Support for children not just about playgrounds

I CAN sympathise with Julie Howard’s view that children are held in ‘‘low esteem’’ by the Dunedin City Council, if the only key to measuring our child friendliness is plans for playgrounds.

Our social wellbeing priorities meanwhile, particularly our drive to support warm and dry housing, has the health and success of our tamariki front of mind. As do our extensive education programmes run out of Toitu and the Dunedin Public Art Gallery.

It’s true that new play areas have been put on ice entirely, while our central city hasn’t seen any significant investment since before I started school.

In this year’s Longterm Plan the council committed to investing

$60 million in the CBD, and

$20 million to connect the city centre to the waterfront, and support its redevelopment.

I don’t see family friendly public spaces as mutually exclusive to this work, I see them as a key part of them.

We have a onceinageneration opportunity to rethink and redesign the city centre and the harbourside area for the needs of a growing 21stcentury city.

This will support local businesses, present and future, but also gives us the opportunity to consider what the heart of our city can offer our community beyond commerce.

The first round of public input into the design of the Central City Plan will kick off before Christmas.

I look forward to Ms Howard joining us for this critical conversation.

Cr Aaron Hawkins chairman, DCC Community

& Culture Committee

Predator control

IT’S important that as we strive to achieve a predatorfree New Zealand, we use methods that are humane as well as efficient.

The humane aspect of predator control is especially important, since all of us, even children, are being encouraged to take part in the killing efforts.

The PFNZ website provides good guidance, but it doesn’t mention the fact that pest mammals should be killed in ways that cause as little pain and suffering as possible.

We should be discouraging use of cage traps and leg hold traps, which are likely to be used by the general public because they are easy to deploy and often used by Doc personnel who club or shoot the trapped animals, but they are not methods that the untrained person should attempt.

I suggest that more people in the community would take part in predator control efforts if they could be sure that the methods they used were humane as well as species specific and efficient. Marjorie Orr

Dunedin

Wanaka parking

I SEE there is a proposal, one of many, to close off parts of two streets in Wanaka to vehicles.

It may sound and look romantic but that is the fastest way to kill off business. I travel the South Island on business and have yet to see a pedestrian street mall type setup that works. They definitely didn’t/don’t work in Christchurch and, with the largest population in the South Island, you would think if they were going to work that would be the place it would happen.

People in smaller towns (Wanaka being one of them) are accustomed to driving close to where they want to shop. If you make it difficult for them, they will go elsewhere.

That is one of the reasons that the large malls keep on expanding in Christchurch and why the ‘‘difficult driving and parking’’ in the CBD of Christchurch will ensure that it keeps happening.

It is difficult to get parks in the CBD area in Wanaka now and losing umpteen car parks to partial pedestrianisation will only make it worse. G.R. Woods

Geraldine