Went as you could have predicted - nothing for us. The three takeaways were:
She has faith in the process
Council is not going to reallocate or rescind any funding
Any way it goes, the outcome will be complicated - if there's no ramp the pressure will move to Grossi Point
She also confirmed that if we want the Commissioners to pay attention, have experts presenting. And no, Council would not fund us to get one. She said that would create a precedent. She accepted that Council had already created a precedent: she voted for the $700k and was quite open that they made a serious mistake. They never imagined it would take the shape it has (MCBRT's trail of deceit goes a long way). Giving us money would lock in the precedent and two wrongs don't make it right.
I did confirm later that Council could use the $150k allocated in June to hire a specialist if they thought they didn't have the expertise internally.
The only thing that got a reaction was when I told her that Peter and Bruno's LGOIMA requests for the funding agreement between Council and MCBRT had come back with 22 pages completely redacted.
The next steps are:
suugest to Phil Doole that he use internal or external expertise to cover off the impact of the ramp on the park. Christeen confided that her biggest fear was that the park would turn into a boat ramp, like Frenchman's pass. She put her finger on my greatest concern as well - and that's why we need to get advice from a park and rec specialist like Boff Miskell
i'm going to approach a couple of firms and see what it would cost to get an opinion and possibly an appearance
sadly, we're going to have to fund that advice. i'm going to set up a givealittle page and go out again to the objectors to seek donations.
set up a community trust for transparency
Earlier I spoke to my friend Janette Campbell, an Auckland environment lawyer who has just been appointed to head the Experts Advisory Group on RMA reform. Her comments:
these things never end. Whoever loses will go to the next step.
the best outcome is if the Commission squashes the idea of any kind of ramp, worst outcome is declining the behemoth, leaving room for a scaled down version
get an expert. The Commissioners listen more to experts than enthusiastic amateurs like me. And no, being an expert ratepayer doesn't count
there may be room under economic efficiency, precluding other uses and misalignment with purpose and objectives of the district and coastal plans, and we can probably investigate those ourselves (i'm getting Chat GPT on to it)
FYI I have loaded the key parts of MCBRT's submission and all of the public submissions into Chat for analysis. I will post that on the resources page shortly.
On we go - happy to hear any helpful thoughts or advice. Got to get cracking on finding and funding an expert - if anyone knows of anyone, please let me know.
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