Is council on firm footing with its strategic plan?

I READ the front page of this morning’s Otago Daily Times (11.9.18) with mounting disbelief.

It appears a strategic plan is contemplated, whereby any attempt to build a residence on land considered to be floodprone, of doubtful stability or subject to liquifaction in the event of an earthquake, will come up against so many obstacles as to make our already userhostile ‘‘compliances processes’’ look like child’s play.

The composition of the land under South Dunedin, as we all know, was that of swamp, going back to a time when only a narrow sliver of sandy beach, saved the peninsula from the status of an ‘‘island’’. South Dunedin, and other lowlying areas, were elevated by means of spoil resulting from the levelling of the central city area, carted and dumped over the harbour edge by dray. That is the limit to which much of the foreshore area was originally consolidated for building, highlighted briefly in the public awareness some years ago by an investigation by civil engineers, Hadleigh and Robinson. As I recall, they recommended, in the area of the wharves fronting the basin’s north side, a limit on future construction to two storeys, to preserve a low enough unit loading for the fragile building platform in that and presumably, most of the rest of the reclaimed area.

And now, it seems, a piece of sheer and unnecessarily ostentatious extravagance is contemplated, longterm, in an area of identical substrata composition, on land equally prone to all the maladies that those contemplating building a residence require to be protected from. Insubstantial building platform, exposure to rising sealevels and liquifaction, as if building a stadium on land of similar composition had not already been enough.

That seems to me, a scenario for a future ‘‘Flight of the Investors’’ and a very expensive hole in the ground, which all stakeholders will have been thankful to have been able to ‘‘walk away from’’ unscathed. Except, that is, for city ratepayers. Ian Smith

Waverley ...................................

BIBLE READING: . . . if we love one another, God lives in us and His love is made complete in us. — 1 John 4:12.