Concerned Citizen is a forum for the citizens of Hamilton to gain information and express their views on the policies, activities and governance of the Hamilton City Council.
The forum is not aligned to any national political party and will be guided by these following concerns and principles:
1. The Hamilton City Council has for many years overreached in its activities. This has seen the Council active in areas way beyond its core activities, beyond its competence and, in many cases, detrimental to the interests of the citizens of Hamilton.
2. This Council overreach has caused Council debt to explode to unprecedented levels and has caused the rates demanded by Council to consistently increase much more than inflation.
3. The rapidly increasing rates and debt burden have grown to such a level that they now constitute a genuine threat to the Council’s, and many ratepayers’, solvency.
4. Hamilton City Council, through its various plans, including the District Plan, and system of levies, has impeded development within the city. Concerned Citizen urges a full review of these plans and levies in order to reduce red tape, compliance costs and levies. This will provide greater freedom for the citizens of Hamilton to develop their own homes, businesses and places of enjoyment.
5. Hamilton City Council’s overreaching has caused it to neglect its core functions: roading, storm water, drinking water, waste water, refuse, civil emergency, parks & reserves, etc. Council must refocus on these core functions and away from non-core activity which has wasted millions of ratepayers’ money.
6. The Hamilton City Council must apply strong governance over its CEO and Executive. Council is elected to represent the citizens of Hamilton. As such Council must set policy then ensure that policy is competently implemented by the Executive. Council’s role is not to protect the Executive from enquiry from citizens.
7. Concerned Citizen is totally opposed to racism and believes that all citizens should be treated equally irrespective of race.
21 Comments on "Principles"
The problem with a lot of ratepayers in Hamilton (and across NZ to be fair) is voter apathy. Either they don’t vote at all (and then hate the council that has been elected), or they don’t take the time to attend council meetings to watch councillors and the mayor in action. What you read in the small voter pack you receive is written by the individual who is standing for election – of course they are going to say they are going to cut back rates and save us all from rate increases. It’s all a big farce. Voters need to start asking questions and attend the candidate meetings – watch them in action – and I can guarantee that you will change your mind about who you vote for. Come on Hamilton make sure you vote this year and lets get a new Mayor and Council.
Hi there,
I have live in Hamilton NZ for most of my life and this is my home now. I saw the big sign on Mill street about how much we are paying for our city’s debt interest. No wonder it is so hard to save as a young married couple. Hope I can be apart of a group of people that is also concern about our city/country’s future. I would love to learn more about our city, our politic people (which one are good and which are not so good), different view on things.
Thanks for all the comments and specially the creator/admin of the website!
A new fact that has come to my notice is that in some areas anyway, Council is fixing illegal fees. So not only are we being ripped off in rating areas, we are being stolen from. the Council has become a self supporting, self protecting body with a scarcity of other concerns – like are they doing it right? Are they working within the boundaries of their legislative right? I am so glad that there is a group in this town who is not afraid to look at these issues
Thanks Cindy. Can you please give examples of these illegal fees. If this is the case then we certainly need to expose this.
Thanks Cindy can you please post examples of Council fixing illegal fees. That must definitely be exposed and hopefully stopped.
Thankyou for making us aware, well done on the back page of the press my partner and i found it very interesting and evoked the thought that awareness is the key to change. It also threw up alot of questions for us. My partner being from england and branded by some as a winging pom has been aware of these issues and finds it hard to believe that we (nzers) simply put up with being ripped off by goverments and councils.By making more people aware it promotes more conversation,questions,debate and hopefully solutions to put in place. Councellers must act on the best interests of the city so it is these people that need to be held accountable for mistakes made, errors of judgement, and at times complete and utter stupidity (claudelands event centre).Remember the old saying “last one to leave NZ , turn the light swich off, might be more a case of last one to leave hamilton turn the fountains off. It certainly makes you think what life could possibly be like in 10 years time. Lucky im an optimist.
