Council Guarantees Otago Rugby Debt

The Dunedin City has confirmed that it has purchased Otago Rugby's Carisbrook property for $7 million dollars. Otago Rugby will lease Carisbrook back for three years and pay for operational and debt-servicing costs. In addition, the Council has agreed to guarantee the interest on the ORFU's seasonal debt.
Mayor Peter Chin claims that:

"This is good news for the ratepayers and for the ORFU. It represents a sound investment based on a rigorous independent valuation of the current and future values across a range of land uses, all of which makes this a canny investment."

Note that there has been no proper registered valuation, as would be expected in a deal of this type, and that the valuation includes "future values". $7 million seems significantly higher than current market value taking into account the cost of demolition and the interference by the Historic Places Trust. When the lease ends after three years, the Council will be faced with servicing the $7 million debt. It is hard to see how it is a "canny investment".
The Council is relying on Otago Rugby for most of the revenue for the new Stadium. Otago Rugby has had to be bailed out of financial difficulty because the product that it is selling in not attracting enough paying customers. This hardly inspires confidence in the success of the Stadium.

Stephens Cairns' Two Hats

Letter to the ODT:

Otago regional councillors Gerry Eckhoff and Bryan Scott are right to pursue ORC chairman Stephen Cairns over the appropriateness of his dual ORC and real estate roles. Either actual or perceived conflicts of interest are something any organisation has to be vigilant about.
It is on public record that Mr Cairns has acted for many years for multimillionaire developer Earl
Hagaman, as his real estate agent. Mr Hagaman owns a very large portfolio of property throughout the city, including the largest proportion of stadium land until it was sold to the Dunedin City Council. There is nothing wrong about this, per se, but to have a real estate
agent, Mr Cairns, in his other position as ORC chairman is simply not right.
Being chairman of the ORC places Mr Cairns in a very powerful andvinfluential position. The argument that he is entitled to an outside job is only partially true. If Mr Cairns was a hairdresser, owning his own salon, there is no likely conflict of interest having such an outside job. The problem here is he is a real estate agent.

Peter Attwooll
City Rise
[This letter was referred to Stephen Cairns, who did not wish to comment.]

There may be a Code of Conduct complaint at the Otago Regional Council arising out of this issue.
In March, Stephen Cairns denied a conflict of interest.

Dunedin Does Not Need New Library

There has been speculation that the Library is going to be moved to the Old Post Office at a cost of $20 million, the latest being Peter Entwhistle's article in today's ODT.

But does not need a new Library:

• The current Library is adequete for current and future needs. Libraries are not as important as they used to be because the Internet has taken over as the primary source of information in the community.
• The current Library's location is excellent because it is close to other places which people visit regularly anyway. I believe that a move to the Exchange will result in a drop in the number of visits to the Library.
• Dunedin cannot afford it. It is true that the funding is already in the Plan, but this requires large rate increases to pay for it.
  
• A new Library is a "want", not a "need".
  

DCC Has Lost The Plot on Facebook

Great to see local politics is going on-line with the DCC Has Lost The Plot Facebook group. It now has 2500 members. The ODT coverage is here.
It is great to have a forum where analysis and opinion can be expressed outside the control of the Dunedin City Council and the Otago Daily Times. I have avoided Facebook so far in spite of encouragement from my children, but this will be the trigger for me to join.

North Queensland Road Trip

We are back from a break from the Dunedin Winter, doing a road trip in Tropical North Queensland, from Mackay to Cape Tribulation. It is a wonderful place for a holiday, especially at this time of year when the temperature is just right for sandals and shirt-sleeves.
Mackay is a boom town on the back of the mining industry, with 40 ships queued off-shore waiting to load coal to China. In the nearby Eungella National Park, we saw platypus in the wild.
Townsville was a real city with happy locals, not a resort, and seemed good place to live in the Dry Tropics compared to the Wet Tropics to the north.
Our favourite place was The Sanctuary at Mission Beach: huts in the Rain-forest with a fine restaurant, where we were lucky to see some cassowaries. Port Douglas is an international-class resort close to the Great Barrier Reef. After croc-spotting on the Daintree river, it is Rain-forest to the end of the tar-seal at Cape Tribulation where we stayed and enjoyed tropical fruit at the Cape Trib Farmstay.

