Waimea dam costs

D Crampton Nelson, July 4 So not even duly elected councillors are allowed to see details about the bill which Tasman Mayor Richard Kempthorne and his colleagues and staffers are planning to foist on ratepayers for years to come. Perhaps TDC really stands for the Totalitarian District Council! are so many empty buildings in Nelson? The reason is most of the CBD landlords, many of whom have no mortgage on their properties, are greedy and charge too much rent. The businesses cannot make enough to pay the excessively high rents, and go out of business. The floors above the shops are often left empty, too, instead of creating small, cheap, central city apartments for people to live in.

The landlords don’t mind having the odd empty building – they still have other properties that bring in money, and some losses can be used to offset the tax burden.

Even more worrying is that some of these greedy landlords want to bulldoze their properties and build a huge mall in the Nelson CBD with multistorey car parking. I think this would be a white elephant.

Come on you stale, pale males, (the landlords) – let’s make Nelson a vibrant, quirky, successful city with interesting local shops, markets, pedestrian areas, central city apartments, colour, life and light. Nelson could become an iconic destination that would draw people in from near and far.