Aaron Hawkins, elected in 2019 as New Zealand’s first Green Party mayor, presented for Zero Carbon Ōtepoti Dunedin at this week’s Dunedin City Council long-term plan hearings at the Dunedin Public Art Gallery.
The Zero Carbon Ōtepoti Dunedin submission, he said, included 150 or so people who wanted "to be more ambitious about how we tackle the single biggest issue of all time".
Councillors voted 8-7 in January to remove options for a high-investment package ($100 million in capital expenditure over) or medium investment (more than $35m) to cut emissions in the draft nine-year plan consultation document.
Mr Hawkins said the zero carbon group, in response, built an online platform to make it as easy as possible for people to still have the opportunity to give feedback on those proposals, which were once expected to be part of the present process.
"The overwhelming message from submitters was for the city on all of our behalf to do everything it can to help us build a safer climate future together, and more importantly, that they are prepared to pay for it.
"There is no way any of the good options will be able to be funded by the city itself. It will require public money from government or elsewhere, and I think the city has a moral obligation if it’s to go and seek government funding or public funding for adapting the low-lying parts of the city to be doing everything within its own powers to be fixing the problem at its source."
The council has suggested it could cost billions to ready South Dunedin for the effects of rising groundwater and sea levels compounded by an increasing frequency and severity of storms powered by carbon emissions.
One of the councillors who voted to drop the emissions reduction spending from the council’s draft long-term plan, Cr Lee Vandervis, questioned Mr Hawkins’ assertion there was "growing local support for climate action".
Cr Vandervis said the high-investment package "involves a lot of cycle ways" and suggested there was limited support for investment in those either.
Deputy mayor Cherry Lucas, who also voted to drop the spending, questioned why the Zero Carbon Ōtepoti Dunedin website that was used to solicit submissions had not clearly identified who was behind it.
Some submitters on the zero carbon platform, including the Seniors Climate Action Network, appeared to believe they were submitting directly to the city council, she said.
Mr Hawkins said the way the group collected submissions was "certainly not perfect".
"But it’s unfortunate that it was left to community to build a thing, to ask the question that council didn’t want to directly ask its community.
"I think we have an opportunity, and Dunedin is incredibly well-placed, actually, from a mitigation point of view and from a zero-carbon point of view, to make good on the platform that we have built and the progress that we have made as a community who care very deeply about this issue."
