The time has surely come for the financially harassed ratepayers of Dunedin to stand up and take on the council bureaucracy and the elected members over the cost-plus mentality that rules supreme with the mayor, the chief executive and the excessively sized, paid and muddled senior management.
The Dunedin City Council is busy eroding the core community around which this fine city was built. The ODT has recently reported the impending closure of Greggs Coffee, reduction in Air New Zealand services and the assault by the DCC on sports clubs as noted by Football South’s Dougal McGowan.
I predict the DCC will go defensive and provide no discernible leadership in its efforts to protect itself from justifiable criticism.
Then we have secret-squirrel meetings of the resident DCC environmental activists who for years have achieved little more than the degrading of Dunedin nationally in pursuit of their causes. We need engineers, not activists; we need businesses, not an ineffectual and arguably a misnamed economic development unit.
And the bloated DCC wants to up rates by three times the inflation rate.
This is now the time for the DCC to look inwards at productivity, staff numbers and what is necessary and what is simply dream boating by unaccountable bureaucrats.
Start talking DCC to any ratepayer and the concerns are all the same regardless of background.
We have businesses born in this fine city that have moved out because the DCC is about the most unfriendly organisation to do business with, seek support from, and heaven forbid if you are looking for encouragement and enlightenment because you are simply in the wrong city.
And you can be sure some resident academic expert, knight of the realm or activist group will be all over anything that does not fit their hallowed self-imposed mandates.
In my lifetime I have seen Methven’s, McLeod Soaps, Aulsebrook & Co, Burnside, Fisher & Paykel, Fulton Hogan, Ravensdown, Cadbury, Wilkinson Callon, Shacklock, Kaikorai Woollen Mills, Mosgiel Woollen Mills and Miller & Tunnage close down or move out — and that is the tip of the economic iceberg.
What is more concerning is that Dunedin is seldom seen as a place to do business, so we see our locally domestic investors head over the border to be welcomed by local economies that have a sustainable future in mind and understand that wealth creation takes precedence over the wealth distribution being practised by a brain-dead town hall.
We need to take back control as a community and remind the DCC, who employs a staggeringly excessive number of staff, who we are and what our core needs are.
Remind the chief executive that that role is as a servant to the council and the community and we are not answerable to that person.
The alternative to not critically examining the DCC and holding it to account will see us further doomed to being a ghost town dominated by risk-averse people who cannot see past a ratepayer or taxpayer-funded salary.
• Ray Macleod is a businessman, engineer and economist who has lived in Dunedin almost his entire life.
