Letters to the editor: No faith in the Tauranga City Council

Tauranga City Council. Photo / File

Just when you think that hopefully internal issues with the councillors will settle down, former deputy mayor and current councillor Kelvin Clout changes his mind over backing the current deputy.

Clout has withdrawn his signature from a joint letter with five other councillors to remove Salisbury, meaning a move to force a vote on the issue effectively fell over. This followed former deputy mayor Larry Baldock resigning after the same type of letter was written by the six councillors.

In my opinion, this makes the Tauranga City Council look increasingly dysfunctional.

Following on from the Phoenix Park overspend, the Greerton lights debacle, Durham St's massive overspend and abandonment of the Harington St carpark building surely this can no longer be permitted to continue.

I no longer have the faith in the council to undertake new developments such as the proposed Elizabeth St upgrade and the Wharf St eat street development or set future rates without problems occurring, such as cost overruns or unforeseen items that should have been identified or at least contingency factors included.

In my view, the only way forward in order to fix the current dysfunctional council and remedy the issues that it obviously cannot do so itself, is for the Minister of Local Government to appoint a commissioner to get our city back on track.

Do others within the city agree with this way forward?

Mike Baker
Bethlehem

All Lives Matter

Claiming that All Lives Matter, as suggested by a church in Masterton, is racist is utterly ludicrous.

It is because mankind has disregarded this basic principle for so long that communities have suffered discrimination and deprivation based on race and ethnicity.

Ian Young
Pāpāmoa

Statues are history

We are now entering a very dangerous part of our history - the destruction of monuments. Throughout history this has happened to almost every civilisation that has soon come to a dismal end.

Monuments, statues are history and good or bad they represent the passage of time through which our country journeyed.

To destroy any of them is to tear up the book.

Yes, there were days of infamy, people the world would have been better off without - but they existed, they carved their names indelibly on our past, nothing can ever remove the fact that they existed and to deny their existence is to remove actual fact.

This is dangerous and every civilisation that had done this has suffered from it.
We can only learn from the mistakes we make and having made them to remove the memory is folly.

Hide them if you must but they must remain to remind us.

If we, for example, denied Adolf Hitler's existence then it would only be a matter of time before the next Holocaust.

Jim Adams
Rotorua

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