Worried about the future of historic church hall
NINA Arron and Frank Buddingh have nothing to smile about as they stand in front of the old St Patrick’s Church hall in Colonsay St, Lawrence, as the picture in the ODT (26.1.19) shows.
They bought this building and left it to rot. The timber exterior needed maintaining. They should have taken the $60,000 grant in 2012, from the Historic Places Trust, and used it to replace the roof.
This is an example of allowing people who don’t live here to buy properties and leave them to deteriorate, and lots of our history gets lost through this uncaring neglect.
This building had a category 1 listing with the Historic Places Trust.
The couple bought it in 1993 — that is a long time to leave a building unattended to.
I feel sad looking at this building. Does it have a future, or will it, too, be lost forever? Deanna Pedersen
Dunedin
[Nina Arron and Frank Buddingh reply:
‘‘Like Ms Pedersen, we also feel sad looking at St Patrick’s Church hall and school. Our intention has always been restoration and it is our inability to do so that has led to us placing it on the market.
Just to clarify, we are not foreign owners. We’re from Dunedin, overseas due to employment.
Heritage NZ has been a wonderful partner in the work we have completed including a preservation plan; a restoration plan; foundations; drainage and site work.
Heritage grants are partial reimbursements and the roof requires more than we can commit to. If we are guilty of anything it is having greater optimism than resources. Our hope is that Metro Realty will find a buyer able to complete what we have started.
It is easy to comment when looking in from the outside.
If Deanna Pederson would like to know more, we are happy to speak with her.’’]
Improving water
WATER quality affects everyone. We all have an input into it, generally negative, and a physical need for it.
We must reduce the negative input, and John Highton (ODT, 6.2.19) is partially right in his view of preserving upcountry tussock land, but to reinstate tussock land along Mill Creek, for instance, will not save Lake Hayes.
The capping of growth is also not the answer. We need to look at some of the main vectors impacting on water quality, namely agriculture and tourism.
Dairy is the main contributor to the degradation of water quality and that is driven by the longstanding policy of farmgate pricing which has stimulated the wide growth of dairy farms to remote areas of cheap land. Farmgate pricing does not recognise cost of collection and thus distorts the true cost of milk production.
If this was a valid economic pricing model, why not apply it to the distribution of petrol? Pump prices would be constant throughout New Zealand and the petrol companies would average out the distribution cost and factor this into the fuel costings. If dairy farms paid the true cost for collection and for water used, this would provide an effective economic cap to this sector. M. Barra
Cromwell