| Public Excluded – Extraordinary Council Meeting
Hokitika Racecourse Development Tender Approval |
Tuesday, 6 August |
| Risk and Assurance Committee | Thursday, 8 August |
| Cycling and Walking Subcommittee | Wednesday, 21 August |
| Council Meeting | Thursday, 29 August |
| Council Meeting | Thursday, 26 September |
Rates rebates may be available for property owners with a household income of $62,000 or less who are the ratepayer on their property. You must be the ratepayer on our records AND reside at the address for which you wish to apply for a rebate as at 1 July 2024. Rebates are intended for residential properties including Retirement village occupants with a licence to occupy and Māori Freehold Landowners with a separate rating unit.
Depending on the amount of rates you need to pay and your income, you could receive a rebate of up to $790. This applies to local council rates, regional council rates, and council water rates.
Council needs to know your total income before tax for the year 1 April 2023– 31 March 2024 to process a rates rebate application.
Please visit this website for further information on what the requirements are and how to apply. Our Rates Officer is happy to assist with these applications.
Dogs bring great joy to their owners and to people who want to interact with them. To make sure that dogs continue to bring joy, their owners need to be responsible and abide by the Dog Control Act and Council’s Dog Control Policy and Bylaw.
If you wish to exercise your dog off-leash, visit Council’s website to view the map of off-leash areas. As we are in a coastal environment with endangered birds, it’s important to take care and pay attention to where your dog explores on the beach.
The library produced 30 craft packs for whanau to do at home and held four activity sessions in the library over the recent school holidays. Over 80 children and their whanau attended. These sessions provide opportunities to have fun, learn and to make new friends.
Our first session made use of old and broken toys to create up-cycled ‘Franken-toys’. Then, in partnership with Westland Toy Library, we held a play session in the library using just some of the fantastic toys that the Toy Library have. What a fabulous resource the Toy Library is for families here on the Coast.
Children and adults got creative with LEGO, these are our future architects, engineers and designers in the making! And, for slightly older children we held a creative writing session, using the AI in the Story Spark website. Story Spark creates the pictures for the text. It was a collaborative writing exercise and there was much hilarity, and some very bizarre pictures as the authors discovered how to give the AI better prompts, what AI can do – and what it can’t! If you want to read one of the story’s they created, click here.
Thank you to everyone who participated, our volunteers who supported the Franken-Toy session and Westland Toy Library.
Text and images – Westland District Library
We are honoured to receive a thank you book from the children in the Rūma Kotuku, Ruru and Tauhou classes from Hokitika Primary School who have been enjoying the new Cass Square Playground. The hamster wheel appears to be particularly popular! The children put in a lot of effort to let us know how much they appreciate the playground and hopefully they will have a lot of fun there for many years to come. It’s great that the school combined language learning with play.
The full booklet is available to view on our website.
My name is Judy Cardno, and for the past five years, I have been dedicated to researching the New Zealand men and women who served in Japan as part of the British Commonwealth Forces. I am excited to announce that I have written and compiled a book about this significant period in New Zealand’s history. Did you know that over 12,000 men and women served during this time?
My book is available at a non-profit cost of $25.00. If you are interested, please contact me at jayforce.nz@gmail.com. I am also keen to hear from anyone who has family members from the West Coast who served, as I would like to include their stories in my 3rd book.
Westland District Library would like to thank Judy for a very informative talk at the library on 23 July about these fascinating but relatively undocumented events. Her books are such a valuable contribution to NZ history. The library has a copy of her book available to borrow and staff can help patrons connect to Judy through the Facebook group ‘J-Force New Zealand’. We can’t wait to read her 3rd book!
Text supplied by Judy Cardno and the Westland District Library. Image, Judy Cardno, Book one Life and Times NZ J Force.
The Custom House restoration project has been completed. The lead-based paint was stripped off, the building repainted, a new flagpole installed, a new sign installed, and a new roof crest installed. Various rotten weatherboards were also replaced and repairs done to the gutters. Part of the initial funding agreement was to re-pile and move the building forward by 2m due to the West Coast Regional Council’s future plans to extend the floodwall. However, the floodwall works are delayed, and Lotteries granted a variation to the funding to complete the restoration works but not do the piling.
Are you keen to volunteer?
The Park held its AGM on 17 July. President Bruce Hackett stood down after 3 years and was replaced by Bob Gaiger. All other officers remained the same.
In his annual report, Bruce noted that we had made significant progress during the year and thanked all members and supporters for their contributions especially the regular hard core of volunteers who do so much work around the Park. He acknowledged the support from the Hokitika Museum, Westland District Council, Destination Westland, Destination Hokitika, the Hokitika Community Trust and a number of local companies and funding organisations. Highlights for the year have been the “Better Off” and “Tourism Infrastructure” funded projects to upgrade the Park’s power supply, carry out yard and drainage improvements and build the new Tracks and Wheels shed and Maritime Centre. More development is being considered with funding applications being made to develop a new Heritage Craft Centre.
He reported that we had started to recognise the efforts of members with some social events, and these have proved popular and successful.
Even with the bigger projects going on, other work has continued. The Livery team are working on an old Tip Dray and the Foster Coach, the Steam Shed has had a major clean-out ready for work to begin on the wall linings and displays and development continues at the railway station. The “sewing machine display” is a totally inadequate way to describe the collection of machines, looms, spinning wheels and the like and the stories that are being told.
As we grow, become more popular, and more people visit, the administration of the organisation also becomes a mammoth task. So, we need more members. Although our volunteers are mostly ‘older men’ there is no barrier to anyone becoming a member. We welcome everyone. If you would like to become a volunteer come up and visit us, see what we do and talk to some of our members. One of our members has coined the phrase “we are a geriatric play-centre”. Let’s see if we can get rid of the geriatric label!
If you’re interested, contact us at wihpark@gmail.com to find out more.
Text and images: Westland Industrial Heritage Park
Images of the maritime centre poles going up.
The Ministry of Business, Innovation and Employment and the Ministry for the Environment are seeking feedback on options to make it easier to build small, self-contained and detached houses, commonly known as ‘granny flats’ on property with an existing home on it.
To make it easier to build granny flats and increase the supply of affordable homes for all New Zealanders. This consultation looks at two key pieces of legislation that set out the rules for residential building, the Building Act (2004) and the Resource Management Act 1991 (RMA).
The Building Act sets out the rules for the construction, alteration and demolition of buildings. Regardless of whether building work is exempt from a building consent or not, all building work must comply with the New Zealand Building Code.
The building system proposals in this consultation include:
Initially, it was suggested that an engineer’s report may be required for granny flats built without needing to undergo the building consent process. However, this could introduce new engineering services and additional costs. Instead, we are proposing that all work is conducted or supervised by competent professionals under current occupational licensing requirements to ensure all building work will meet the Building Code.
Many district plans already allow granny flats without resource consent, but there’s a lack of consistency and different standards across the country.
A national environmental standard (NES) would need to be created to permit a granny flat on sites in rural and residential zones without resource consent. An NES means changes can come into force quickly.
The NES would apply in rural and residential zones where it is anticipated most granny flats will be built. We want to know whether people think the NES should apply to other areas too, such as mixed-use zones where there’s a mixture of residential, commercial and light industrial buildings.
While the proposed changes would make it easier to build granny flats, changes must be balanced against existing issues, including managing flood risks. Certain district plan rules will still need to apply.
A set of permitted activity standards are proposed to cover aspects such as the size, how much of a property can be covered by buildings and how close a granny flat can be to a neighbouring property boundary.
Visit the MBIE website for all the information and to make a submission.
Text: Ministry of Business, Innovation and Employment
