The Dunedin City Council's economic development committee yesterday voted to replace some of the city's ageing decorations with "Christmas-themed banners" for this year's festivities, because of budget constraints and concerns about their appearance and safety.
The move means 45 Christmas-themed frames featuring Santa Claus, candles and holly will be scrapped, although the central city's Christmas tree, garlands and stars will be spared the axe this year.
Banners will instead be hoisted above main streets in Green Island, Caversham, Port Chalmers, Waikouaiti, Karitane and Middlemarch, and will replace older decorations in South Dunedin and Mosgiel.
However, Cr Neil Collins criticised the move yesterday, suggesting the banners lacked "beef" and blaming the tatty state of the city's festive spirit on a "rather miserly" $50,000 decorations budget allocated by the council.
He suggested Taylormade chief executive Ian Taylor be contacted to see if alternative, high-tech - and possibly cheaper - solutions to the city's decorations gap could be found.
"I would like to see Dunedin look a wee bit more like Christmas at Christmas."
Cr Paul Hudson agreed, believing it was too late to find a better solution than banners for this Christmas, but that holograms designed by Taylormade could be "very, very effective" decorations in the longer term.
Councillors also needed to consider increasing the budget allocated for Christmas decorations, he said.
Mr Taylor was surprised to hear of the suggestion when contacted yesterday, saying no approach had been made and that such a project would be difficult and expensive.
"Holograms are a decidedly tricky area," he said.
"There might be ways to do stuff but I think it would be expensive and there would be quite a lot of development. It would be challenging."
The decision to hoist banners in the city this Christmas followed criticism of the city's decorations last Christmas.
Council marketing and communications agency manager Debra Simes told yesterday's meeting many of the city's decorations were "starting to look tired", to the extent they could not be repaired and reused.
DCC events manager Marilyn Anderson said some of the city's decorations were now in such a bad state that they were considered a threat to public safety.
