Stuffed Roads Equals Stuffed Lives Equals Stuffed Economy Equals Stuffed Country.
I’ve just sent the below email to Marlborough Council Members, Michael Wood, Stuart Smith, and various other hopeless people eating our money in Parliament. I think you’ll glean context pretty quickly.
Can the person working the recovery@marlborough.govt.nz email please ensure this email gets to Stantec NZ (very important). That firm is a big part of the problem in Marlborough regarding our ruined roads.
So above is Moetapu Bay Road right now: closed, residents trying to clear it. Tuesday 9 May, 2023: ten months since the last storm that wrecked it, including a summer that work crews should have been on it seven days a week. Two years since the initial damage.
This is bullshit. After all this time we have only this fragile dangerous road: buggered infrastructure and MDC and government passing the buck to consultants to fend off having to do a damned thing.
My wife and I are 566 Moetapu Bay Road, you know me well, although since end of March we've been living in a house we've bought in Christchurch as due to health issues it was just too hard living in our Sounds home, which we needed to sell last summer but which was of course impossible. I have to come back for work soon, although with the state of the road that has to be up in the air right now.
I'm so angry - residents are so angry - I don't trust myself to write this so instead I'm simply copying and pasting a post I wrote last night for the Moetapu Road Association Facebook page today, but given the road closure this morning, I'd rather send it to this mailing list given you are all at fault for our ludicrous situation. I'm sure from reading it you'll understand the context: there is a request in here to drop the bullshit process of meetings that Stantec is ripping us all off with, and just setting up a page online where road using residents can get timely answers to current questions, and answers to the questions I include that should have been answered 10 months ago. The post was going to be a further response to our Councillor Barbara Faulls who through thick and thin tries to keep in contact with us ... but that's all hopeless as well. The highlighted parts are now particularly applicable.
Post:
Thank you Barbara. Nothing personal here; you’re great. But here’s an idea, given the times and the issues perhaps senior members of Marlborough District Council - John Wheeler, et al - and NZTA, and Stantec especially, should be on the various road association Facebook pages for Moetapu and Keneparu answering questions such as below to avoid doubled up correspondence with we who are corresponding individually, as well as for greater transparency given road using residents are being left in a despicable uncertainty for so long. Noting I’m not going to future Stantec meetings, whenever they are, for reasons which I will give: in brief, I’m over the never-ending consultation ‘process’. It’s nonsense and we have all the public eyes we need on these pages and the ability for same day responses.
MDC should have simply set up a FB page months ago for affected residents on a question and answer basis: transparent, cheap and it would have saved so much frustration for those of us trying to get the information we need to plan our lives.
Re your reply that MDC is bound by central government now: so we just throw up our hands and say, oh central government processes; we’re stuck with it? Sit for days, months, years, our lives on hold, to hear our fate delivered from on high. LOL sit and hope with this profligate government notorious for not being able to bring a policy home, just paying consultants to fend off having to make decisions - which sounds awfully familiar, doesn't it. We’re talking years more then, and I’ve not got years left to wait. Many of us haven’t. I put it to you governments, especially in an election year, respond to pressure; MDC’s job is to apply that pressure every day; you need to get some mongrel because the road victims of Cyclone Gabrielle are lining up to get in front of us for NZTA funds given how stuffed governments have let our infrastructure become as they legislate for blokes in frocks in women's toilets while everything else, including the economy now, goes down that same toilet..
Stantec NZ need be taken to task by MDC (again, government has hired these consultants to run interference for them and to take years so they don’t have to make decisions - look at every other policy area - thus it’s the brief and we can forget them holding Stantec’s feet to the coals). The fact that Stantec have not yet got their report to Wellington is disgraceful; how can I deal with them directly if they won’t come to these pages? They don’t answer correspondence. Chiefly I want to know why they haven’t asked the most obvious question of residents: can we live in our houses without a road? Because as we can’t, Pauline and I, what are the alternatives they have otherwise? They needed to be straight up with us on this from the get-go nine months ago. They are crap communicators, and I’m not interested in their picture slideshows or anymore meetings, I’m not going to those because to date they have been a waste of time.
And as most of us can’t live here without the road, as ninety nine out of one hundred buyers for our houses cease to exist on a water access only basis, as our house valuations are destroyed just by the uncertainty of this interminable process, we should be talking about compensation, NOW, for those of us wanting to and needing to sell (this decade). How do we get that conversation going please? Or do we have to lawyer up? [Tony Quirke???]
You are right, I’ve given up on MDC plus I suspect our MP Stuart Smith who refuses to represent us in Wellington, happy with this endless consultation, per my correspondence, knows where he can put my vote on October 14. The complete lack of urgency from all parties, particularly Stantec, is not acceptable. Everyone is falling over themselves to be nice, but that’s getting us nowhere.
Can you get a Stantec staffer here, to this thread, to answer these questions? None of those consultants live here, and they are not giving us anywhere near the information we need to plan our lives. The whole Future Access program has become a moribund, expensive, mishandled nightmare for road using residents. Most likely our business use - ludicrous notion that is - case file for access to our houses and thus our lives, is sitting on someone’s desk today doing nothing while our lives ebb away day by day, year by year. Because when their report, which I have no confidence in whatsoever given ‘that’ survey, and not asking the most basic question, can we live here without a road, gets to Wellington, how long will the bureaucracy at - let’s reduce road speeds to pre-industrial era - NZTA take to then make their decision? We know the answer; next decade, delivered via horse and cart over whatever is left of our road by then.
Although in the meantime through this weather and this winter, surely MDC have enough money for basic maintenance around our slip above Elephant Point, or other areas that fail - as Ian has said, the slip face above that piece of road had cracks in it which have slipped today; it’s a health and safety issue if nothing else. As much as I’d like to organise a rates revolt, we still pay rates, the only thing we’ve ever got for our rates is this road - I’m never using the new library in Blenheim (who does these days) - so surely Moetapu and Keneparu rates can be put into a dedicated ongoing road maintenance fund for clean up after the bigger rains? Why are you just leaving that wholly to residents who have jobs to go to, lives to lead. Plus question: if our road goes this winter, what is the MDC plan for we residents beyond Thompson’s Corner or Elephant Point pending whichever ends in the sea? That’s a fair question now. Got a feeling it’s barge out and bugger off.
[I shouldn’t post next bit as lays me open to ad hominem attack to discredit everything I’ve said above, which would be mischievous, but I’ve reached that ’I simply don’t care anymore’ stage of my life…]
As for our Mayor, the last article I read on her was about her many climate change projects, save us, which is the pseudoscience we road users are being sacrificed to by government and by Stantec, otherwise this was only ever an engineering exercise, and that’s all it ever should’ve been, so she might want to read up on the Hunga Tonga volcano eruption of two years ago, which this ‘finite’ wet weather pattern largely is down to, from the Melbourne floods on, within otherwise normal cyclical climate, and thus making this entire shambolic process a waste of money that could’ve been spent on our roads, and a waste of so much time measured in our lives; because if you think CO2 which makes up merely 0.04% of the atmosphere and has been much higher in the planet's history during colder periods than now makes a difference, then you are a victim of government paid science which gets the answers it funds. Anyhow, Hunga Tonga, here’s a great primer by Karl du Fresne,:
Yours in total hopelessness, Mark Hubbard