I couldn’t decide what to call the post today, as events seem to cover all the options available to us. Things in the city seem to be playing out as a farce every day, so much so that it becomes a soap opera, or a sit-com like Brooklyn Nine Nine, only with more comedy and less pulling of guns. Situations that are merely farcical in Nine Nine become actuality in reality. the worst thing about it is that everyone concerned seems to think they are Jake Peralta, whereas in fact they are far more like Hitchcock and Scully.
For those of you that don’t know about the show – aaaah, who am I kidding – the whole planet has heard about the show. It’s funny. It plays dumb, it plays cheap for laughs, but it is actually quite clever, or at least the main characters do not seem to think they are being dumb.
With the leaders to our city, I think we have a very similar situation. I’ve tried to be polite about the leadership of the city and to give our wonderful Mayor a break, because she gets enough shit from elsewhere.
But sometimes I lose my patience, because they just seem to be making bad decision after bad decision. There are many points that I could use, but I’ll just start with two. Water and waterfront.
Water first. Local deadbeat cop, sleaseball ex-Mayor of a two-bit neighbour of ours, Nick Leggett was a mayor of Porirua for one term and was then cast out unceremoneously and has tried to make an honest living since then.
He has thrown his hat into many rings since then, like a stripper at a pole-dancing competition, so he is now doing various things at the same time, none of them successfully.
He is/was a spokesperson for the Roading Lobby, by which I mean that he would always be arguing for more roads and more trucking. No one except fellow truckers believes this line.
He is also apparently the chair of Wellington Water, the organisation that has forgotten how to repair pipes and thinks it is fine to charge repairs in Wellington at THREE times the going rate, and think that no one would notice. And for a long time this strategy was stunningly successful, because no one at WW knew who to ask, or how to ask, or what they were asking for. Bunch of absolute muppets, the lot of them. The Muppet Show was great, and funny enough back in the 70s, but no longer. Anyway, when breaking pipes started breaking out faster than they could be fixed, people started to notice. Fountains fifty feet high in Aro Valley are hard to ignore, especially as they normally just use water-pistols there to settle disputes.
Somehow, as if it is a sit-com being written instead of real life being lived, Legget was not sacked but lives to survive another day. He is clearly incompetent and at the very least should be tarred and feathered, if not drawn and quartered. But so that the sit-com can continue for another season, he is confirmed back in his seat, despite the patient (Us, the people of Wellington) being pissed off and worn out.
There are many other examples of incredibly bad management being played out here. The debacle of the Begonia house. The debacle of the Tinakori Road cycleway past the Botanical Gardens. In fact, any cycleway anywhere in Wellington, the exemplars of how not to do things, in the whole country. The sewer pipes. The fresh water pipes. The stormwater pipes. The charging for parking, in the evening and in the weekend, pushing people away from the city by both day and night.
The latest debacle however is the argument over whether we should have handrails all around the Wellington Waterfront. Again, it is playing out as though Peralta and Santiago are saving the country, or at least the waterfront, whereas actually it is Boyle and Scully running the show, and ruining every single thing that they touch.
This story…. is to be continued….
Given that this was most recently called for by the coroner after a drunk guy fell in to the harbour and drowned, I would point out that coroner’s recommendations are not binding and also that a few years back a drunk guy dropped his keys in a stormwater drain then drowned whilst diving for them so should we not also fence off all stormwater grates?
As it is, NZTA seem hellbent on turning every road available into one giant judder bar
People (ok, young men) consistently climb cranes and jump off them into the water and die
To the “If it saves one life” crowd I would say “8 billion plus, we could lose a few of the dumb ones”
Have these people not heard of the Darwin Awards?
https://darwinawards.com/darwin/
Agreed. Totally agreed. Young men, in particular are very stupid. I was in the barber the other day, and their reading matter was Skateboarding mags – only – front cover of one had someone skating after midnight on a concrete beam 5m above the Auckland motorway. As they said in the article, had he fallen, it would have been almost certain death….
Lets be honest, Wellington’s wharves are pretty manky specimens. The place could do with a half-way decent corniche if it’s going to do anything more than make a lame pretence of having a waterfront. Sadly, I expect a couple of decades of gently rusting chainlink fencing.
After the coroner’s report this is shaping up to be one of those unfortunate situations where an over correction will be proposed. I’m not clear on the exact circumstances that led to these unfortunate deaths but if they happened mostly at night maybe they need better lighting first. Perhaps add some well positioned seating or a single railing at tight or high traffic areas to prevent disorientated revelers from getting too close to the edge. Let’s face it, If somebody is determined to take a swim a balustrade won’t stop them.