Forget the reports, time for bulldozers say politicians
By local democracy reporter Lois Williams:
Westland mayor Helen Lash says her council is thrilled that funding has at last been released to protect valuable farms and homes on the south bank of the wild Waiho River at Franz Josef.
But she warns there won’t be a cent to spare for red tape or paperwork.
Regional Development Minister Shane Jones announced a grant of $6 million this week for the West Coast Regional Council to strengthen and extend the Waiho stop banks, leaving local ratepayers to find the remaining $4m for the job.
Lash said the grant would be welcomed by landowners waiting to see if the Government would come to their aid, while large chunks of the land disappeared with every flood.
“But it’s $2m shy of what the council thought it would get so they’re going to have to make every cent work to get the right result, and not waste any on more reports and consultants’ fees.”
The last Labour government spent $12.5m shoring up stop banks on the north bank of the Waiho to protect the tourist township but withheld another $8m originally promised for the south bank with its farms and lifestyle blocks.
It wanted to see a long- term plan, including retreat, for the community labelled “Disaster Central” by geologists, before spending more money,
The stony bed of the short river has risen 8m since the 1950s and now sits well above the level of the town.
That process is speeding up as the glacier retreats, releasing rocks and gravel to the flats below.
And to cap it off, Franz Josef is perched right on the Alpine Fault, which is due for its 300-yearly major rupture.
When the Waiho River Management Strategy came out last October, saying the south bank would eventually have to be abandoned to the river, property values there plummeted, destroying equity overnight.
Lash said the landowners had been "horribly mucked around" by the decision makers, and the uncertainty.
“You can’t do that to people’s lives. Every flood they go into stress mode. When you have no skin in the game you don’t get the gravity of it.”
River management is the Regional Council’s job, the mayor says, but the Westland District Council wants to be heavily involved in the stop bank project this time, to make sure ratepayers got the fullest possible benefit from the $6m.
“We want to be sure the community gets the best protection and maximum gain out of it and I’m sure that’s what the government wants to see as well.”
Regional Development Minister Shane Jones - in Greymouth this week for a meeting with civic leaders - said Lash was right about that.
“I have insisted that MBIE maximise the amount of dough that’s spent on practical delivery. We don’t need reams of reports from consultants - we need picks and shovels swinging to and fro, and delivery.”
The Franz Josef project, and others in Nelson approved for funding this week under the Government’s 'Before the Deluge' banner, were all bulldozer-ready, the minister said.
“There’s a lot of uncertainty in the pipeline from (contracting) firms saying they can’t keep their workforce on unless the money keeps flowing.
“The added virtue of these West Coast projects is that the damn things are consented so the mahi can take place as soon as possible.”
Long term, the fate of Franz Josef, the Waiho Flats and those who live and farm there would require decisions well above his paygrade, Shane Jones said.
“You are wrestling with Mother Nature there, and all hell could break loose with that river."
But it’s not a fight that should be conceded – at least, not yet, he said.
“The name of our party is New Zealand First, not Climate First. For as long as I’m around, we are going to spend money and work with communities to adapt - so we can generate the necessary solutions over a longer period of time."
A cynic would say that was only putting off the inevitable, he said.
“But I feel grossly uncomfortable chasing anyone out of where they are. I’ve got a lot of sympathy for the people on farms, being told they should leave.
“Who’s going to pay them to leave? Not Mother Nature."
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Horse rider pleads for support to keep them safe on roads
A nationwide campaign to have horse-riders officially recognised as vulnerable road users has been offered supported by the West Coast’s Regional Transport committee.
The committee heard a presentation this month from equestrian safety advocate Julia McLean, who recently took a petition to Parliament on behalf of riding associations across the country.
The petition, signed by close to 9000 people, asks the government to recognise the vulnerability of horse riders in transport legislation.
“Currently we sit in the ‘other road user’ category and that gives no benefits whatsoever and most critically we are not included in education or road safety-messaging,” McLean said.
Horse-riders were continually dealing with reckless and dangerous behaviour by motorists, she told the committee.
“We get reports from our rider groups of horses being killed: there was one in Reefton, and another in Ruatoki; just two weeks ago a horse was hit and killed by a truck and the rider was taken to hospital."
Riders were also put at risk by aggressive drivers tooting their horns, winding down their windows and shouting, and passing at speed and too closely, she told the committee.
But unlike accidents involving pedestrians, cyclists and other vulnerable road users, such incidents involving horses were not captured in the statistics.
When she had asked NZTA for data, said said all it could tell her was that it had issued 13 infringements in 13 years, for failing to take care around a ridden animal or stock.
“When someone comes so close they touch your stirrup, or they hoot their horn as they go past ... it’s the abuse - it’s everywhere."
In a case down south, a truck driver refused to slow down despite hand signals and the rider fell off just in front of him, she said.
She had asked the road safety director for NZ Police to look at providing a ‘tick-box’ for horse-riders in incident reports, Ms McLean said.
“It’s a small, low-cost measure that would allow us to have some proper data, an informed understanding of what’s happening out there on the roads, and in turn some targeted road safety messaging.”
She was motivated to become a safety advocate by her own experience at the age of 25, when she fractured her skull in a near-fatal riding accident on a Kaiapoi road.
“I lost all memory of my childhood; my sense of taste and smell is gone forever. I was in a coma for week, I lost my career and it’s taken me 16 years to fully recover,” she told LDR.
Her accident had not been caused by a car: her horse had shied and thrown her when a piece of paper on the verge moved suddenly in the wind.
But the incident was a grim reminder of what could happen if a horse were startled, she said.
The UK and Australia had recently changed their road codes to give drivers explicit instructions on passing horses.
“It needs to be explicit. We can’t assume people just get it anymore. Common sense is not a thing. We actually have to tell people what we require, to pass a horse wide and slow - wide is two metres.”
A total of 37 organisations were now endorsing her campaign, including police, trucking companies, pony clubs and 10 other regional councils, McLean told the committee.
Transport Committee chairperson Peter Ewen was supportive of Ms McLeans safety campaign.
“In rural New Zealand we have a lot of narrow roads, and we do have riders on them – I would like to think that courtesy is given to those riders."
Regional council chairperson Peter Haddock said he sympathised with the cause but had reservations about riders on state highways.
“I would encourage it on low volume council roads but would struggle to support riding on highways where you’ve got traffic following closely behind.
“It’s difficult to find you suddenly have a horse in front of you and slowly pass it and go from 100kphs to 10kphs. It’s a dangerous situation."
McLean said horse riders did not want to ride on highways, and accidents were happening on 50kph local roads.
She appealed to West Coast mayors and chairs present to consider horse riders when they built shared pathways like cycle trails.
“We don’t need a hard surface, just a bit of dirt or grass at the side.”
The Transport Committee agreed to draft a letter to the national transport authorities, endorsing McLean’s safety campaign but stating its reservations about horses on highways.
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