Different in Dunedin
While the Invercargill City Council and Southland Museum and Art Gallery trust board decided to close the museum, it is interesting to see how others cope with similar situations.
The Edgar Centre in Dunedin has been declared earthquake prone. It is just 10-15 per cent of the new building standard.
The acting general manager, Leanne Mash, of the Dunedin City Council told The Otago Daily Times the entire complex was also subject to varying degrees of subsidence, having been built on reclaimed land
Despite that, Ms Mash said the complex remained safe to use until the strengthening work could be carried out in 2019-20.
An immediate closure of the complex would be ‘‘an overreaction’’, she said.
‘‘I don’t believe people should be worried about going into the building.
‘‘It’s just like hundreds of other buildings around New Zealand that now need to meet these earthquake standards.
‘‘The risk is no greater now than it was 12 months ago.’’
The council would spend the next year refining the design for repairs, discussing the plan with user groups and seeking a contractor to retrofit structural steel to the building’s walls and ceiling. So if this building remains open with 650,000 people using it a year, including Southern Steel games, it begs the question why the museum is closed.
Does this show the egg on the faces of the ICC and Museum Trust Board members?
NEIL THOMAS
Invercargill City Council chief executive Clare Hadley replied:
Each employer and building owner must decide for themselves the level of risk they are comfortable to take.
Every person and organisation will have a different approach to risk.
With the Southland Museum and Art Gallery we considered four main factors:
1. Legislative change in the health and safety and building sectors
2. Expert engineering opinion and a peer review
3. Lack of a future plan at time of closure
4. A lack of funding
These factors meant that I, as the employer, and the SMAG Trust Board, as building owner, were not prepared to risk people’s safety by keeping the building open. If our ratepayers who voted in our elected councillors and mayor ever want to know how inept they are, just read the front page of The Otago Daily Times on Saturday.
Dunedin is faced with a far worse scenario with their Edgar Centre than our museum.
Their council have done the right thing by getting an assessment, which showed severe structural risks as their building was on subsiding land.
They are now doing the strengthening work while the building is still open, even though the centre has 650,000 visitors a year.
So, Dunedin did its homework on the building standards and are now remedying the issues.
All I see is that most of our councillors did not do their homework before deciding to withdraw staff and leave the SMAG trust with no option but to close the museum.
There are two other concerns about our leaders:
1. Mayor Tim Shadbolt states that he is terrified about leaving the museum open for the fear of dragging bodies out of the building. If he is not up for making the appropriate corporate decision, like Dunedin have correctly done, and he seems too dependent on his fears and the need to cover this poor, inappropriate decision, then he should resign.
2. While our leaders say the museum is closed for ‘‘safety reasons’’, how is it possible that 12 permanent museum staff remain working in this building every day, doing cataloguing work, if the building is so unsafe ?
Don’t be taken in by the raft of council and SMAG trust spin which is nothing more than trying to cover their ineptitude.
The next local body elections can not come quick enough.
NOBBY CLARK
Spokesperson
Invercargill Ratepayers Advocacy Group
Invercargill City Council chief executive Clare Hadley replied:
The council, in consultation with the museum trust board, is working to minimise the risk to museum staff who will be working on cataloguing the collection.
Access to the building will be required to do this because the huge collection is stored in the roof of the Pyramid.
Work is now being progressed on providing a safe workspace for staff outside the Pyramid structure and to mitigate the risk to them when they have to enter the building to access the collection.
With respect to Mr Shadbolt’s experience of being in a building that collapsed and killed colleagues, he was conveying the tragic real-life consequences of a building collapse. Clare Hadley in her reply to Max Skerrett (May 26) stated the ICC has ‘‘also committed $200,000 per year for the next four years to develop an interim museum presence, while the permanent museum is being redeveloped’’.
May I ask how interim exactly (or best guess) this ‘‘interim presence’’ would be? And where?
And to what ‘‘permanent museum’’ is she referring – to the established well-loved presence in the Pyramid, or to an ambitious plan to develop and enhance new attractions for their wannabe CBD?
JOHN HUNTER
Invercargill City Council chief executive Clare Hadley and Southland Museum and Art Gallery Trust board chair Toni Biddle replied:
Decisions about the interim museum presence will be made by the Southland Museum and Art Gallery Trust Board, which owns the collection. The board is currently exploring options for the interim museum to be located in the CBD.
The council has committed $200,000 per year for the next four years to develop an interim museum while the permanent museum is being redeveloped.
The museum trust board has already indicated that it sees the future of museum being at the current site in Queens Park.
The Trump presidency is living down to expectations. The man is exactly as diagnosed: sick of self-love and desperate for praise. If he gets praise, from whatever source, he rolls in it like a dog in a dead sheep. His cabinet meetings are Stalinesque, a prostration of lickspittles.
Trump promised to drain the swamp. It was a fine slogan. Here was an outsider coming to Washington to pull the plug. As the swamp waters sank they’d reveal the creatures that skulked there, the parasites sucking on the body politic, the slimy consultants and reptilian lobbyists, all of them drawn to the swamp by the twin baits of power and money. Exposed to daylight these creatures would shrivel and die.
Well ha, of course. Trump’s arrival thrilled the swamp. The dark waters swirled with creatures keen to feed. Some, Trump had brought with him. Others were long-term residents. One such was Elliott Broidy. He’d been hanging around Washington for years, finding ways to make money. He’d lobbied for corrupt governments. He’d been paid through the sort of Cypriot banks that money launderers favour. He’d been convicted once of bribery but had turned informer to stay out of prison. Over the years he’d made a fortune.
The Republican Party, the party of law and order, was so appalled by Broidy’s swampy record that they appointed him deputy finance chairman of their national committee. And alongside him on that panel of virtue they put Michael Cohen, now famous as the president’s part-time lawyer and fulltime fixer.
A month or so ago the FBI raided Cohen’s offices, took all his records. A few days after that, a story broke that Elliott Broidy had had an affair with Shera Bechard, a Playboy model. He’d impregnated her and then paid her $1.6 million to have an abortion and shut up.
Interestingly the deal had been brokered by Cohen, who’d brokered a similar deal between Trump and the porn star Stormy Daniels. The pseudonym that Cohen used for Trump was David Dennison. The pseudonym he used for Broidy was also David Dennison.
Even more curiously, within a day or two of paying off Ms Bechard, Broidy secured a one-onone meeting with Trump, a priceless thing for someone who touts their influence to foreign clients. And only a few days after that, most curiously of all, Broidy’s firm secured a $600 million contract with the United Arab Emirates. And it has since gone on to secure US defence contracts worth millions more.
Now, several American journalists have noted that the story of Ms Bechard’s pay-off makes no sense. Broidy is not a public figure, so $1.6m is a vast sum to pay merely to keep a story from his wife. After all it took only $130,000 to silence Stormy Daniels. Furthermore, Broidy has no history of sexual dalliance.
One who does have a history of sexual dalliance, however, and a proven taste for Playboy models, is Trump. So the story makes far more sense if it was Trump who had the affair. When Cohen’s offices were raided Trump knew the story would emerge and feared that the abortion would cost him the support of evangelical Christians.
So he sent out his fixer to find a fall guy at any price. Cohen tapped his fellow committee member and promised him wealth beyond his needs or dreams if he’d only confess to the affair. And thus Trump wriggled clear.
Is that how it was? Your guess is as good as mine. Mine is yes. And thus the world goes round.