What is it about our local council that makes them need to appear so out of touch with their constituents?

Recently, there has been a large stoush in the chambers, with several councilors calling on Cr Andy Foster to resign over his refusal to accept the Cobham Park location for the new indoor stadium. “If he cannot accept the collective responsibility of his council, he should resign immediately,” says Cr Morrison – although maybe Morrison needs to read the rule book and realise that collective responsibility is governmental convention, and does not apply at local body level.

After a meeting between the parties, the Mayor’s office released a media release to ‘Seize opportunity on ICSC’. In essence, there will be more analysis done on the options that was missed out of the fast tracked process. However, the very last sentence is shocking: “I’m hopeful this will resolve Cr Foster’s issues once-and-for-all and allow the ICSC to be built at Cobham as soon as possible.”

This comes after a long run of statements from the Mayor, including the infamous (paraphrased, as I can’t find a link to the source) ‘we will build a second mount vic tunnel no matter what the submissions say’. And indeed we have seen a supreme reluctance to accept the results of public submissions. 80% of respondents to the Ngauranga to Airport study said they did not want a Basin reserve flyover, yet it has been passed through Council. Now, they’ve done it again.

The results of the ‘Restoring the golden mile‘ submission were released today, showing that 74% of submitters opposed having buses in the mall. So what does our council do – they look for reasons to ignore the results.

“Our take on the figures at this stage is this is more a pedestrian’s view of the world.”

Full disclosure – Unlike in the N2A submissions, I was one of the 20% who were very much in support of the proposal. However, that does not make it better that they are now planning on ignoring the majority that has spoken. I am fast losing all confidence in our city council.