The tortoise, the hare and the council
Fabled wisdom is that slow and steady wins the race. But you’d be hard put to find a scenario in which slow and unsteady prevails
And that’s a better description for what passes for progress as the Invercargill City Council (ICC) looks to restore some of its out-of-order assets.
The Southland Museum and Art Gallery, Anderson House, and the water tower, for instance. All closed on the basis of infrastructural unsoundness, awaiting either the rapture of engineering redemption or merciful release through the the civic version of assisted dying.
Some would counter this by pointing to the approach being taken to the CBD redevelopment project – which has been criticised from some quarters for being altogether too headlong.
Arguably. But in any case the present giddy-up mentality of the joint venture developers ICC and H W Richardson Group to this task needs to be seen against the decades of wretched inertia under which inner-city buildings fell into repellent decrepitude.
For individual property owners to invest mightily in the expensive business of redevelopment – if they could even afford it after so many years of lowish income – may well have been for the collective good of the city, but the economics for them personally were dodgy and they knew it.
And all the more so when they couldn’t be confident enough of their neighbours would do likewise to have the overall transformative effect necessary.
So yes, the more coherent and collaborative public-private approach now being pursued has long been sorely needed.
But elsewhere, and most recently, a particularly sorry instance of that rotten slow-andunsteady dynamic has emerged in the ICC’s management of its (we grant you still quite recently acquired) Rugby Park.
Repairs to unsafe western bleachers and to the toxic mouldafflicted offices of Rugby Southland and the Rugby Southland Supporters Clubrooms are now expected to be ‘‘significantly’’ higher than the estimated $387,000.
Expressions of displeasure abound. Expressions of surprise, not so much.
Even if we set aside the conflicting views about whether the mould problem is a problem of the scale the council insists it to be – there’s ample scope for reproachful questioning here.
Should we start with the reliability of structural reports before and since the council somewhat reluctantly took ownership of the facility in 2016, which was a year after it assumed responsibility for running it?
Or with some of the vigorous water-blasting under the council’s watch, which councillor Peter Kett says stripped away sealant leading to substantive damage?
Or the apparent lack of action after surveyor Roy Faris raised prescient warnings at a council committee meeting in 2016 about the state of the bleachers?
There has to be a lesson or two in that little lot.
Meanwhile, Rugby Park will open for another season. And at the risk of taking a glass-halfempty approach, we have to acknowledge that the closure of those bleachers will hardly mean thousands turned away. The park itself will, most likely, be far from half-full.
Crowd attendances at provincial rugby games have been going down the gurgler, the Highlanders aren’t bringing Super Rugby down here, and ambitions to broaden the usage of the park for other events have been at best spasmodically successful.
In fact it’s probably worth a get-together of key stakeholders – the council, NZ Rugby, Southland Rugby and Sport Southland among them – to form a clearer picture of what we actually need from the stadium in the future.
Crowd attendances at provincial rugby games have been going down the gurgler, the Highlanders aren’t bringing Super Rugby down here, and ambitions to broaden the usage of the park for other events have been at best spasmodically successful.