Wasted opportunities a shame

TWO SHOTS: Clive Bibby is trying for a seat on Gisborne District Council, and Hauora Tairawhiti.

Opinion

During nearly forty years working with the good people of the East Coast, l have built a reputation for delivering on my promises. I hope to continue in that vein if the voters decide to support my candidacy for the council and district health board in the October local body elections.

It will be interesting to see if my part in yesterday’s story from John Jones about the council and Tokomaru Bay Heritage Trust’s failure to honour their commitments to East Coast residents will be a help or a hindrance in my pursuit of that goal.

Since that story broke, l have been subjected to intimidation and false accusations of disingenuous behaviour by people who don’t feel comfortable being held to account.

Unfortunately, irrespective of what the council and trust have to say in defence of the charges of failure to honour their commitments to East Coast people, their actions or lack of action are symptomatic of a much wider problem, particularly with the council, which has squandered opportunities that could have made a huge difference in the bleak times that lie ahead. Are they not aware that this region faces the biggest threat to its existence in our history?

It amazes me that their sole plan for dealing with the impending disaster predicted by our own climate scientists appears to be to recommend the adoption of a “folksy” slogan that simply says this country faces a “climate crisis”. Unbelievable.

Even if measured by the law of probability and these guys are half right, the responsible reaction from our leaders should be to immediately examine the few options we have to build our defences in mitigation against the likely destruction of our pastoral economy because of global warming.

We don’t have to agree on the causes of this phenomenon in order to identify the priority areas that need attention.

The real disappointment about this record of ineptitude is that our opportunities to make some real progress restructuring our economy so that it is sustainable post climate change have been wasted and I fear they may not come our way again.

Although l am not an ideological supporter of this Government, l can recognise a rare gift horse when I look it in the mouth.

Shane Jones with his Provincial Growth Fund is entitled to all the gratitude we can muster for the help we have been given since he started providing the cash to fund our operating shortfall. But I am convinced he would be happy to do so much more if only we could get our act together.

Sadly, our planners have been missing in action when they should have been designing priority projects to overhaul our utilities and safeguard our scarce natural resources, particularly the storage of a freshwater supply and reliable distribution infrastructure to service urban and rural users.

The time has come for the ratepayers of this region to take back control of our own destiny, entrusting the oversight of our restructuring to people who understand the importance of working in the best interests of all our citizens, not just those few individuals or interest groups who have an exaggerated sense of entitlement.

Council, trust respond

In yesterday’s Gisborne Herald story about the restoration of the Tokomaru Bay wharf, Clive Bibby referred to a Memorandum of Understanding signed between Gisborne District Council and the Tokomaru Bay Heritage Trust. He said it was a legally binding document that could colloquially be called “a joint venture”.

In response to this, Gisborne District Council chief executive Nedine Thatcher Swann says an MOU was signed in 2016 but was outdated and was not legally binding.

That was specified in the MOU itself, she says. The purpose of the MOU was to outline how each party would collaborate with the other on the project.

She had communicated with the trust that it would need to re-establish a new MOU in light of the new resolution of the council.

Tokomaru Bay Wharf Trust chairman Bruce Holm said “we are working with GDC and are making good progress”.