Welcome to the 3rd monthly e-Newsletter for CityWatch NZ
For March 2024, the CityWatch NZ website has been focusing on public consultations, the discussions around adding residential water meters in Hamilton City, and council finances. The challenging of “Traffic calming“ measures such as speed humps and raised platforms continues with notable recent developments.
Early in March, Hamilton City Councillors voted overwhelmingly to support the Notice of Revocation on Hamilton transport projects. This motion has stopped a number transport “upgrade“ projects and sent other projects back for redesign. Most Councillors are now wary of supporting projects that remove car parks, install in-lane bus stops, and build more raised platforms in Hamilton City. We are seeing increasing support in Council to remove such features from projects or cancel whole projects. However, most Councillors recently voted to approve a plan to have a raised platform installed on one of Hamilton’s busiest roads, using the justification that it was in the conditions of a consent to build a new supermarket in Te Rapa. Previously the Council had insisted that the supermarket company pay for the construction of an intersection with traffic lights and a raised platform as conditions of the consent. CityWatch NZ will follow this case closely.
March also saw wider acknowledgement in New Zealand that “traffic calming measures“ (such as the raised platforms) are having serious negative impacts on emergency vehicles and their response times.
NZ Herald and RNZ cover emergency vehicles being impacted by Auckland’s “traffic calming measures”
This article in the NZ Herald covers the situation with fire trucks encountering raised platforms and speed humps in Auckland City. RNZ then published an interview (recommended listening) where the Auckland Local President of the NZ Professional Firefighters' Union explains the issues. The Fire and Emergency New Zealand (FENZ) Annual report 2023 also mentions “traffic calming measures” as a factor in fire crews not reaching their 2022-23 targets of getting to 80% of structural fires withing 8-minutes and getting to 85% of medical emergencies in 8-minutes. In Hamilton City Council, Councillor Andrew Bydder challenged the Mayor to increase both the transparency and effectiveness of City Council’s meetings with Fire and Emergency services (details in his opinion piece linked below).
OPINION: Speed bumps are a public emergency
Public Consultations
March and April are busy months for public consultations.
The draft of the Government Policy Statement on land transport (GPS) 2024 is out for public consultation until the 2nd of April. With this policy statement aiming to shape land transport priorities for the next 10 years it is worth sending feedback to the Ministry about which changes you agree with or have concerns about.
The Ministry of Transport’s consultation features a survey so we will not do one via the CityWatch NZ substack.
Use this link to access the Ministry’s consultation survey
CityWatch NZ has also posted an opinionated analysis comparing the coalition governments draft to the Labour government’s draft version from 2023.
Hamilton City Council’s Long-term Plan 2024-2034 is out for public consultation until the 21st of April. View the plan documents at this link and the Hamilton City Council’s webpage at this link.
CityWatch NZ will be updating this page about the consultation featuring analysis and opinion on the Long-term plan and approaches to providing effective feedback.
With Hamilton City Council now: nearing $1 billion dollars in debt, planning a 19.9% rates increase this year, signalling cuts to services and staff, along with planning to double the size of rates bills by 2029, this is a particularly important Long-term Plan consultation.
The draft for the WEL Energy Trust Annual Plan was out for consultation in March 2023. That consultation is now closed for written submissions.
Council Finances
Related to the serious financial situation faced by Hamilton City Council, the first of our series of opinion pieces on the issue has been posted.
OPINION: Hamilton City Council’s First Rating Downgrade in a Decade
Expect further opinion pieces over the next month about how City Council’s get themselves into difficult financial situations with irresponsible spending, accumulating large debts, and mismanaging growth in the city.
Discussion around Water Meters
The contentious topic of installing residential water meters is being discussed again in Hamilton, with the City Council voting to spend $1.5 million dollars to study options in this area. Wellingtonians have recently had their mayors declaring that water meters were inevitable, according to an article in The Post titled “Water meters are coming - like it or not”.
CityWatch NZ has posted a series of opinion pieces on the topic of Water meters from residents and by-election candidates in Hamilton City.
