David Cormack
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He's running?
🕑 Added 2021-02-20 03:04:05 +0000 UTCFor those of you outside of Wellington you may have missed the utter cluster fuck that is our current council.
Sure there are a handful of gems there - Fleur Fitzsimmons is pretty good and Rebecca Matthews is an absolute star - but for the most part they are the pits.
Local Government is viewed as where good people go to die, and maybe it's this view that's led us to a situation where nothing good comes out of our council, and they seem to continually make bad decisions.
There are a few councillors who are overtly awful, Diane Calvert seems to be on the wrong side of every vote ever. She's against densification, she seems to hate public transport and also voted against increasing the budget for social housing. She's also in my ward.
Just this week, the council has voted on the latest iteration of the "Long Term Plan". There is a massive debt "problem"* in Wellington and so it was full of slashes and burns.
The Mayor thought it would be helpful to do 11 amendments that were sent around the council the day before the vote. One of these amendments included a very vague note about effectively partially-privatising the Library.
Privatising the library.
That's something that us lefties make jokes about right wingers wanting to do, to paint them as hopeless, out of touch and awful. And yet here we are.
You can read about this particular clusterfuck in an excellent twitter thread by Phil Quinn here:
https://twitter.com/philquin/status/1362867366531596290
Mayor Andy has complained that some councillors just weren't prepared to accept that we needed to cut things and that's why there is this complaint, except that motherfucker has been on the council since 1992. If he had been any good at his job then we wouldn't need to do the cuts.
All of this has led me to very seriously consider running for Wellington City Council next year. I've floated the idea with a few people and they seem enthusiastic.
I don't think, for a second, that I can fix everything in Wellington, but it seems like we have so many people on our council who are just incompetent that sure I'd be better?
I'd like a Wellington where there isn't literal shit pouring onto the streets, one where there's plenty of quality places for younger people to live so we can fill up the city with fun and vibrant folk again. We used to be that. Now the city just seems tired and grey.
Anyway, what do you all think? Worth the run? Let me know in the comments what you think.
*the debt situation with local government needs to be looked at by central government. Currently a lot of them are hamstrung by weird rules that central government doesn't have to abide by, and maybe it's time for a change.
Comments
Sambhav
Do it, please!
Matt Maguire
Do it David!
