My Account
Targeted rate for road sealing
Beth Houlbrooke’s comments (MM September 12) trying to blame Auckland Transport (AT) for the decision to remove provision for road sealing from the Targeted Transport Rate (TTR) will come as a surprise to many who had not heard this argument before.
The suggestion that the Rodney Local Board (RLB) should not have full decision-making authority over how the money was spent, because that would conflict with what AT wanted, will be appalling to those who think that the RLB, not AT, should set the priorities for what AT does with their money!
While most people understand that the Local Board gets little discretion regarding what Auckland Council deems is fit for Rodney, the application of local Targeted Rate monies is one area where local boards have control. In its June 2018 response to the Local Government Commission, Council commented that the Targeted Transport Rate in Franklin was a reason why they had progressed road sealing and Rodney had not.
To then turn around and take the Targeted Transport funds and Regional Land Transport Plan (RLTP) funding away from Rodney’s promised road sealing is Council hypocrisy; and it flies in the face of the local sentiment of voters whose majority did not even support the TTR in the first place, given we were also being hit with a Regional Fuel Tax.
The Rodney Local Board’s original recommendation in 2018 that seal extension be taken out of the targeted rate allocation was conditional upon the additional RLTP funding being provided. As Council has now confirmed, they could readily have honoured their conditional approval by reallocating TTR funding to seal extensions (and deferring other pet projects) when it became clear the RLTP was not going to provide for Rodney road sealing.
Yet the Local Board majority decided that supporting Council’s urban transport priorities was more important than representing the wishes of the voters of Rodney. It’s now up to Rodney voters to decide if they will continue to support this approach, or vote for people who will work with our Councillor to truly represent Rodney’s interests.
William Foster, Leigh
Pull the other one
Recently, current city councillors Greg Sayers and John Watson indicated they had no idea that Unify New Zealand was tied up with the Voices for Freedom anti-vaccination group or other conspiracy theorists such as Freedom New Zealand. However, they chaired or spoke to meetings reported in Mahurangi Matters on several topics including co-governance, as did the political opportunist Winston Peters.
They accepted payments to speak from this group. Now they claim they had no idea about the groups Unify NZ was associated with, although they appear prominently on the Unify NZ web page. Seems unlikely seasoned politicians such as these would accept speaking engagements and take payments without knowing who they were dealing with.
An old expression many readers will recognise springs to mind, “Pull the other one, it plays jingle bells”.
Neil Anderson, Algies Bay
Greg Sayers responded: No, I did not receive any payments from them [Unify NZ]. I also have no affiliation with them. I am [happy] to MC any locally based apolitical group who asks me to, the most recent one being the Neighbourhood Support AGM.
John Watson responded: There was no agreement made with Unify NZ for any payment of any sort before or after this meeting. I appeared at the meeting because I hoped my experiences as an Auckland Councillor with the Hauraki Gulf Forum and its attempts to turn that entity into a co-governed authority with expanded powers while at the same time formally incorporating 21 of Auckland’s regional parks into the Hauraki Gulf Park, might be of interest to the audience. At the end of the meeting I did receive a ‘thank you’ card which I did not pay much attention to at the time. When I did look at it the following day, however, there was in addition to a kind message of thanks signed by a number of people, a $100 note to cover ‘petrol costs’.