April 2024 By-election for Rangitīkei District Council
The Southern Ward By-election for a councillor seat on the Rangitīkei District Council will have voting closing at noon on the 12th of April 2024. If you know anyone eligible to vote in that ward, encourage them to learn about the candidates and get involved in that election.
If there is an upcoming local by-election or local politics event you think CityWatch NZ should be covering, email the details to contact@citywatchnz.org and we will see what we can do.
Upcoming Issues
Over the next few months CityWatch NZ will be focusing on the following issues.
Long-term Plan Consultations.
Large Proposed Rates Increases.
Growing Council Debts and Other Issues with Council Finances.
City Council Surveillance Capabilities.
Three Waters Reforms.
CityWatch NZ has opinion pieces arriving on many of these issues and more are welcome. CityWatch NZ is open to covering many different sides of these issues. If you are interested in volunteering an opinion piece or know of someone who could write a good opinion piece about these issues, email content@citywatchnz.org for more information.
The rest of this e-newsletter is reminders from previous newsletters.
What can you do to help CityWatch NZ?
We need more groups added to our directories of Local Group Contact Details and Issue-based Group Contact Details.
If you know of a local group challenging or engaging with local government or a New Zealand-wide group focused on issues relevant to cities, send them a link to CityWatchNZ.org and ask them to email contact@citywatchnz.org. We will email them back with a template and ask their permission to add their group to the directory.
As the website grows, and especially if we look to creating regional sub-newsletters, we will need the help of volunteers and potentially contractors. If you have an interest or background in editing or creating content and want to help CityWatchNZ grow, email contact@citywatchnz.org with a brief description of your skill set and if you are interested in volunteer work and/or paid contractor work.
CityWatchNZ.org Website and Social Media
CityWatch NZ is running more active investigations on various issues and will be posting more original articles to the website over the next three months.
A number of future explainer articles are being worked on to bring attention to the groups, agendas, policies, and terminology being used to reshape our cities.
We are planning to gradually add more regions to the website, especially those regions with active groups challenging their councils.
We hope to be posting some wins in 2024. We want CityWatch NZ to feature articles and case studies about communities which were successful in resisting or reversing the unwanted changes imposed upon them. These should be more than just brief ‘feel good’ stories and feature details on tactics and approaches which were effective so that people around New Zealand can learn from successful groups and campaigns.
It will be helpful if people share CityWatchNZ.org content on social media. Note that Twitter (X) may not like Substack links. If you have a request for features that would help with sharing content on social media or staying up-to-date with CityWatch NZ content, email your suggestions to feedback@citywatchnz.org and we will see what we can do.
The ‘What is to be Done’ Series of Opinion Pieces
CityWatch NZ is planning to post a series of ‘What is to be Done’ opinion pieces in 2024. The purpose of this series of opinion pieces is to share a wide range of ideas for solving problems with local government and urban development in New Zealand. If you are interested in volunteering an opinion piece or know of someone who could write a good opinion piece about these issues, email content@citywatchnz.org for more information. Given the many issues facing local government, reforms will be needed in the near future. We at CityWatch NZ consider it important that well-informed discussions about the underlying problems and any proposed reforms take place in public.
Substack e-Newsletter
At this stage, the plan is to keep the e-Newsletters as freely available without needing a paid Substack subscription.
We plan to release a monthly e-Newsletter summarising website content on email via Substack. The format might change and we are open to feedback and suggestions to improve the newsletter.
We are planning to create a feature on this Substack, where people can subscribe to a ‘sub-Substack’ email list for a version of the newsletters focused on a specific region or city.
Aside from the monthly e-Newsletters, the Substack email list will be used for informing subscribers of time-critical issues. We will endeavour to send these ‘urgent’ emails sparingly, However, projects being rushed-through with minimal consultation is a normal situation when dealing with local government. This means that rapid responses may be needed on a variety of issues.
The Substack platform also has other features such as polls which could be useful in the future for surveying our readers and collecting views on what issues are most important. We plan to trial some of these features in 2024.