Enthusiasm for university vision

Of course you are correct about Maori Hill but seeing that Kaikorai Valley is lower one could drive a tunnel under MH and then have a rising bridge, like Arthurs Pass, to meet the start of the Northern Motorway.
However judging from the angst arising from such suggestions, the Ranfurley Bypass remaining unsealed a perfect example, I cannot for one moment really believe a bypass is likely. Not enough people being killed on the city route for roading authorities to justify the huge expense.

How would Kaikorai Valley be connected to the motorway? Maori Hill is too densely built up and too high value for a highway to be constructed there, and the demographic is too articulate and high-status, they would not take this slowly and it would be a long bitter expensive fight.
One possibility is to go up Taieri Road, then round the back of Ross Creek reservoir to link up with Malvern Street, then there is the old road which joins the motorway this side of Pigeon Flat road. But that involves duplicating the current motorway, and there is a reason it was built to replace the old road.

Another difficulty is that when a bypass takes traffic well away from the main shopping centre there is sustained high volume yelping from businesses afraid of losing trade. It would be, as Sir Humphrey put it, a courageous move to take the main road away from the city centre.
And it would only reduce the traffic that was headed straight through in the first place. Most of the traffic on the streets through the university is local.

We go to work, schools, shopping, hospital appointments, entertainment, visiting friends, and back home again.
People from Green Island and beyond could use it, many already use Kaikorai Valley Rd to go between home and "town".
I doubt that it would be a useful substitute for what's there now.

Keep the through traffic, if there is much of it, out of the city by connecting the Kaikorai Valley road, suitably widened, with the motorway start in Pine Hill with an elegant road bridge across Leith Valley.

The University needs to stick to what it's good at and leave redesigning our State Highway to others. In other cities where decision-making is more rational, a state highway would be seen as a constraint to an expanding university. Here in Dunedin things like controlling costs and practicality are replaced by strange visions and an erupting volcano of DCC debt.

With Mayor Chin and his helpers being so easily persuaded by this loopy idea, it makes me wonder if the University is expecting a big favour from the DCC in return for their public relations assistance with the unpopular DCC Stadium project.
The decisions to build the One-Way System and John Wilson Drive are the only good decisions I can recall being made by our council in the last 40 years.

[Abridged]

As far as deciding how many people get a say over how rates are spent there's a good way to count the number of people - the electoral roll.

We do count the votes of students who vote along with anyone else who rents - which from the numbers above is about half of us. Renters are, after all, the people who pay the money that their landlords use to pay the rates on the house they live in. The idea that only people who own property are allowed to vote is something from medieval times that we thankfully got rid of.

I don't think that the number of voters who pay rates is a useful number for anything practical - it doesn't help calculate how the costs of something like the stadium might be shared across the city, nor does it help decide how people might vote rather than holding a referendum - the DCC's habit of mailing out questionnaires and polls only to people who get rates bills is sadly undemocratic.

Ok then. During the whole anti-stadium saga there has been many references to how many Dunedin ratepayers are in favour and how many against the edifice, but there has been no exact definition of "how many ratepayers?" I would still like to know how many people/properties are actually served with rate demands in Dunedin.I am assuming that a rate demand for a commercial property counts as one ratepayer, and that a private residence in joint ownership(the most common) counts as two ratepayers, and that indirect ratepayers such as students and hotel guests are not included as "ratepayers".Rental properties with a single landlord count as one ratepayer. So how many actual ratepayers are there in Dunedin ?

That was a typing error which should have been 56,000 ratepayers.

Remember there are several classes of ratepayers - commercial, rural as well as households.

50,000 ratepayers is a useful estimate for back-of-the-envelope calculations that have to do with the number of rates bills, as is 120,000 for the number of residents (when the student tide is in).

The actual number of 'people who pay rates' is probably a whole different thing with many private homes having couples who pay rates and other cases where rental properties are owned by a single landlord.

Wow that would be ugly - and not just a 'monorail' like the stadium, it would look like a bit like monorail too and provide lots of nice shade in the winter.
I think that keeping building in Dunedin to scale with both the buildings around them and the landscape is important - it's part of why the Uni wants to spread out rather than up - and there's definite tension there because of the limited space.

I have no idea on the "true number of rate paying households", but the number of privately occupied dwellings as of the 2006 census is 44394, with just under half owned by either landlords or family trusts. The information is available broken down into suburbs, along with all manner of other information at www.statistics.govt.nz

Close the streets carrying SH1 between Gardens and Albany St. Build a skyway highway over but parallel to Great King St.
Linking George St by an elevated roundabout.

