What others do is their call
As an Invercargill City councillor and a representative on the WasteNet Advisory Group, it is sad that the Southland District Council and the Gore District Council are signalling that they may attempt to recover costs from the city council for what they see as a failed tender process.
And that the way forward as a shared services provider may be under a cloud.
I was not on the council when the city council voted to decline the WasteNet recommendation for the preferred tenderer, but I was a public activist regarding the need to retain Southland disAbility Enterprises as our recycling contractor.
What nobody seems to get is (i) that the city council should have consulted with its ratepayers before any tender went to the marketplace (the Local Government Act and ICC policy requires this); and (ii) the overwhelming public feedback in favour of retaining Southland disAbility Enterprises as a contractor should not be ignored by the city council, as that is the democratic process.
From what I’ve seen in the WasteNet meeting this week, I am not worried at all about the positioning of the other two councils.
WasteNet is funded by all three councils. I am comfortable that if the city council needs to contract with Southland disAbility Enterprises after its current contract with WasteNet lapses at the end of June next year, so be it.
The city council is financially well positioned, with its latest AAA+ credit rating, to stand alone in this contract if we need to.
I do not believe that any of our city council recycling will end up in a landfill. What the other councils do is their call.
My personal view is that the chances of either district council recovering their costs from the city council because they didn’t get the result they wanted, because the city council stood by its community and by those employed at SDE, is about the same as winning Lotto this weekend.
So, do not worry – the city council will work through these issues for you.
Nobby Clark Invercargill City councillor
But old age itself doesn’t equate with gloom. Apparently, the unhappiest years of one’s life are the early 40s. Go figure.
We don’t just want to be safe
Younger people are obsessed with keeping their parents/grandparents out of harm’s way. That covers everything from medical bracelets through to the right-to-die bill. Of course we want appropriate degrees of safety and reassurance, but much more than that, we want freedom. Freedom to take risks, choose dubious options, do things that make our kids gulp. ‘‘Give me liberty or give me death’’ has a special relevance when applied to the old.
We’re not unhappy
Hardly any of my peers resent being old. It’s novel. It’s interesting. It provides more humour than any years since puberty. Yes, we can feel despondent about discomfort and illness, isolation and apparent irrelevance. But old age itself doesn’t equate with gloom. Apparently, the unhappiest years of one’s life are the early 40s. Go figure.
We’re not grumpy
We simply value honesty. When the checkout operator intones ‘‘So how’s your day been?’’ while staring straight past us, we feel it’s entirely appropriate to reply, ‘‘I’ve got a lump.’’
We’re not physically slow
It’s just that the messages from brain to limbs have so many friends to visit on the way.
We’re not forgetful, either
We merely have a bigger data bank to scroll through.
We’re not deaf
It’s more that we like you to pronounce your consonants as well as your vowels.
We’re not a financial drain on the nation
We provide a quarter of New Zealand’s volunteers. Our tax give exceeds our benefit take. And we don’t necessarily prevent young people from getting jobs.
We don’t oppose change
Indeed, we’ve had more experience of handling it than you have. We’ve also been around long enough to have seen certain changes before, and to know they didn’t work that time, either.
We’re not set in our routines
(Subset of item above.) But more days are challenges for us, and one way you deal with challenges is to plan a way through them. If we’re having such a day, and working through the plan we’ve made to cope with it, and if that plan is suddenly torpedoed by something new and/or different, then we need time to recalibrate.
We’re not whingers
Years back, I asked a much older friend ‘‘How are you, Jack?’’ He replied ‘‘Good, apart from the usual aches and pains.’’ I was 50 then, and wondered what on earth he meant. Now I know. And it impresses me, it amazes me, that so few of my contemporaries ever mention the physical discomforts that attend them. If it’s any consolation to today’s 50-year-olds, you do learn to live with it – quite contentedly.