Southland District Council’s magazine Pumped at the park Page 2 1 Pumped at the park There’s a happy buzz in the air around Te Anau’s newest cycling attraction. e Anau Community Board chair Rachel Cockburn says reaction to the new pump track has been T“incredible” since it opened on 18 February. “Use of the track has been amazing,” she says. “It’s brought kids back to the skate park.” Scooter rider So much so that it’s given the community board plenty to Oliver Mann think about as to how the area can be further developed. Cover photo Ms Cockburn says seating, shading and water outlets will be Yves Broers installed near the track, which is an offshoot of the skate Magazine design park. Toilets are also a possibility for the area. Gloria Eno The pump track cost $70,000 to construct and is Produced by designed to give cyclists, BMX riders, scooter riders and skateboarders a different experience. Southland District Council Communications team The twin-looped asphalt track has a series of berms and smooth mounds, known as “rollers”, which are ridden without pedalling, by “pumping” the bike. Te Anau Community Board funded half the $70,000, with the rest coming from the Community Trust of Southland “It was a great and Meridian. Te Anau Cycling Inc got “right behind it”, Ms Cockburn community project. says, with president Andy McDonald heavily involved. We’re stoked.” 2 Dear 14 February Attended the Mayoral Forum at Environment Southland. 16 February Met ratepayers in Te Anau about Around the Diary Mountains Cycle Trail. 1 March CDA elections have kicked off with Deputy Mayor Paul Duffy and I sharing the workload. Excerpts from Mayor Gary Tong’s busy schedule … 3 March Visited the Department of Corrections for an overview of what they do in our community. 6 March I was at Bluff this morning to help an adventurous bunch of jetskiers and their support crews set off on a journey to fi ght melanoma. Up to 38 personal watercraft riders at any time were covering 1400km of water over 12 days, from Invercargill to Auckland. The annual Yamaha Ski-nZ Max event has been running for four years, and this was their longest ride yet. As well as having fun, each rider raised funds to help Melanoma NZ to prevent avoidable deaths. New Zealand has the highest incidence of melanoma in the world. Travel safe and well, team. yg 6 March Attended the Vince Boyle Collection launch Bon voyage! at Winton Library. 8 March Hosted Janice Lee and Darren Ludlow and worked through Koha Kai’s presentation for the national TrustPower Awards, followed by a visit to their kitchen. What an awesome organisation! 9 March Here’s my fi rst crack at being an artist. I whipped up this sculpture in the workshop at home for the Southland Arts Society’s 50:50 exhibition at Invercargill’s City Gallery. I’m with City Gallery public programmes manager Gemma Baldock. My sculpture is of a fi sherman My first sale! and a cyclist holding hands, and it might just have something to do with the Around the Mountains Cycle Trail. All artworks in the fundraising exhibition were available although I donated my cut to the gallery. for sale for $200. Of that, $100 went to The exhibition, at City Gallery, 28 Don the artist and $100 went to City Gallery, Street, ran until 1 April. Southland District Council is now looking again at its options for the Te Anau disposal of treated wastewater from Te Anau. Council chief executive Steve Ruru says due to circumstances out of Council’s and Fiordland Sewerage Options’ control, the Smith block on wastewater Sinclair Road is no longer a viable option. “Council staff are now working on a report to go to Council in May on what the next steps for this project will be,” Mr Ruru says. option off Fiordland Sewerage Options chair Alistair Paton-McDonald says the group is disappointed the Sinclair Road option has fallen through but the table thanks Council for the work it has done to move forward on this option. 3 MAYOR GARY TONG etting on with the job is what we do best in Southland. As our communities evolve, representation needs to evolve alongside it. It’s crucial those changes are driven by Gpeople in our district’s towns and rural areas. The changes have already started to have an impact through tighter terms of reference for community development areas. Some communities have embraced a vision of future-proofi ng themselves as populations vary and boundaries change. Others are still talking about how best to tackle the changes around them. A representation review next year could see more changes as Council encourages people to be involved in what’s called participatory democracy versus representational democracy. Essentially, this means communities taking control of their own patches wherever possible. Councillors are one strand of representation but Southland district has long prided itself on bottom-up democracy through community boards and community development areas – allowing them to steer their own destiny as much as possible. An example of communities evolving is Riversdale, where people have built new dwellings outside the town boundary, meaning they are not covered by the current community “This means development area. These grey areas of people living in the district but not being covered by the current communities taking representation umbrella need to be addressed. It’s been six years since the last representation review, and the dwellings in Riversdale were built control of their since then. An example of a community-led initiative own patches that has captured local and national attention – and funding – is the Curio Bay Natural Heritage Centre. wherever possible.” Council’s role in providing infrastructure has melded relatively seamlessly into the development of the heritage centre and We received very few submissions and in the end it was a storytelling by the South Catlins Charitable reasonably straight-forward decision. The tourism heartlands of Trust, and the provision of a new carpark by our district need to be able to have their doors open whenever DOC to complement its existing facilities. the visitors are there, and this decision allows that. While there has been a lot of focus on tourism Employees can elect not to work on Easter Sunday, and they growth in the Catlins, the centre, the new cannot be treated adversely for not working. wastewater treatment plant and carpark will provide real positives for local residents as well. Finally, I should mention the Te Anau Community Board’s initiative of asking people what their vision is for the area in 10 Continuing the theme of doing it for yourself, years’ time. Council has approved a new Easter Sunday trading bylaw whereby businesses are able to It’s another good example of positive, strategic thinking. make their own decisions instead of Council Other communities around the district are also refl ecting on telling certain shops they can open while telling where they are at and where they want to be in the future. These others they must close, in an ad hoc fashion. are important conversations for everyone in Southland. 4 CHIEF EXECUTIVE STEVE RURU The time is right to have a frank and open discussion about this. “ e’ve been thinking a lot about It is a legislative requirement community governance lately. to have a representation review every six years, which we will In particular we’ve been thinking be starting soon, and here at about the design of the governance Council we’re thinking about what structure we have in the district. a new structure might look like by We think it could be better. 2019 as part of our” Community W Governance Project. As it stands Council has a representational democracy model, whereby residents put themselves forward for Last month, CDA elections were election to Council, community boards and community held to elect six community development area subcommittees, and they have the representatives on to each of opportunity to be voted in. the 19 CDAs, a total of 114 There are eight community boards throughout community representatives to the district, and 19 community development area go with the 48 elected members subcommittees, or CDAs. of community boards and 13 elected to Council. That’s 175 CDAs are not controlled by the LLocal Government elected representatives in a Act.Act. They are a construct of SouthlandSout District governance role that equates to Council, designed to allow broaderbroade community-focused one elected representative for representation across thethe region. every 165 residents. Until now, the CDA system has been considered an Such an unwieldy structure is appropriate vehicle for deliveringdelive democracy to your neither effi cient nor effective doorstep.doorstep. It has certainly givengiv some of the district’s as we think about the changing smaller communities a degree of autonomy in deciding Southland social, economic and howhow they administer their townshipstown and which projects environmental landscape and they wish to pursue, as well as creating a formal line of what it might look like another communication withwith tthehe territoterritorial authority, the Council. generation down the track. It’sIt’s not without its fl aws, though.thoug We know that some Southlanders have been thinking about this too. ItIt may come as a surprisesu to some of you that roughly one tthird of the people Among the issues hotly debated who live in SouthlandSouth district do not at our Community Conversations havehave the same lelevel of representation series of meetings last year was as those who liveliv in an area covered demographic change, and the byby a communitycommunit board or CDA.