Where do you get 156,000 from? I thought there is only 126,000 ratepayers in Dunedin. Does anybody know the true number of rate paying households? And I don't count a household as 2 ratepayers if it is in joint ownership.

The university doesn't pay rates. What they are now suggesting is an expansion that would turn even more central Dunedin land from rates-paying to non-ratable.
Doesn't this mean that owners of the rest of Dunedin property would have to pay more, making up for this reduction? The city's costs would have to still be divided among the actual ratepayers i.e. owners of property that is not exempt from paying rates.
While it will be good to see the university growing in strength, including a reputation for excellence and high standards, I cannot help feeling that more buildings, while giving the outward show of progress, are not what will deliver the best quality education.
Paying for, and providing conditions that will encourage retention of, the best quality teaching and technical staff should come first. While nice buildings form a part of what makes people want to stay in a job there are other things that make them want to leave. I'd like to see the university address those factors. A smart first step would be to find out what high quality staff really want and what they dislike, then get on with making OU, including the Medical School, into a place so good to work in that NZ's pay rates are not a discouragement.

Another University Vision = 156,000 ratepayers' nightmares

Don't get me wrong I'm not against the university expanding, I'm all for it, and it's not my rugby ground - although I'm all for someone else paying for it.

I also agree with most of what the university says in its plan - it's a great idea. I just worry about its practicality - can you think of a way to get SH1 from the Northern motorway to the Southern one, and Port Chalmers without going past the University? I can't - it either goes past it on one or more of George/Gt King/Cumberland streets or it goes under it or over it - and those last two sound very expensive. They're not making new land any more. Maybe the university should be expanding up rather than out.

However, reading the university's new glossy plan I think there's a bunch of hand waving around traffic - it doesn't seem to be that they've thought it through past "we'd like the land where the S bends are, they're a waste of space".

They are a waste of space - but they're the same waste of space that gave the University Castle St in the first place. So far they have some architectural drawings and some vague wishes about a unified campus - no plans to reroute traffic, no traffic modeling for now and the future, nothing scientific at all.

Of course, it may be that as I said below they know this is not palatable, especially in an election year, and they're softening us up for a future run on our treasury.

I don't think the university should be doing town planning for the city by fiat. If the university wants some big traffic change they should come to the table and pay for it themselves and get us to agree with it. Don't force it down our throats - talk to us, and if we don't like it make an alternative proposal.

We just built them a stadium - apparently they're one of the main reasons we built the thing. I don't really understand why they wont be putting a cent in to pay for its capital costs. We're now broke and need to be very careful with our money for the next decade until we pay this debt burden down.

Remember we have a water system that's about to fall apart and cost us a billion dollars and we need to be careful with our money. We should be putting it aside now - we're probably going to have to dig up each and every street and replace most of the pipes.

The uni can keep running with traffic on Cumberland St, but it will come to screeching stop without working water and sewerage.

When the city's largest employer starts talking about expansion, meaning more jobs and enhancing existing business, the citizens of Dunedin would do well to take note. Staff employed at this unversity pay a large proportion of Dunedin rates. You might not like it MikeStk, but more people means your rugby ground might actually get paid for. At least there is justification for what the university is proposing, unlike the whim that resulted in another rugby field.

I don't think the debate will be half as much as for the stadium. This proposal has commercial viability, and will create a large number of jobs. The stadium will do neither. Mr Chin seems to be confused: The people of Dunedin want prosperity, something the stadium won't provide, but the universities expansion will.

I think we're being softened up

The University is telling us that the traffic can't run through the middle of the Uni any more - they've said that the S bends have to go, they've written them out on their maps but without showing any real alternative, they all just look like dead ends - it's going to be the city's problem.

Just wait, pretty soon, we'll be told they'll take their ball and go home if we don't do something (but remember they can't, they're already home) - and a bit later there will be a wonderful plan, someone will announce that the sky will fall unless we build another $200m monorail, umm I mean tunnel under the Uni or similar expensive plan that the ratepayers have to fund.

I'm confused Mr. Chin. You say the university proposal will make the stadium debate fade into insignificance, or have you been misreported?
What debate? There is no disagreement on the stadium. The majority are in support of it. You told us so. That's why there was no need for the council to poll the ratepayers. Remember?