Chess is Coming!

Urban Planning in Curitiba, Brazil

In the pages listed to the right of your screen, you can see an entry Urban Planning in Curitiba, Brazil. This city has been at the forefront of cities trying to find new ways to deal with growth while at the same time maintaining a human scale.

It has been suggested to me that Rangiora is a small town  with small-town problems trying to find big-city solutions.

What do you think?

The Dudley Pool Fundraisers Keep Rolling On!

Yet another Dudley Aquatic Centre Fundraiser happened last night with the dance at the Chervier Centre at the Rangiora Catholic Church.

A good crowd rocked to the music of Barock until well after midnight – another impressive event organised by the Community Fundraising team.

You can keep up-to-date on coming events by checking the blackboard on our fence at the corner of High and King Streets, Rangiora.

Spending One’s Life at the Council …

Sometimes, my family must have wondered where my home is.  Marilyn and I will have been married 40 years next week – and come November I will have spent 20 years as a Rangiora or Waimakariri councillor.  Hmmmm.

This is why I can relate to this very funny page about an US senator on the American humour website The Onion:

http://www.theonion.com/content/news/congress_beginning_to_suspect

Accident Blackspots in Waimakariri

Where are they?

1. Pineacres Corner.  This is the most dangerous interesection in the District.  The problem is not the merging on the west side, as many think, but the failure of traffic exiting from Williams Street (i.e. coming from Kaiapoi) to give way as it turns right towarsds Woodend.  The police have been giving out a lot of tickets recently to people failing to observe the STOP sign – and many of those drivers are older people.
2. Percival Street – Queen Street intersection, Rangiora.
3. Williams Street – Smith Street – Beach Road intersection, Kaiapoi.
4. West Belt – Oxford Road intersection, Rangiora.
5. Lehmans Road – Plasketts Road – Oxford Road intersection, Fernside.
6. Plasketts Road – Johns Road intersection, Fernside.
7. Rangiora-Woodend Road – Tuahiwi Road – Boys Road – Harris Road intersection, Tuahiwi.

Alfred Street Remains Closed – Council Decision

This week, the Waimakariri District Council decided to keep Alfred Street closed.  They decided:

Lets the closure of Alfred Street stand in the meantime and develop a long term plan for Rangiora and from that decide the future form and function of Alfred Street.

Requests staff to bring back to Council a wider strategy report on the Rangiora Town Centre before any enhancement takes place in Alfred Street.

There are a number of problems with this approach.

1. Those councillors who voted for this ignored a petition of about 4000 people.
2. They passed up the opportunity to follow the same legal process to reopen the street that was taken to pedestrianise that portion of Alfred Street.
3. The “long-term plan” consultation process will be muddied by strong community feelings over Alfred Street – in other words, Alfred Street will be a diversion from more important matters (click on Rangiora’s Heart: What Needs to Happen?  in the page list on the right of your screen).
4. They have implicitly told the people of this District that in developing a long-term plan for central Rangiora, they won’t necessarily listen to those people.
5. They are going to do nothing until the plan is complete.  This will take at least a year and in my view is unlikely to be complete before the next local body elections in October 2010.  In the meantime, we can all look at those yellow bollards.

To me, it was better to get this issue out of the way by going back to the way Alfred Street was.  That is why I tried to persaude the Council to reopen the street.

I strongly believe that we need a long hard look at Central Rangiora – its structure, the appearance, the parking, the traffic, etc. because a strong retail centre is vital to Rangiora as a town.  See the following blog post.

But this week’s decision has made progress towards that harder.

Rangiora’s Central Business District: Let’s Do Something About It!

Something needs to be done about Rangiora’s Central Business District.

We need better planning so that we know where we are going to go over the next 20 years.

The planning needs to involve the entire community (that’s not just Rangiora residents) and it needs to be open.

To help get discussion going, my initial thoughts are in one of the pages posted on the right: click on  Rangiora’s Heart: What Needs to Happen.  

Envirocomp Opens Nappy-Composting Plant

Karen and Karl Upston’s Envirocomp plant is now up-and-running in Balcairn.

With funding from Huggies, this is a world-leading initiative to keep disposable nappies out of landfill – and they are a significant part of what goes into the likes of Kate Valley.

This morning, Environment Minister Hon Nick Smith opened the plant and within days the first nappies should be being processed.

The Waimakariri and Kaikoura District Councils are offering a $1 per week subsidy for those users of the service for the first six months of its operation.  The normal weekly cost is $5.

This is a great initiative and we can only hope that success and growth result.  It will be watched by many parties as the world continues to try to reduce the amount of waste it puts into the environment.

If You are a Farmer, Why Have Your Rates Shot up?

If you are running a farm – a conventional large farm – you have probably discovered a considerable jump in your rates.

The reason for this is that the Council has dramatically reduced the Uniform Annual General Charge (UAGC).  The result of this action has been to shift the rates burden away from low-land-value properties in the District to those with higher land values.

Part of the reason for this was to lessen the rates burden on small low-value urban properties, which were, in my view, paying disproportionately.

The problem is, however, the Council has not got the mix right.  It needed to reduce the UAGC, sure, but it also needed to move the rating to capital value rating.  This would have had a similar effect to lowering the UAGC, but instead of shifting the rating impact from low-value urban properties to high value rural properties, would have shifted the impact to high value residential properties and to high capital-value rural properties, mainly lifestyle blocks and the new dairy units.

In other words, the Council has got the rating mix wrong.