Councillor’s claims – “utter nonsense”
26/01/2006 12:00:00 a.m.
WELLINGTON City Councillor Jack Ruben is up in arms over the shifting of a sub-committee meeting, discussing the Waitangi Park development, closer to Christmas.
Holding the Waterfront Development sub-committee meeting on November 28 will mean the public consultation period falls over the Christmas break, he says.
"What has happened before, and I’m going on past experience, is Wellington Waterfront Limited try and slip in things that they want to do or things they don’t want to answer. They delay it as near to the Christmas period as possible by which time we have all gone away, and then they say in four or five months time – ‘but you had the statutory eight weeks public consultation period’ – but what they don’t tell you is it was the period when no one was around," Ruben says.
Ian Pike, WWL’s CEO, says Ruben’s claims are "utter nonsense".
"It is utter nonsense that Councillor Ruben thinks we are going to slip something through over the Christmas break," he says.
"There won’t be a building being built in 2006 – I’d be very surprised to see that. This is a long process, so this is just the beginning.
"I think there is a bit of a feeling that all of a sudden we are going to build four buildings. If only it was like that. It’s actually much more difficult than that."
David Gordon, the Waterfront Development sub-committee chairman, says a workshop on Waitangi Park scheduled for councillors in early October was changed to accommodate Mayor Kerry Prendergast’s father’s funeral. This in turn meant shifting the sub-committee meeting.
Gordon says November 28 is an appropriate time for the sub-committee meeting, and the date will not have a negative affect on the public consultation process.