DCC Buys Jacks Point Sections

The Dunedin City Council has bought 100 section in the Jacks Point development in Queenstown.
This story is by the National Business Review's Chris Hutchings.
Time will tell if it is a wise investment.
The NBR has scooped the ODT again.
But the ODT catches up here
and here.

Misleading Staff Report on "350" Campaign

The Dunedin City Council Staff Report on the "350" campaign only tells one side of the story. Others have also taken issue with this Report in comments on the ODT web-site.
I consider myself quite "green": I grow vegetables, have a compost-heap and worm-farm, go to the Farmer's Market, collect huhu grubs for the kakas at the Eco-Sanctuary, and cycle to work. But I do not believe that global-warming is a problem. I did an honours degree in Physics many years ago and have followed Climate Science all my life. I work as a computer programmer and am aware of the limitations of computer modeling in complex systems like the Earth's atmosphere.
The predictions of Global Warming are based on the output of computer models. But the Earth's temperature has not increased as predicted by the models.
Have a look at the temperature record here.
If the global warming predictions were correct, then the graph would be off the top of the chart. The peak in 1998 triggered the initial alarm but is now agreed to be due to El Nino. Since then the temperature has got nowhere near the 1998 peak and now seems to be trending down.
It is nonsense to suggest that there is "consensus" in this area, and that the science is "settled". 30,000 American scientists recently signed a petition saying that that the scientific evidence did not support global warming.
Note how the term "climate change" is now used rather than the original "global warming". This change has been made because the warming has stopped, and because with "climate change" every drought, storm, flood or snow-fall can be blamed on carbon emissions, even though they have always happened.
There is no dispute that carbon-dioxide causes some increase in temperature. What is in dispute is whether there are the runaway "feed-back loops" predicted by the global warming advocates, or whether the increase in temperature will be small and not significant compared to other influences on the Earth's climate. Runaway feedback loops are rare in natural systems which have existed for a long time, such as the Earth's climate, and do not seem to show in measured temperatures.
A little warming is a good thing: it is the warm periods of history which have been the times of the greatest flowering of civilisation, when crops have flourished and surplus wealth was available for human progress (Roman times and the Middle Ages were warmer than now). And Dunedin would be almost perfect if it was a degree or two hotter!
It is cold which is the greater threat to the world. It has been long recognised that there is correlation between global temperature and sun-spot activity (although no mechanism for this has yet to be scientifically established). The high sunspot activity that has occurred since 1950 has ended, and there have now been no sunspots for two years. Based on this, some scientists are predicting cold spell for the Earth over the next twenty years. Time will tell who is right.
Who is James Hansen?
NASA's James Hansen is a controversial scientist and eco-activist. He made headlines in the USA last week when he was arrested in an anti-coalmine protest. He has been accused of a great many things including selecting and adjusting data to suit his theories, and siting his temperature-recording devices next to the heat-outlets for air-conditioning systems.
From the Staff Report: "an example is the large loss of Arctic sea ice in the summer of 2007"
Here is a graph of the area of Global Sea Ice over the last 20 years.
There was less Arctic sea ice in 2007, but also more Antarctic sea ice. The current area of ice is no different than it was twenty years ago.
Why is Global Warming so widely believed?
"The Emperor has got no clothes!" I think that "sustainability" has become a kind of eco-Religion where the dogma cannot be challenged. This has become aligned with left-wing political interests who are looking for an excuse for state-control. And now there is a large bureaucracy which depends on global warming for it's existence. There are determined efforts to ignore or suppress opposing views, comparing them to denying the Holocaust. The latest example:
In the USA, the Environmental Protection Agency is having hearings to decide is carbon-dioxide should be classified as a pollutant, and it asked for a report which reviewed the current science. The review questioned global warming, then the EPA suppressed the report, and announced that there would be no review of the science in the hearings. Fortunately the report was leaked and can be found here.
Why are other organisations supporting the "350" campaign?
Some are environmental organisations which you would expect to, others may be following along with the crowd, or have eco-activists in position of influence. The Ministry of the Environment does not appear to be supporting the event.
The Council is being asked to support a controversial political activity, but is not in a position to properly make a judgment the issues involved.
It is the job of the Council to administer local affairs, it is not the role of the Council to be involved in such political campaigns. Not supporting it does not mean that the Council is opposed to it: it is just leaving it up to individuals or organisations in the city to support it, if they wise to do so.