Alexander (Sandy) Milne

I CONGRATULATE your correspondent Philip Jacobs on his October 9 letter headlined, “How to waste 436,500”, in which he exposed serious operational failings amongst Whakatāne District Council senior management in their handling of what they must have considered to be a comparatively trivial matter.  

I refer to the planned spend-up of almost half a million precious ratepayer dollars for the ill-thought-out and entirely frivolous Mitchell Park Sunday Market Water-loo amenities project.  

Mr Jacobs’ letter joins a never-ending stream of highly critical Beacon mail over recent years regarding badly-scoped council projects and misuse of ratepayer dollars.  

I’m running out of storage space for my own voluminous archives on these repeated council failures to consider the plight of lower income ratepayers.

Once again, we can all clearly see that Mayor Victor Luca does not have the support of the majority of his councillors when he urges prudence with our rates dollars in these challenging times.  

He gets knocked back every time by the very people who should be in his corner; his councillors, especially those he appointed to chair committees.  

Their actions bring to mind the famous Goons skit where a British soldier rushes into the tent of his commanding officer yelling “Sir, sir, sir, the men are revolting.”, at which his commanding officer drawls back, “Yes, aren’t they?”.

I believe that several of our councillors will experience their own Waterloos at our next local body elections, but that is still a year away.  Meantime, can any Beacon readers suggest ways to motivate residents to take a serious and active interest in council mis-spending?  

Will comedy work (even though there’s little to laugh about)?