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Summarised by Centrist
Wellington’s sewage crisis did not come out of nowhere.
Commentator Peter Bassett points to a May 2021 meeting of Wellington City Council’s Long-Term Plan Committee, where councillors were asked to choose between funding cycleways or upgrading water infrastructure. He argues the decision, involving
Tamatha Paul and Julie Anne Genter, helped set the course for the problems now surfacing.
One option included a $391 million wastewater renewals programme designed to reduce sewage pollution, particularly in the central city and along the south coast. It was explicit, costed, and aimed directly at preventing the failures now closing beaches.
That option was passed over.
Instead, an amendment moved by then-councillor Tamatha Paul and seconded by Robyn Day nearly doubled the city’s original cycleway programme to $226 million. The amendment was passed by a vote of 9 to 5. Accelerated wastewater renewal did not.
“The vote is on video. The numbers are in the Long-Term Plan. The consequences are now floating in Cook Strait,” Bassett writes.
Bassett calls out Green MP Julie Anne Genter (a councillor at the time), long associated with aggressive cycleway advocacy, who has since called for “hard questions” and renewed infrastructure investment.
Paul, by contrast, has said nothing. Bassett notes that no journalist appears to have pressed her to explain why a sewage-focused investment option was rejected in favour of expanded cycleways.
“A city that keeps voting for people who, as Winston Peters once observed, couldn’t operate a school tuck shop, should not be surprised when it ends up ankle-deep in the consequences,” he writes.
Read more over at Breaking Views NZ
Image: Schwede66
