Today's Letters to the Editor from readers cover topics including flooding concerns, Lake Onslow scheme and tenure review of high country land.
Eleven years after floods, enough is enough DCC
We write in concern of the fact that it is 11 years since the 2015 major flooding in South Dunedin/Surrey St. Since then, there has been another major flooding event and the rainfall of the past few days could have been another catastrophic event to the residents of these areas.
When will council see that enough is enough? Maybe it is time for the staff of council to be requested to come up with a decent mitigation toward solving this problem and if they do not, then restructure. Time for fresh ideas.
This is a health and safety problem which should not be ignored. The homes of people and their safety should be of paramount concern. This is not only the physical, but mental health which is impacted also.
Maybe the monies set for the rubbish dump at Smooth Hill could go some way to mitigating this risk on the health of our citizens?
Jennifer Thomas
Chairwoman/secretary, Dunedin Area Citizens Assn Inc
No to exotics
I live on Forbury Rd. No-one here asked the DCC to install fountains. I can only imagine that consent for this was granted when Hawkins was mayor.
If the DCC would in future refrain from all exotic projects and stick to core business they would do us a great favour.
Robert Wansink
St Clair
Over it
The temporary leaders of Dunedin really need to stop this “he said, but he said” ping-pong and focus on what they were elected for. Otherwise, this is going to be a very long and very tedious election cycle for everyone.
This includes, of course, those who are paying for them all to be there and those helping to spend our money uselessly on expensive litigious backstabbing, while claiming to serve the ratepayers.
Gosh and I thought the antics of a few of the last lot were as bad as it could get.
Pat Duffy
Opoho
Onslow ouch
Allan Leitch and Russell Garbutt raise concerns over aspects of the Lake Onslow pumped storage scheme (Letters 13.2.26). Various ecological, social and economic components of the scheme are covered in the many MBIE reports by the NZ Battery team.
A private consortium has now submitted the original proposal for possible entry into the Fast Track process. Consideration of the scheme is best left until the outcome is known.
Earl Bardsley
University of Waikato
Party hearty
Re Paul James Comrie’s suggestion (Letters 13.2.26) that we have a party to celebrate the arrival of the first humans 800 years ago. Certainly. Why not celebrate the arrival of the planet’s apex predator into an ecology that had existed and evolved in isolated peace for 80 million years?
When humans arrived things went downhill very fast for the resident life forms. Since then species of bird, insect and plant that existed nowhere else have vanished from the Earth and imported predators are doing their murderous best to exterminate what is left. By all means, let’s have a party.
B. A. Thompson
Weston
Fun for all?
Re the Running of the Lambs at the Southern Field Days. I do hope the lambs enjoyed it. I wonder if any thought was given to this?
Kay Hannan
Weston
Tenure review not all it was cracked up to be
Tony Perret (Opinion ODT 16.2.26), a former tenure review transactor, misleadingly portrays this process as an unqualified success, but in reality this process has been an abysmal fiscal boondoggle, resulting in termination of the scheme in 2022.
The process involved partitioning high country lease-hold land. The higher altitude lower value component was added to the Doc estate: the lower-altitude more valuable land was free-holded to the farmers.
As it was unbalanced exchange, this process enriched farmers at the expense of the taxpayers. This has been exposed by former Fullbright scholar Ann Brower in her acclaimed book Who Owns The High Country?
As the farmers received prime land, often suitable for residential subdivision, this was far more valuable than the land the Doc estate received.
She tabulates 16 properties where the runholders receive in aggregate almost $16 million more than the Crown.
As Jeanette Fitzsimmons opined, “bureaucrats have fleeced New Zealanders of biodiversity, access, land and money”.
Ian Breeze
Broad Bay
Address Letters to the Editor to: Otago Daily Times, PO Box 517, 52-56 Lower Stuart St, Dunedin. Email: letters@odt.co.nz
