|
Getting your Trinity Audio player ready...
|
- By Andy Baker, Franklin Ward councillor
In recent months, Auckland Council has spent a lot of time talking about changes in direction regarding several Government policies across a variety of issues.
Things like freshwater management, speed limits and urban development rules are just three where we are committing a lot of time to.
Speed limits, the reversals and other changes have certainly stirred things up, and I recall the changes made back in about 2017 in Franklin that were pretty unpopular.
Some of those have proven to actually be ok, some have continued to frustrate and are
difficult to justify.
The recent speed rule change actually hasn’t enabled Auckland Transport (AT) to have any
discretion in changing back many of the changes that were made last time round. It also
hasn’t given them the ability to retain some of the changes even when the community in the area want them kept.
In my capacity as Chair of the Transport, Resilience and Infrastructure Committee, I wrote to Minister of Transport Chris Bishop requesting that AT have the same capacity as the New
Zealand Transport Agency to respond to community demands.
We are still working through his reply to see if we can look at things a bit more closely.
Where and how intensely we build is also under review, alongside things like how we apply
heritage rules.
My view is that we need to make sure we always have a choice for people in how they want
to live and not try to push them into apartments or small sections, and that we also need to protect our relatively short history and heritage through quality buildings.
There is a place and demand for all types of living styles.
Franklin is lucky, we have good choices —long may that last — but we also need to make
sure we do what we can to protect the rural parts of Franklin through sticking to the rules we created in the Unitary Plan which are designed to respect our need to have appropriate
activities in appropriate places and recognising we are different from the rest of Auckland.
That is a constant battle.
