Letters

Plenty of issues

Our current mayor seems to think the council had a hand in the increased population and new businesses, I have yet to meet a business owner who was encouraged by the council – council policy has included “encouraging Business” for a long time but like a lot of their policies they don’t actually enact them. The influx of new (young) families is because, reported by the estate agents, they have given up trying to save the continually increasing amount for a deposit.

At the “meet the candidates” evening in Featherston water issues were to the fore so perhaps we should remind ourselves that it was lack of effective monitoring by council employees of the contractors’ monitoring people that failed to stop the contamination of the Martinborough water supply – the LUTRA report paints a damning picture of council competencies. The mayor’s statements twice claimed the water treatment equipment caused the bacteria (caused by animal faecal matter) rather than saying that because it was not working after a power cut it did not eradicate the bacteria as it is intended to do. To discover the cause of E-coli you just have to read a dictionary (or maybe look it up on the internet).

All in all the current mayor does not show any ability to run the core services properly. I notice her advert says she will keep rates low, I did not know that they were low and most people do not consider them low. It’s one thing to increase rates for essentials services, another to use (and increase) them for vanity projects.

Pete Roberts