Rangitikei District Council caught in Bulls sign debate

The new signs will be placed at all entrances to Bulls to welcome motorists. Photo / Bevan Conley

A new potential sign welcoming people into the township of Bulls has caused debate in the community.

In 2018 the Rangitikei District Council presented possible new signage options to several towns in the district.

At Thursday's council meeting Helen Scully from the Bulls & District Community Trust said it was looking to refresh the current branding.

They approached council and asked about the requirements for the sign.

"The branding for Bulls to get this linkages is ... about how a community is built, how it links, how the feeling is when you look at it, so we wanted this to flow through the whole of Bulls," Scully said.

Bulls community members presented at a public forum at the Rangitikei District Council August meeting. Photo / Bevan Conley

They sifted through more than 120 iterations of drawings, paintings and sketches, and decided the black bull statues sum up Bulls.

"We have found we are repainting these every three months because they are so sat on and so used, we wanted the bulls to become the dominant feature so we went in that direction," she said.

They then consulted with Design Addition who came up with some silhouette options of bulls and they also worked closely with local iwi to get the notation correct.

"They wanted 'Nau mai, haere mai' to be big and bold as a really big lovely welcome and we all agreed that we wanted 'Bulls welcomes you' not 'welcome to Bulls'," Scully said.

Two final designs went out for public consultation through email, text and Facebook.

Flyers were dropped to 1054 homes and 54 businesses were visited directly and the signage was discussed.

They had 117 responses and 24 invalid responses from the flyers with one design receiving 68 per cent of votes.

Scully asked the council at their meeting to approve their chosen sign to which Mayor Andy Watson told her the council would consider the design and make a decision.

The Bulls Trust has been looking to refresh the A-Bulls signs around the town. Photo / Bevan Conley

But council will also have to consider the concerns raised by Bulls resident Heather Thorby who said she had serious concerns over the integrity of the public consultation process of the new sign.

"Like others I filled them [the flyers] out and put it in the box and I was later told no your comments don't matter we're only looking for tick next to a or b and I questioned where was the input from the community."

She said the flyers that circulated only gave the community two options, no option to provide comment or add additional images and this was not giving the community a real choice.

Thorby said the flaws in this consultation include a missed opportunity, a poor process, the lack of inclusiveness, and nothing substantial recorded in the Bulls Community Committee minutes indicating a resolution of the sign had been met.

She believes changing the image branding of the bull logo around the town will have financial implications for businesses and groups.

"This affects people with their financial obligation, businesses use it on logos, staff uniforms, stickers, so it's a bigger issue than just we don't like this image, we like this one instead."

Thorby asked council to return the branding logo images to the Bulls Community Committee for an open forum and public consultation and for this to take place at the next Bulls Community Committee meeting.

She also asked the council to set guidelines of template for community elected groups when they interact and survey their community to ensure they are transparent.

When Watson questioned Scully if she believed it was a fair process of public consultation she said, "I believe it was a fair process, we did a lot of work behind it."