Letters: Excessive Whinging

Frank Leadley

I am a submitter in support of the Bay of Islands Vintage Railway Trust's application for a new railway station/ terminal in an area of Opua known since the 1990s as the Colenso Triangle.

Having received vast amounts of documents before and after attending the hearing at the Opua Cruising Club in April, I can empathise to some extent with some of Frank Leadley's comments (A process designed to frustrate, Northland Age, June 13.) It did seem a bit excessive on the paperwork, just as Mr Leadley's piece seemed a bit excessive on the whinging.

For example, I was pleased to observe the relevant FNDC staff diligently following due process, which, in my experience with other local issues, certain other FNDC staff have simply failed to do. The High Court recently ruled to this effect on two separate matters brought before it, and there is more to come.

Mr Leadley may be usefully reminded that any application that complies with the district plan rules does not require to be publicly notified, is not subject to such tedious public process, and that only about 3-4 per cent of RMA applications are notified. It follows that the process he complains of is only triggered by non-compliance.

Welcome to the new experience of non-conformity, Frank.

With all due respect, it seems to me that the vintage rail application would have greatly benefited from better planning advice, and that the process has delivered this missing expertise in the form of very competent submissions which the railway applicants are now properly taking advantage of. Good on them, and I agree that this should succeed.

The pity is that they did not seek and receive this kind of assistance before lodging the application. A reason for this would appear to be that they were 'guided' towards the advice they did receive by Far North Holdings Ltd, who entirely dirtied the water by trying to attach their grubby coastal reclamation project to the railway application.

I would characterise this as Darth Vader astride Bambi.

FNHL has moved the Waikare oyster farmers' landing area from pillar to post over the last couple of decades, missing several opportunities to properly incorporate it with their local coastal developments.

Now it appears they have leaned on an oyster farmer or two to be 'an applicant' for the aforesaid reclamation, and tried to tie this to the railway station project by positing it will also serve as steamboat access to complement the steam railway.

Problem is, firstly, this sank the railway application, and secondly, far greater synergies for steam train and steamboat can be achieved at another site by the Whangae bridge ...

Mr Leadley's complaint at length about the merits of the project (with lashings of Bambi) being "set aside" by "an extremely small minority of people who have had no input into the concept or the planning" is misplaced. As above, there is the matter of poor planning advice requiring remedy by the process, and the clunker reclamation proposal being bundled with the railway application.

Then there is the obvious: the people and the cause that he demeans so trenchantly could and should have been identified through consultation before the application was lodged. Then we would not have heard the untrue comment after the hearing which Mr Leadley's whinging attempts to perpetuate: "So, banded rail derails the railway."

MIKE RASHBROOKE
Opua