Thanks I think you’ve hit the nail on the head. At Concerned Citizen we’re very ‘concerned’ that, for various reasons, amongst which shallow reporting by the Waikato Times & the huge PR machine at the HCC are just a few, the citizens & ratepayers of Hamilton are not being fully informed about the huge errors and massive overspending and over borrowing at the HCC. The HCC’s behaviour is a ‘clear and present danger’ to the well-being of the Hamilton community. Too much spending, too much borrowing, too much rating and too much regulation will strangle all honest endeavour.
I support all of the comments on this wonderful much needed website. As we all know that Governance is the key issue here. It’s about having the right people in the right position with all the right tools making the right decisions for all of the right reasons. So my question is “where is the transparency in all of this?” I say to HCC. For too long we as tax payers have had to prove ourselves worthy of even being spoken to respectfully by their incompetent staff members in order to get the answers we are seeking. We ask one person a basic question and all of a sudden, the barriers go up, and they all turn into Kangaroos and transfer you to dept by dept, person to person until you either give up, get frustrated or just can’t be bothered and leave it be. Let’s put them to task and make them accountable for the positions they were employed to do in the first place and that’s by starting at the top.
Thanks you for your comments. I fear that your experiences are all too common. Your concerns are part of the reason we set up the Concerned Citizen forum.
Thank you for providing a forum for which people may become more aware of what is happening in our city.
The HCC has shown no real effort to remedy the past negligence or ensure no future let down of ratepayers. I personally think they need to stick to core services, as the likes of Claudelands and V8′s are examples of money which should have come privately rather than from ratepayers.
I hope to see a change in how the council is run – and hope that Hamiltonians adopt a new approach to voting or make more informed decisions in the next council elections, as I see that as the best opportunity to move forward.
Thanks Kelli. We couldn’t have put it better. There needs to be a clear (probably legislated) limit to the scope of activities in-which local government may engage. They are currently running amuck and leaving the bill for the ratepayer.
I think that it is very important for ratepayers to know which councillors are behind the various decisions that are made. This will be useful in deciding who should get the boot next election.
You’re dead right. Providing visability/accountability to the public is one of the very important factors we set out address with Concerned Citizen. That’s also why many Councillors spat the dummy when CC exposed some of their gross misspending.
Hi there. I think setting this webiste up is a great idea. I was thinking one the issues we have is not getting the infomation we need to make informed decisions. Is it possible to get a link on this website to all council agendas (for whatever meetings they have). This would give us access to the discussions and the decisions so we could act when we didn’t agree with a certain direction the council was taking.
Great idea Geoff. We’ll get to work on that. I’m no expert but we could probably have a link directly to the HCC website.
point 1 of the principles may not be entirely correct
There was until just recently a legislated social agenda that councils were supposed to take on
Recently the legislation in support of this social agenda has been pared back somewhat
We can thank (grimace) Labour for taking Councils down this path
stevensg you have a good point. The legislation governing local authorities needs to be changed. However, even under the current legislation, there’s nothing stopping a Council, after proper consultation, consideration etc from determining that the social agenda, the economic agenda, in fact any agenda is best served by a council that reduces over-reach, reduces over-spending, cuts debt & does a really good job of providing the core services. It doesn’t do much for anyone’s social agenda when families are rated out of their homes or the storm water system floods all the time.
It surprises me that there is any support for Ewan Wilson at all given that he is a convicted criminal, just beware of what he may be up to!
Yip I know few people who were left out of pocket due to Mr Wilson’s previous business.
As concerned citizens we need to take the responsibilty of knowing exactly what our councillors are doing. So if your are really a concerned citizen you need to log onto the council’s webcam and follow what our councillors are doing and saying at their meetings. Then we can decide really who is working for us. There seems to be only one councillor who is not afraid to ask the questions and demand accountability from his colleagues and the council bureaucratics and that is Ewan Wilson.
Thanks Cat. Your point about knowing what our councillors are doing is well taken. In fact that’s the main reason we set up ‘Concerned Citizen’. To help people ‘pay attention’.