COMMUNITY BOARD HANDLING OF PEDESTRIAN SAFETY ISSUE INEPT AND UNDEMOCRATIC

 The Central Riccarton Residents’ Association Inc believes the way the Riccarton/Wigram Community Board has handled the issue of pedestrian safety in Rotherham Street adjacent to the western entrance and exit of the Westfield car park has been completely INEPT and UNDEMOCRATIC. The Board chose to meet with a city traffic engineer on site in Rotherham Street and deliberately excluded representatives of our Association from attending. The “reason” offered by Acting Chair Judy Kirk was sheer ‘Alice in Wonderland’ stuff. The on site meeting was also held at a time when our two city councillors, Cr Broughton and Cr Chen, could not attend yet the Board had been told by the councillors they could not attend because they had a commitment to a city council meeting at the same time. In the end, two other Board members also were not present. The three Board members who were there –M Mora, I Ganda and J Kirk – reached an “agreement” with the city traffic engineer and Board Chair Mora subsequently announced their “solution” to the media without bothering at all to communicate with our Association which had raised the matter in the first place.

 Our Association wrote to the Board in 2010 and the letter was tabled at the December meeting of the Board which referred it to the Transport and Greenspace Committee. Representatives of our Association attended the next Transport and Greenspace Committee as observers only to discover that the letter did not appear in the correspondence or in the business of the day. The matter of pedestrian safety has been in limbo all year until the secret meeting held on site – common sense says that the best way of achieving a desirable outcome is for all concerned parties to meet and work their way through the issues. But that is obviously not the modus operandi of the Riccarton/Wigram Community Board.

 Why was the Central Riccarton Residents’ Association Inc deputation to the Board purposely postponed until December 14 so that traffic engineer Steve Dejong could attend, yet, though present, he was not asked to give any response to what was said in our deputation?  Why were the city councillors not informed by the Deputy Chair of what had been “agreed” at the on site meeting they were not able to attend? And why did the Chair of the Community Board not attend the meeting?

 As we understand it, the Board will be hearing the traffic engineer’s response at a later date, which unnecessarily delays our submission being dealt with yet again.  This once more brings up our concern that negotiations are happening behind closed doors.  The city traffic engineer and the Board knew full well prior to the meeting that we have asked for the installation of a raised platform, and that we are contesting his point of view that this is not needed. 

 Additionally, it was very troubling to hear Mr Dejong speak with the Westmorland residents and continually refer to the speed limit rule.  It is very obvious that he treats this and other rules as supposedly set in stone and unalterable, but has forgotten that rules are made by people and, more importantly, can be changed when circumstances change.  Whatever happened to common sense?  We would also like to remind the Board that the problem on Rotherham Street was created by traffic engineers, the so called experts, in the first place when they granted the resource consent for the construction of the shopping mall car park. 

 The Board’s apparent deference to the authority of Mr Dejong is very disturbing in light of the fact that ‘experts,’ like all human beings, can make mistakes and it would be foolish to defer to some sort of authority figure at the expense of public safety when common sense dictates otherwise.