TDC’s disaster relief stretched
A neighbourhood meeting at Ligar Bay on Monday this week with TDC’s Golden Bay recovery manager Adrian Humphries. Photo: Neil Wilson.
Disaster relief stretched, council adapting to a changing world, says mayor.
In the wake of the disastrous rain event in December, many affected landowners, residents and holiday-home-owners are asking “What happens now?”
Because the events occurred during the statutory holiday period, some offices have been closed or manned by skeleton staff. This has made it difficult for affected people to log their pressing concerns around remediation work to prevent further damage, and to allow people to move forward.
Some also say that their perception is that the severity of the situation in the Bay was not understood in Richmond. Tasman mayor Richard Kempthorne, however, has rated the Civil Defence response as “fantastic” and refutes the suggestion that controllers on the other side of the Hill were underinformed.
“This was a once-in-more-than-a-hundred-year event,” said Mr Kempthorne. “The rain was very heavy, prolonged and localised in the eastern coastal hills of Golden Bay and Tasman Bay. There were six people on our phone-desks and they took 1100 calls the first day, so if some people felt there wasn’t such a quick response there was a good reason for that.
“I was sitting in the Richmond council chamber and not in the Bay but, at the peak, up to 45 people from various agencies were pitching in to cover things across the district. We had at least one or two teleconferences a day and we always started by asking about the needs of Golden Bay. Roger Broadhurst or Laurie Davidson or Adrian Humphries told us what was going on, and all the agencies were able to hear that and it kept everyone in the whole district in the picture.”
Now that the disaster has moved into recovery phase, people want to know when decisions will be made about work programmes and how infrastructure will be restored.
Adrian Humphries, TDC’s Golden Bay recovery manager, has been holding neighbourhood meetings in Ligar Bay and in parts of Pohara to field questions, record requests for work and circulate up-to-date information. At Monday’s meeting, anxious Ligar Bay residents wanted to know when the council would meet to prioritise work and make decisions about solutions to problems particular to individual properties and part of wider locality-based problems. Contacting council with specific concerns had not led to any concerted action, they said.
Mr Humphries while sympathetic and open was at pains to point out that the scale of the work meant that an overall plan for the area would be needed and that it would take time to decide where the council’s efforts needed to be concentrated.
Residents and landowners, however, feel that work needs to be done urgently to prevent further damage in the event of more rain. The possibility of more logs being washed down was a major concern for some residents. Some properties in Ligar Bay also had silt and logs dumped on them by contractors at the height of the emergency and these landowners want to know when that material will be removed. One particularly troublesome culvert in Ligar Bay- known as culvert 40 - is only continuing to function because of the daily efforts of local residents to clear it. They wonder whether that initiative had resulted in the culvert being regarded as a lower priority. Mr Humphries was due to convene a meeting of interested parties at the culvert on Wednesday as the paper went to press.
Mr Kempthorne explained the role of the joint Nelson City Council/Tasman District Council recovery office. Its office was due to open on Wednesday 4 January but it would have had a sizeable log of specific concerns as it began to operate. The recovery office is headed by NCC’s strategy and planning manager Mike Schruer, with TDC’s engineering services manager Peter Thomson as his deputy. The councils are waiting for the office to come up with lists of work that needs to be done and that explains the delays that are frustrating some anxious residents.
“They’re putting together a response programme, identifying where all the problems are and what we need to do to fix them. Each council will be given a list of the works and they will then prioritise them, decide on time-lines and start to work out how we are going to fund them. We have to take stock and put a recovery plan in place that determines what gets reinstated and when. It’s clear that there has been a huge impact on infrastructure. The impact is even bigger on private properties.”
Mr Kempthorne explained that the council had used up its disaster relief funding in earlier events.
“With global warming there seems to be an increase in these kinds of events and we’ve got to help people who have been impacted seriously. Pressures are coming on core services and there has been major cutting already in the funding of disaster relief and in other areas. We’ll have to consider refreshing the disaster relief fund over a number of years. We can’t do it all at once. When this sort of event happens things change. The world has changed. We have to look into all these situations and make the best decision for the money.”
Some section-owners have raised the idea of rate relief, pointing to the unfairness of continuing to pay rates on sections that are no longer fit for purpose.
Mr Kempthorne pointed out that valuations recently struck by Quotable Value need to be considered by ratepayers as well.
“The rain event’s effects are likely to have some impact on some properties’ capital value. If people think that’s the case, they should talk to council and to Quotable Value. The deadline for appealing against your recent valuation is in late January. It may be necessary to revisit some valuations.”
Neil Wilson
