Public opinion thwarted

On April 26, Mayor Gurunathan confirmed at a KCDC council meeting that “the council wants the markets across the district to succeed”. Most (49) public submissions to the council’s Long Term Plan related to fees and charges under the Food Act 2014, which everyone agrees has implications for the continued success of the markets. Forty-six of the 49 had “direct concerns about potential impacts for market stall holders” and only two supported the fees proposed.

These facts are in published minutes on the KCDC website. What has not been published on the website, but we learn through a letter in your paper of June 13, is that on May 18 the mayor used his casting vote to introduce a new charging regime that a community board representative says will “severely hit some local market stallholders”.

That the mayor should use a casting vote to thwart majority opinion in public submissions was unconscionable. One can only wonder whose interests he was representing, certainly not those of the community or democracy.

Waikanae stallholders tell me the KCDC procedures and charges are more stringent and higher than any other council in the lower North Island and a number say they will withdraw from the market which attracts hundreds of people every Saturday.

That will be a huge loss to the community and the only beneficiaries will be the high-priced supermarket duopoly, whose interests our local MP Nathan Guy was presumably fostering when he introduced the Food Act 2014 that began this whole nonsense.

DAVID BARBER

WAIKANAE