Kerre Woodham: Lack of accountability over wasting public money has to stop

My Tuesday morning started quite well. It's not raining. Sun’s out, nice drive into the city.

And then I got to work and read the story from Wellington about the brakes being hit on the Wellington speed reduction plan, after a councillor spotted that the cost-benefit-analysis had been overstated by $250 million.

So they've gone back to the drawing board.  The whopping error means that papers that were sent out for public consultation are worth little more than toilet paper, consultation will be halted and it's back to square one for a new speed management plan.  

So the time and money wasted on this is indicative of so many, many stuff-ups, abandoned plans and utter incompetence at a public service level.

I mean, this is relatively minor in terms of the cost, but there is still a cost involved, in terms of the time and the money spent on drawing up this plan and based on completely fabricated numbers.

Here's another example, this one from Auckland. Auckland Transport spent months in West Lynn shopping village digging up Richmond Rd. Realigning the footpaths, car parks and pedestrian crossings, moving the bus stops, removing car parks, adding a dedicated cycle lane on both sides of the street and was it a bucolic cyclist paradise?

No, it wasn't.

In a shocking twist, some of the shops flooded every time it rained because they built them with slopes from the road down to the shop doors. I'm no civil engineer, but even I know that water runs downhill.

So there were sandbags all along the shops. The cycle lanes are unsatisfactory and unsafe. The sighting of the new bus stops was highly controversial and it's questionable how much traffic has been calmed.  

My lovely morning turned to custard really when I started a cursory search of money wasted.

When most of us are having to tighten our belts as the cost of living bites. When it's harder to do business, it's harder to make money for people who actually do stuff, make stuff, sell stuff, people who generate an income.

We then give it to the Council and the Government, and what do they do with it? They squander it irresponsibly and I want people to be accountable for that.

I want people to own up, say where they got it wrong, say how they've fixed it, say that it won't happen again -  because it's been happening time and time and time again.  

And in the same way, all that money that you and I are working hard to make, we’re trying to hold on to as much as possible so we can pay the mortgage and we can buy the groceries and we can fill the car, and we can pay our taxes and pay our rates.

They have no respect for us or for the work that's required to generate that sort of money.

They see it as some public purse that they can dip into, make myself a bit of a stuff up there, without any accountability - and it has to stop.

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