Give them a gate!
The residents of Ahipara’s kauma¯ tua flats are not moaners. At least the two the writer met last week aren’t. And, typical of their generation, they are prepared to help themselves if their landlord can’t, or won’t. But they shouldn’t have to.
Pat McPherson came to the Northland Age last week to say that she and her fellow residents had been preyed upon by thieves for a decade.
These sad excuses for human beings have a fairly basic modus operandi. They smash windows to get into cars that appeal to them, although they are rarely, if ever, rewarded for their endeavours. Taking the coins that they sometimes find seems to be beneath them, and if the plan is to actually steal a car, they have rarely, if ever, succeeded.
What they tend to do is leave broken glass everywhere, mangle ignition barrels, and leave their victims carless until repairs, which they can likely ill afford, are completed. Master criminals they are not, but an expensive nuisance they certainly are. And the residents have had enough.
So a couple of them went to their landlord, the Far North District Council, asking for a lockable gate on the Takahe St frontage. Not entirely surprisingly, perhaps, they were not successful.
One resident said the council told her that it couldn’t afford a gate, so she was talking last week about fundraising for one. A near neighbour said he knew someone who could make one in no time, if someone came up with the materials. But according to the response he got from the council, money wasn’t the problem. The issue, it seems is that a locked gate would make access difficult for emergency services.
That would certainly appeal to a bureaucrat. One might expect St John to despatch ambulances to blocks of pensioner flats more frequently than other addresses, although according to the tenant, that’s not been the case in Takahe St.
The fire brigade, just 100 metres along the street, might need to get an appliance through a gate in the event of a fire, although not necessarily. There is vehicular access at the rear, and the average firefighter probably wouldn’t have too much difficulty leaping over the front fence, hose in hand, in the event of an emergency.
There seems to be no evidence that pensioner flats burst into flames more frequently than other homes, however, and again there is no history of conflagrations that would be out of reach were a gate to be erected and locked in this location.
And a locked gate would hardly be a novelty. Gated communities are not uncommon, even in the Far
North, and they don’t seem to bother emergency services. Presumably those who might need access at any time of day or night have keys, and the same, surely, could apply at Ahipara.
The fact that two very different reasons were given to two tenants as to why a gate could not be erected smacks of someone grabbing for any excuse that would do, but neither reaches the required threshold. As the residents’ landlord, the council has a clear obligation to do whatever it can to ensure their security. Obviously it has been failing there for some time.
Ten years, in fact. And it should be much more willing to find a solution than it seems to have been thus far.
One would think that a council that prides itself on making the Far North a better place would do something, although the prime responsibility for giving the tenants the ease of mind that they deserve lies with the people of Ahipara.
No one knows who the cretins are, but it would be fair to assume that they are not yet fully grown, given that they have been known to get into cars by smashing the rear windows. That suggests they are kids. And if that is the case, where the hell are their parents?
Times have changed, obviously, since the time when parents tended to know where their offspring were, and what they were doing, 24/7. And when news of any misbehaviour, which once tended to be much less egregious than smashing their way into people’s cars, got home before they did.
Consequences probably varied in severity, but in the old days parents took misbehaviour by their children seriously, and could generally be relied upon to organise some sort of re-education.
Not any more.
If the Takahe St residents are anything to go by, some young people in their community have free rein.
And it is difficult to believe that their elders have no idea about what they are getting up to in the middle of the night.
It is unlikely, however, that breaking into pensioners’ cars is going to magically lose its appeal to those who are responsible, or that the people who brought these little tow rags into the world are suddenly going to become proper parents.
The best solution, unsatisfactory as it might be, would surely be to lock them out.
They’ll still be able to get into the parking area, but they won’t be able to steal cars, and, maybe, eventually they will give up.
It would not be especially difficult for some of the good folk of Ahipara to keep a watch on the units during the hours of darkness, if they wanted to do that, but that doesn’t seem to have occurred to anyone yet.
In the meantime, the council needs to think about its obligations as a landlord, and perhaps give some thought to how a gate can be erected as opposed to why it can’t. Landlords generally have come in for some very bad press over recent times, courtesy of a government that obviously holds them in very low regard, and this is an opportunity for the council to show that it takes its obligations to its tenants seriously.
And if the Takahe St pensioners are prepared to do the heavy lifting themselves to fix a problem that the council should have resolved years ago, so too is at least one Mangonui resident, who has come up with a solution to the potential for people to fall into the harbour from Waterfront Rd.
Retired dairy farmer Danny Simms was not alone in being appalled by the death of an 89-year-old woman who fell on Tuesday last week (although the cause of death is not yet known), and a second mishap, in the same location, 48 hours later. In that case the woman, a visitor from Auckland, got away with a soaking and abrasions, suffered as she was helped back up to the road.
Simms has now erected the first section of what he calls a stumble fence, a basic wooden structure than he plans to extend along a short section of the nib wall from the southern end of the Neva Clarke McKenna Boardwalk to the end of where vehicle parking is permitted.
He’s confident that that will reduce the risk of falling significantly. The question is, will he be allowed to build the fence without a resource consent, public consultation, peer reviewing of his design, an engineer’s and tsunami reports, testing of the materials and an assessment of the construction of a very simple structure to ensure that it doesn’t add to our collective carbon footprint and global warming?
The sceptic might have some doubts.
The options seem to be a quick, simple solution that will cost ratepayers very little, if anything, and might well save lives, or a properly designed and consented structure that will cost a fortune and take five years to erect, if it’s fast-tracked.
Like the desired gate in Takahe St, the solution at Mangonui might not be as simple as it seems.