Stewart Hansen finds the recommendation to decline a resource consent for a new use for Dunedin's Loan Mercantile Agency Co Ltd building incomprehensible.
I'm part of the team operating the Wharf Hotel and I've been here for the past 14 months. I find it incomprehensible Dunedin City Council planners could recommend declining Russell Lund's consent application for the Loan Mercantile Agency Co Ltd building, which would breathe new life into what could become a derelict building.
Here's a guy prepared to part with some serious coin and do something positive and our planners say no. Really?
I have not received any negative comments from patrons of the Wharf regarding the proposed development.
Everyone talks about it and is all for it. I hear plenty of bad stuff about cycleways, though.
Seems the masses aren't so flash on cycleways.
''Reverse sensitivity''. What is it? PC rubbish. We choose where we live - eyes wide open.
After all, we live in a city where noise is a fact of life; it's all around us and the railway lines won't be going away any time soon, I bet.
We do not find noise an issue at the Wharf.
There is noise but it does not have a negative impact. We hear train horns and we hear traffic, none of which is intrusive.
The loudest noises are the sirens of emergency vehicles and the rescue helicopter as it passes overhead.
Dare someone to apply the ''reverse sensitivity'' approach to those.
Did not the council spend considerable money on the proposed Harbourside development?
Was not the Otago Regional Council planning to build new offices among all this?
The noise thing has not changed since those projects were rightly canned - pardon, revised.
We expect to hear a lot of noise from Mr Lund's development as it happens, but we're grown up and understand these things.
We won't be applying ''reverse sensitivity'' to that.
And to those who would say I'm only protecting my own self-interest, sure the Wharf Hotel may derive some benefit by having apartments next door (we shall have to wait and see).
However, the hotel has been here a long time without adjacent apartments, and I'm sure we will continue to operate for a long time should our councillors make the mistake of not allowing the plan to proceed or impose draconian conditions that render the proposal impractical.
