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Are you the Special Someone our animals have been waiting for?
From Sat 6 July – Sun 21 July, we are waiving adoption fees for our long-stay residents for the right home.*
They might be older, shy, have only three legs or just need that extra bit of attention and care – but they all deserve a loving home. And they have been waiting for a long time for that Special Love!
Look for the ‘Special Love Needed’ tag on our adoption profiles, check you can provide what they need to flourish & apply online at www.spca.nz....
*The offer applies to animals looking for homes for more than 40 days; our usual adoption criteria and processes apply.
⏰ Last chance Taupō District! ⏰
Have you had your say on our Long-term Plan yet? Submissions close this Friday and we want to hear from you!
📣Have we got the balance right?
Should we focus most of our effort and money on essential services?
🚘 Safe roads
💧 Resilient water infrastructure
💡 Keeping the lights on
👉🏼 Find out more and let us know what you think here
📣Bag it or Bin it
Have your say on the future of kerbside rubbish and recycling!
Last year we asked what you thought of bags vs bins and heard from heeeeeaaaaaaaps of you.
So we’ve done some more mahi, worked out the details and crunched the numbers. Now we’re back asking the big question. Bag It or Bin It?
Check out the video here.
👉🏼 Find out more and have your say here.
📣Should we help ease the housing crisis in the Taupō District?
We own a parcel of land south of Richmond Heights in Taupō. We have the opportunity to sell some of this to a development partner who would build high-quality, attractive homes on it.
🏡 Some of these homes (around 42) would be targeted at first home buyers who can afford to pay a mortgage. The remainder would be sold on the open market.
👉🏼 Find out more and have your say here
📣How should we deal with wastewater?
Wastewater is the dirty water that's left behind after taking a shower, doing a load of washing or flushing the loo.
💧 In Taupō, there's been more houses being built on the northern side of the Waikato River. This means the pipe that takes wastewater across to the Taupō Wastewater Treatment Plant is almost at capacity.
💧 In Tūrangi, the wastewater is treated to a very high standard and disposed of into a wetland. This is a very common process in other parts of New Zealand but the community has raised concerns and asked us to try to find a land-based option.
👉🏼 We've come up with some different solutions. Check them out here.
📣Increasing fees and charges to manage rates
One way to try and keep rates under control is to increase our fees and charges on different services that people choose to use. We’re thinking of a 20-25 percent increase across the board.
📌 Adult AC Baths entry from $10 to $12
📌 Swim lessons from $12 to $15
📌 Rubbish bag stickers from $2 to $2.50
📌 Broadlands Road Landfill minimum charge from $21 to $26
📌 Building consent from $100 to $125
All of these services, like swimming pools and landfills, are topped up by rates. By putting up our fees and charges, it means that people who use the services contribute more towards the cost of providing them.
This helps reduce that cost burden falling on the wider community through rates (including the people who don’t use these facilities or services at all).
👉🏼 Find out more and have your say here.
📣Let’s talk about Control Gates Bridge
We’ve heard from many of you that you’re not enjoying sitting in traffic waiting to cross the Waikato River at certain times of the day.
🚗 Planning for a solution to ease congestion was meant to happen in 2031-33 but traffic volumes are increasing faster than we predicted. The plan is to spend the next three years working with Mercury, iwi, and hapū to begin working on options.
🌉 We’ll come back to you with some detailed designs and costs in 2027, with a view to starting construction in 2029. A rough initial estimated cost is $73.5 million. What do you think?
👉🏼 Find out more and have your say here.
📣Plan for Tūrangi town centre
We know the Tūrangi community are really keen to see their town centre tidied up and given a new lease on life, and there is also a lot of excitement about a community recreation centre in Tūrangi.
🏗️ During our last Long-term Plan in 2021, we started working with Ngāti Tūrangitukua to create a community recreation centre for Tūrangi. This centre is still in our draft Long-term Plan, but it has been delayed until 2028.
That’s because, although we allocated $15.9 million for the centre in our 2021-31 Long-term Plan, construction costs have risen significantly and there’s also uncertainty around where a centre should go, who would run it, and how it would be used. It is going to be expensive to build and operate and we aren’t confident the Tūrangi community can afford a centre of this size right now.
🎣 At the same time, the community has been asking for action on the Tūrangi town centre, and there are some links between getting this sorted and investing in a recreation centre.
So, what we’re proposing is that we do some town centre structure planning to get that functioning better, which will help us figure out what recreation facilities are needed and where best to place them.
In this plan, we’ve allocated around $150,000 to our town centre planning in 2025 and $17.5 million for the recreation centre project in the years 2028-2030. What do you think?
👉🏼 Find out more and have your say here.
📣Transport funding changes
We usually get help funding our transport projects like road widening from Waka Kotahi (New Zealand Transport Agency).
🚗 We’d like to improve some intersections in the next 10 years like AC Baths Avenue, Napier Road/Crown Road intersection and Taharepa Road/Crown Road intersection near Tauhara Primary School. We’d also like to do some major upgrades on Broadlands Road, Poihipi Road and Whangamata Road.
If we get less money, what should we do? Increase our budget to make up the shortfall so we can deliver the full list of projects? Or change the projects up to meet our smaller budget?
👉🏼 Find out more and have your say here.
📣Rates increase
Rachel lives in Taupō central, is passionate about living sustainably, yoga, her super cute cats and chooks, and the community. She is also one of our awesome councillors.
🏡 Rachel's looking at $4,079.97 in rates next year. That's an extra $450 from last year. Most ($415) of this increase is going towards targeted rates that pay for keeping our water and wastewater infrastructure up to scratch.
👉🏼 What's your number? Find out here.
📣Have we missed something?
We love how passionate our community is in the Taupō rohe. If there’s something that we’ve missed out that you think should be included in this plan, we really want to hear from you.
🙋🏼 Skip to question 11 of our submission survey and give your feedback or send an email to 10yearplan@taupo.govt.nz.
👉🏼 Find out more about making a submission here.
Medieval quest seeks donations for latest time travel experience
Hamilton Gardens enthusiasts now have the opportunity to support the completion of its Medieval Garden, the next new time-travel experience at the city’s premier visitor attraction.
A fundraising campaign to raise $300,000 needed to complete the new themed space has been launched by Momentum Waikato, the region’s community foundation.
The design of the Medieval Garden will be based on the ruins of the St John of the Hermits Monastery in Sicily, made up of a ‘Cloister Garth’ for prayer and meditation and an ‘Apothecary Garden’ for growing medicinal herbs and healing plants.
Peter Sergel, the founding director and visionary designer of Hamilton Gardens, says each of its existing and planned gardens represents a major transformation point in history, with the Medieval Garden representing the spread of Christianity.
“Three particular aspects will be reflected in the Medieval Garden, one is the piety, study and prayer, second was protection and looking after strangers, and the third was superstition, particularly around geometry and maths and numbers.”
“The Medieval world has inspired all sorts of fiction, including science fiction films, because it was a strange brutal world with all sorts of magic and mystery,” says Sergel.
The monastery spaces of the Medieval Garden will ultimately be one of four gardens on site reflecting the philosophies of the world’s major religions, the others being Islam via the Indian Char Bagh Garden, Buddhism via the Japanese Garden, and Hinduism via the planned Vedic Garden.
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