Mark Price decided it was time to pick on one of the critics, put him under the microscope and try to find out what makes him tick. The specimen he chose was the Otago Daily Times' most prolific letter-writer, Calvin Oaten.
The mere suggestion Calvin Oaten would feature in today's Otago Daily Times was enough to upset one reader this week.
"He is nothing more than a blackboard accountant, deficit-minded, mean-spirited pseudo-citizen," wrote the reader in an email.
High on Pine Hill, in a tidy brick bungalow, a silver-haired great-grandfather chuckles.
"It doesn't bother me. In fact, it interests me that people take that much interest to get so grumpy."
Calvin Oaten has been one of this decade's most consistent voices of complaint over the way the Dunedin City Council has done its business.
He has written 232 letters to the editor and 19 opinion pieces; and each one he has clipped, dated and pasted into two exercise books.
His first letter - hand-written and delivered by post - was written when Dame Sukhi Turner was mayor.
It lambasted the council for the "expensive and very soft settlement" with former chief executive Murray Douglas and complained of the "petulant, early removal of David Benson-Pope from council on a technicality".
"All this in one year leads to the inevitable conclusion that we are presided over by arguably the most naive and inept mayor and council that this city has ever had.
"The question is, can it get worse?"
He answered his own question then by saying yes it could, and he believes now things have "just got progressively worse".
"Every now and again I just read the paper and I read it and I think 'this is a bloody nonsense'."
Mr Oaten is no friend of the bureaucrat and, as the city's chief bureaucrat, council chief executive Jim Harland has a special place in Mr Oaten's rhetoric.
"We have been captured by Harland and not just by him. It's a culture, a bureaucratic culture.
"It's rife in the whole Western world and certainly rife in Dunedin. He [Mr Harland] restructured the whole place when he came, set up these senior management positions and he's peopled them with modern-day products of university academics.
"They come out with marketing and management degrees and they set up and they do all sorts of bloody wonderful things ..."
Mr Oaten, born in September 1934, was a child in a far different Dunedin.
When he went off to North East Valley Primary School in the first month of World War 2, he was given a cork to carry and some cotton wool.
Air raid drills were part of the normal school day and children were instructed that if the Japanese bombers came, they were to hide under a tree, and put the cotton wool in their ears and the cork between their teeth.
"Bizarre really. It was hilarious stuff when I think back," says Mr Oaten.
Like other Dunedin children, he also wore a strong linen label, "like a dog tag", around his neck carrying his name and address.
"It was for when you were found dead on the street. They knew who you were."
The bombers did not come, of course, and Mr Oaten went on to Dunedin North Intermediate, King Edward Technical College and then became an apprentice fitter and turner at A. and T. Burt.
He married in 1956 and had three children. His wife, Barbara, died six and a-half years ago.
He has lived most of his life in Dunedin - moving from North East Valley to Green Island to Opoho to Roslyn and now Pine Hill.
After selling out of his business in 1979, the Oatens bought a women's clothing shop, Lees Ladies Wear, in South Dunedin.
"We wanted to do something together."
Mr Oaten said ladies' wear "was never quite my thing - the old ducks ... didn't want to buy their bloomers from a bloke" and he mostly did the office work and made the tea.
However, the business worked very well for five years, until Minister of Labour Jim Bolger "sort of stuffed" South Dunedin by allowing Saturday trading.
Mr Oaten says South Dunedin had traditionally opened late on Thursday nights and Saturday mornings when the rest of the city had a late Friday night and shut for the weekend.
"So when the major shops in Dunedin started to open on Saturday morning, trade just disappeared from South Dunedin.
"Our business started to go down, so we wound it up."
For four years, the family lived in their favourite holiday location, Nelson.
"But, it didn't sort of fit. It's hard to say why, but holidaying in a place is not the same as living in a place. And we had lived here.
"After a period of time, you sort of know that's where you belong.
"It's where your extended friendships are and old relationships and family and what have you.
