Tell us your thoughts

Will Mayor Nick’s ‘‘tough budget’’ dispense with her services and save us from future wasteful spending? If the Dompost report is to be believed the answer is no. Instead we are to fund a programme of future expense designed to increase the city’s population when past experience has demonstrated that this leads to rates increases above inflation.

We already have failing core infrastructure. How will a 20 per cent increase in population affect that? Is this new plan in the LTP, yet to be released for public input?

BRIAN COLLINS, Papakowhai Editor,

It’s completely understandable that some people regard the proposed reductions in council services as significant but I think your correspondent Anne Perry is exaggerating them.

The council has listened to the Porirua community and made some savings to all its operating budgets in the proposed long-term plan. At the same time we have either held or significantly improved infrastructure investment. It’s now up to the community to tell us what you think of these changes.

The rate increase for the next financial year is proposed at 3.2 per cent and the ones following it 3 per cent and 2.9 per cent respectively, still higher than many are comfortable with.

Ms Perry suggests the world as we know it will come to an end if these reductions are made and I do agree that residents will feel the effects of some of these changes, but for a council to spend less, it needs to reduce the level of the services it provides. We have taken the message from residents that they want to see greater restraint in council spending and operations. Now tell us if we have the right balance.

I know that other residents will be a lot more constructive and positive than Ms Perry in their contributions to the plan. To make a submission please visit the council’s website pcc.govt.nz or call 237 5089, the council office or Porirua Library.

NICK LEGGETT, Mayor of Porirua marked deficit in that department it doesn’t take an Einstein to know that labelling Porirua P-town merely fixes what most people outside and a lot inside, already think the city has become.

You’ll get your 10,000 extra people all right but they will stretch the region’s police.

I guess the $50,000-plus Porirua citizens paid to send you and Barbara Bercic to some backwoods state in the US to have them sign a certificate to say we’re a nice place to live, didn’t quite measure up to expectations. Have we quantified yet just what benefits did accrue? If you’d gone online you probably could have bought one for $6.50.

I’m tired of the hair-brained schemes your marketing manager comes up with. They cost us a lot and reap very little reward. And while we’re at it Ms Bercic, the flags on the bridge we paid $30,000 for, shredded before they were a year old; the replacements are ripped now too. But it’s not your money you’re wasting is it? MIKE DUNCAN, Titahi Bay.

(Letter abridged) See story, p2 - Editor. said, ‘‘septic tanks leak into Pauatahanui Inlet because of rising water levels’’.

Could Cr Baker advise how much measured rise there has been for the past 20 years and also quote the peer-reviewed source of this information? ALLAN BLOOMFIELD,

Pauatahanui.

It is important our planning, the assumptions councillors have adopted, and our systems and practices are energetically examined, especially challenging councillors on all aspects of their stewardship.

Council employees are not the enemy and should not be the target.

He has raised an important question at the heart of long-term planning: ‘‘Who should pay for the future?’’

That is why the council has collectively struggled to get the balance right across generations and is also why the Long Term Plan is so very important to a city like ours.

It’s called inter-generational equity. Maintaining and adjusting to the needs of the present population but maintaining a steady push for significant improvement for our kids and even the generation after that, is the sharpest point of why active participation in the consultation process is so important.

Andrew, please make sure you detail your concerns and take the opportunity to explain to us why and where we are wrong. However, do yourself and us a favour by checking the facts behind your concerns.

Whatever, I look forward to listening to you. Don’t let yourself or our city down. KEN DOUGLAS, Porirua city

councillor – Western ward