed ones wrestle with aging infrastructures and stretched budgets. All are fighting to secure or maintain the competitiveness of their cities and the livelihoods of the people who live in them. And all are aware of the environmental legacy they will leave if they fail to find more sustainable, resource-efficient ways of managing these cities.
Explore six diverse initiatives aimed at making cities great places to live and work.
To understand the core processes and benchmarks that can transform cities into superior places to live and work, McKinsey developed and analysed a comprehensive database of urban economic, social, and environmental performance indicators. The research included interviewing 30 mayors and other leaders in city governments on four continents and synthesizing the findings from more than 80 case studies that sought to understand what city leaders did to improve processes and services from urban planning to financial management and social housing.
The result is How to make a city great (PDF, 2.1MB), a new report arguing that leaders who make important strides in improving their cities do three things really well:
█ They achieve smart growth. Smart growth identifies and nurtures the very best opportunities for growth, plans ways to cope with its demands, integrates environmental thinking, and ensures that all citizens enjoy a city’s prosperity. Good city leaders also think about regional growth because as a metropolis expands, they will need the cooperation of surrounding municipalities and regional service providers. Integrating the environment into economic decision making is vital to smart growth: cities must invest in infrastructure that reduces emissions, waste production, and water use, as well as in building high-density communities.
█ They do more with less. Great cities secure all revenues due, explore investment partnerships, embrace technology, make organisational changes that eliminate overlapping roles, and manage expenses. Successful city leaders have also learned that, if designed and executed well, private–public partnerships can be an essential element of smart growth, delivering lower-cost, higher-quality infrastructure and services.
█ They win support for change. Change is not easy, and its momentum can even attract opposition. Successful city leaders build a high-performing team of civil servants, create a working environment where all employees are accountable for their actions, and take every opportunity to forge a stakeholder consensus with the local population and business community. They take steps to recruit and retain top talent, emphasise collaboration, and train civil servants in the use of technology.
Mayors are only too aware that their tenure will be limited. But if longer-term plans are articulated — and gain popular support because of short-term successes — leaders can start a virtuous cycle that sustains and encourages a great urban environment. Link to source
*Image: commons.wikimedia.org – Central city view of Dunedin, New Zealand, at night from Signal Hill lookout. The dark horizontal band above the centre of the photo is the Town Belt. Some landmarks including First Church of Otago and the Dunedin Railway Station are visible near the centre. Photo by Benchill, 9 March 2010.
MOSGIEL-TAIERI COMMUNITY BOARD
Discretionary funds: Conflicts of interest? Accountability? Rort?
”They provided no quotes for what they say they need funding for, and other applications, like the BMX track at Outram, we asked them to go away and come back to us with quotes before we could grant them the funds.”
–Brian Miller
### ODT Online Sun, 23 Jun 2013 Member calls his board a shambles
By Tim Miller – The Star
A member of the Mosgiel-Taieri Community Board says the board is a shambles and has abdicated its responsibilities in giving money to a community group last week. Brian Miller believes the granting of $4500 to the Taieri Community Wellbeing Strategy Group, which aims to promote the Mosgiel and Taieri community, meant the board was handing over its responsibilities to an unelected group. Other community board members spoken to by The Star said the board had done nothing wrong and worked well. Mr Miller said the group would overlap the responsibilities of the board and its funding application did not face the same scrutiny other applications did.
”This would be the worst board I have been on. It’s a shambles.” The group had an unfair advantage because chairman Bill Feather and board member Teresa Christie had been working with it behind the scenes, Mr Miller said.
Board member Martin Dillon also voted against the funding. Mr Dillon said he had issues with the way the funding application had been made, but had no problems with Mr Feather and Mrs Christie being part of the group asking for funding. Read more
*Teresa Christie is the wife of Otago Chamber of Commerce chief executive John Christie.
Kobus Mentz – Profile
Director of Urbanismplus, Kobus is one of the leading sustainability-based urban designers in Australasia. He has significantly contributed to change in urban development practices in the region, leading the field through his delivery of demonstration projects, publications, professional training, regeneration strategies and some of the first spatially-based sub-regional plans. Trained as an architect with post graduate qualifications from the Joint Centre for Urban Design, Oxford, he draws from considerable international experience that reaches across the UK, Australia, Ireland, China and Africa. Kobus is adjunct professor of the University of Auckland’s Master of Urban Design. He has also delivered extensive urban design training for professionals and council staff. Urbanismplus has received numerous national awards for its growth planning, professional training, regeneration projects, transport specific urban design and design guidelines.
### nytimes.com March 1, 2011
Commercial Born of 9/11, an Effort to Rebuild Shattered Haiti
By Julie Satow
Just four days after 9/11, James P. Stuckey, then a vice president of Forest City Ratner Companies, met with executives of Empire Blue Cross Blue Shield at Forest City’s headquarters in Brooklyn. Empire had been the fourth-largest tenant at the World Trade Center, and the shell-shocked executives were already thinking about new offices. Mr. Stuckey promised them a building in 18 months, even though, he said, “they didn’t have any floor plans, they didn’t know who had sat next to who, or even where much of their staff was.”
“Based on a handshake, we started to pour the foundation,” at the MetroTech office plaza in downtown Brooklyn, said Mr. Stuckey, who in 2009 was appointed a dean of the Schack Institute of Real Estate at New York University. Soon after he assumed the position, he said, he started to think how he could teach students the lessons he learned after 9/11.
The result was a course on postcatastrophe reconstruction, now in its second semester, where students devise building plans, work on environmental and social issues, and create financing models for real-world projects. Read more
Delta needs more
![Dilbert 19.1.16 by Scott Adams Billion dollars. [Stuff.co.nz]](https://dunedinstadium.files.wordpress.com/2016/04/dilbert-19-1-16-by-scott-adams-billion-dollars-stuff-co-nz.jpg)
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What if? Dunedin... 