Dear John,This is to inform an aspiring entrepreneur like yourself what you probably do not want to read.
The Dunedin City Council does not want mobile traders; actually, it doesn't want small or medium enterprises either.
We managed to surmount City Hall's hurdles to establish our mobile book-selling business in 2002-03 at an annual licence cost of $143.
By 2008-09 this fee had risen to $180. In all that time we never had any DCC staff check out our van.
Our early entrepreneurial endeavours threw the council "kleptocrats" into such confusion about where in the city we could trade that it had to review its mobile trading bylaw after 35 years of neglect.
Non-food mobile traders do not attract the attention of environmental health/animal control managers, like mobile food retailers do.
Understandable I suppose. After all, a pre-loved book might poison a reader's mind, but an unhygienic hamburger could be fatal, eh?
Anyway, John, back in November 2003 a hearing was held to revise and update the city's mobile traders bylaw.
Besides us, the only other submitter was Warren Budge, of Dinkum Donuts, such was the public heat the issue generated.
DCC environmental health co-ordinator Ros MacGill was present.
She pointed out that "mobile traders did not face the same overheads as those in fixed stores".
We believed our mobile book-selling endeavour added a little pizzazz to the ambience of Dear Drear Dunners, a university town of repute.
Well, John, we found the supermarkets to their capitalistic credit accommodating in allowing us to sell books in their car parks on certain days.
By 2009, with advancing age, we found the winters too cold to trade and again approached City Hall for a summer five-month licence.
The reply from team leader environmental health Ros MacGill was to the point: "These conditions [mobile trading bylaws] are there to protect permanent shops that pay higher costs etc.
"Therefore your request to pay for only five months of the year is declined."
So we packed it in and moved the business to Palmerston to catch the passing tourist trade and we continued mobile summer trading throughout Otago and Southland at A&P shows, festivals, field days etc.
John, the story has developed an interesting twist. Recently in the ODT there was a large advertisement for personal training at the Moana Pool gym.
Fair go, I couldn't have hefted a feather for laughing.
After the concern the DCC held for small businesses, right in the readers' faces was our spendthrift council advancing its own business giving the other private enterprise gyms, of which there are about nine, a good poke in the eye!
It gets worse. The advertisement photo showed a male personal trainer; complete with "tats", assisting an attractive, lithe young woman to lift tiny weights in each hand.
Goodness, City Hall is a pretty reactionary outfit, but in an age when women can do anything and many have smashed through the glass ceiling, it is a most politically inappropriate image.
The advertisement raises a couple of questions requiring answers for the long-suffering ratepayers. Who approved the advertisement, and why is a DCC business brazenly competing with city small and medium enterprises?
So John, as you discovered, it is City Hall's heavy, unimaginative, bureaucratic hand that is extinguishing Dunedin's entrepreneurial spark.
I'll wager there is little chance of its economic unit setting the city's larger private enterprises on fire either.
Leaving aside its core services, it does raise the question of who is going to clean out Dunedin's government's elegiac Augean stable?
It is obvious the elected councillors don't run the council; rather, the staff does.
