By Andrew Bydder
The sleepy leafy suburbs of quaint conservative Cambridge were torn apart by Waipa District Council’s infamous BLUE BLOB.
Residents awoke to the local newspaper’s report about a new bridge location shifting the town’s main arterial route through their back streets. There was no prior notice, and the exact details were covered by a large blob of blue over a map, but the council was adamant that this was it. So adamant that they described four options of their own invention with no public input, selected their preferred one, and gave the residents a choice between Option C and…, no that was it, just Option C.
Victoria Bridge, one Cambridge’s existing bridges.
The Local Government Act Section 82 requires consultation according to the following principles:
“(a) that persons who will or may be affected by, or have an interest in, the decision or matter should be provided by the local authority with reasonable access to relevant information in a manner and format that is appropriate to the preferences and needs of those persons…
…(e) that the views presented to the local authority should be received by the local authority with an open mind and should be given by the local authority, in making a decision, due consideration”
The Council utterly failed to comply with the law.
The decision to proceed with Option C had already been made. The finer details could be up for debate, but any chance of the logical alternatives on the outskirts of the town would not be considered.
The blue blob created confusion over which particular streets faced massive disruption from roadworks (including losing verges, trees, and street parking that create Cambridge’s character), bridge construction (including demolition of river-front houses), and resulting 100-fold traffic increase (noise, safety and pollution issues). Instantly, nobody will risk purchasing a property anywhere near the blob. At least 100 families were now trapped with their major asset devalued. At a conservative estimate, this is $50 million in losses. The human cost is greater.
Waipa District Council has a history of consultation failures.
Like many councils, they took the bribe of taxpayer funds to implement Innovating Streets, Waka Kotahi’s Labour-inspired anti-car fiasco. The deliberate interference with the daily commute was done without any public consultation. The feedback was harshly negative, forcing the removal of most of the interventions. One example was painted dots through several intersections with the stated purpose of distracting drivers so they would slow down. The concept of distracting drivers is usually regarded as a serious safety hazard to be avoided at all costs. This was insanity.
In 2022, the council tried to ban dogs at a dog park. The consultation was conveniently left off the annual dog registration letter, hidden several layers deep on the council website (who checks that regularly), with a single week for feedback. I stumbled across it and alerted many dog lovers. Again, the feedback was harshly negative. The council justified the ban as being culturally sensitive to Maori. This was simply a lie. Apart from the fact that Maori had kuri (dogs), I had a consultant report from two years earlier when the land was identified as a good site for a council building. The secretive attempt to ban dogs was to make the land available for their ulterior motive.
The council admitted fault, apologised, and then undertook new consultation via an on-line forum so that most of the retired dog lovers (e.g. most of Cambridge) didn’t know how to access it.
Given this history, public feedback to the Blue Blob was angry. We have had enough.
The backlash again caused the Council to backtrack. They are slow learners, one may even say retarded, from the original French for slow.
A public meeting was hastily arranged for fifty people. Five hundred turned up. But key council staff members didn’t, leaving the Mayor, Susan O’Regan unable to answer questions, strangely reminiscent of Hamilton’s Deputy Mayor declaring she didn’t know much about 20 minute cities in a similar setting. Like that meeting, O’Regan departed quickly, leaving a furious crowd.
She later ‘apologised’ in a letter but spent most of the words blaming the public for the failure.
To add insult to injury, the council made the decision to drop the blob in a Public Excluded Workshop. Local ratepayers have been complaining for years about the secrecy of such meetings, and the Ombudsman had recently concluded that the council is not allowed to make decisions in such workshops.
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