"Don't get me wrong. I love Nelson. It's a great place."
Tucked away in the corner of Mr Oaten's small kitchen is his personal computer, the means by which this unpaid, self-appointed critic now goes about his civic business via email.
"Why do I do it? I sometimes wonder myself. It's a hobby. I mean, I don't play golf and I don't play bowls. I'm just a grumpy old man.
"But, there's so much going on in this town. That's what irks me.
"And I keep getting back to this man Harland ..."
Mr Oaten believes the city has become totally beholden to consultants and that it is time for the return of an old-style chief engineer.
"We've got no in-house ability to assess what the consultants are doing for us, or serving us up with. And they've served us up with some bloody awful stuff."
He uses the issue of the damaged St Clair sea wall as an example of what he calls the council's "pathetic ability" to handle consultants.
"The consultants did it. They produced the design and supervised construction.
"It's their responsibility to put that right. And they never have. And it's obvious now they're never going to.
"So, who ends up the loser? We do. The ratepayers.
"We end up with a shonky job that's never put right."
Asked why he should be the one to be so concerned about such issues, Mr Oaten says: "Because I'm a ratepayer and it affects the welfare and the future viability of this city. Absolutely."
He speaks freely of people in prominent positions in the city who he believes manipulate affairs for their own ends.
However, among several theories offered to this reporter to illustrate his point, one about the identity of habitual investors in council bonds appears to have no basis in fact.
Mr Oaten says his concerns about council activity all come back to money in the end.
"There's a chain. If you spend a zillion on a sea wall, that's a zillion you can't spend on anything else.
"But, if you don't even get the proper sea wall, you've been doubly ... you know what I mean."
Mr Oaten stood unsuccessfully for the council in the Cargill ward in 2004 and 2007.
"Failed abysmally both times."
He also used to occasionally attend council meetings as a spectator, but no longer does so because of a hearing problem.
He collects council plans, papers and reports but is "pretty much ignored" by councillors and staff.
"I know by feedback that I sometimes annoy them. I get phone calls and the occasional letter from members of the public. Mostly complimentary."
Mr Oaten has firm ideas on how the council should or should not spend ratepayer money - "treasure"- and believes while it should facilitate economic development, it should not be financing it.
"There's a difference, I think."
He uses the 2000 example of the council buying land at Allanton for industrial use.
"They get the idea they can pick winners and spend any amount of money to do it. And they've done it consistently ever since and I just don't think it's ever paid off, really."
Mr Oaten classes as a victory the council listening to him about an attempt to set up an industrial development fund using borrowed money, something he describes as "a slush fund".
"It caught enough attention around the council table apparently that they had second thoughts and they decided `no, we won't borrow this money at all'."
He also considers as a victory for the critics the council's decision to abandon plans to build a hotel on its Moray Pl car park.
But critics have had less success halting the town hall conference centre development that began as a $14 million project and now is expected to cost $52 million.
"Ratepayers are going to be staring down the barrel of $4.2 million a year to run the bloody conference centre ..."
He believes the Forsyth Barr Stadium got the green light because of "apathy" on the part of the public and a "lack of understanding" on the part of councillors.
"The lazy buggers didn't even read the information. They just took on board what was told them and voted and laid down a few lines in the sand."
Mr Oaten talks of "jiggery-pokery" and "millstones" and "poisoned chalices" and believes Dunedin citizens have got "no idea" what they are being let in for.
"There's only fools like me that do this sort of work."
He considers the high debt levels will be Mr Harland's legacy.
"I put pretty much most of the bad happenings of the city over the last decade down to Harland and the acquiescence of a weak, pathetic council."
He is watching the new regime "with great interest" but believes it has "a well nigh impossible task" to meet the expectations of voters.
"The problem is, there's no money and the new guard is not going to be able to deliver without serious cost to the citizens.
"So, they'll end up getting blamed and kicked out in three years' time."
He plans to continue his critique of the new council.
"I wish them well."
