Below is a timeline of events from this point:
23rd April
Went to Let’s Korero event at the Cossie Club in Upper Hutt where many questions were asked, and Mayor Wayne Guppy, who was confused about them, asked us for these to be sent through as these confused him also.
24th April
Sent through to the council the questions relating to the Consultation Information at 2:40pm and awaited a response as requested by Mayor Guppy. Got a response from Wayne saying he would follow up.
27th April
Attended another Let’s Korero event at the Upper Hutt Recycling centre to try and get clarity but met with different answers to the same questions. Also felt the venue and how it was run put the public in danger as it was right in front of the recycling depot where cars were coming and going to drop off recycling, no coned of area, just set up in the carpark. Extremely dangerous as even the staff of the UHCC were wearing Hi-Viz seemed concerned about the cars and people standing talking.
28th April
Attended the Let’s Korero event at Brewtown, once again to try and gain clarity, once again different answers to the same questions. Also, the council had decided to change the time from 9am-11am to 10am-1pm and not advise the public or update their website. We personally rung Mayor Wayne Guppy at 9.29am and he said they had decided to change the time to 10am –1pm, and they would be setting up shortly. There were about 9 of us there, and many were looking to us for answers hence the phone call to the mayor. He did not apologise nor seemed concerned that the public had been waiting. We even asked the person in charge of Brewtown for the Sunday market, and he couldn’t tell us anything more than they were supposed to be set up in front of the black food cart in the centre. The Mayor soon after he arrived, around 9.35am, announced he was off to buy his tomatoes from the Farmers market before they sold out. Leaving many of us shocked and speechless.
2nd May
Submissions on the consultation finished. Still with no correspondence on the questions requested via email sent on the 24th of April 2024.
3rd May
Notified by “The Post” that extension had been made and asked for comment, had no idea at the time so didn’t comment immediately. Once off the phone saw an email from the UHCC about 10 mins before the call this included the next points.
3rd May
Email from UHCC CEO to say there were 2 errors in the LTP, after submissions closed and they were extending submissions to the 12th May. According to the article in “The Post” and the Upper Hutt Leader the mayor stated :
“it was “disappointing” but both errors were minor and everything else in the document was correct.”
And the CEO said :
“staff were “devastated” by the errors and he accepted it had negatively affected the credibility of the council.” and “He was confident there were no other errors”
Reference:
6th May
8:47pm we sent an email requesting the answers to our questions again as we had had no answers to the questions we had raised other than the 2 they had said were errors causing them to extend the submission deadline.
7th May
13 Days after our requested email from Mayor Wayne Guppy we received a response from UHCC to the questions (5:43pm) but these we still felt were not satisfactory answered.
8th May
We responded back early hours of the morning (1:40am) with clarification requests and followed up via txt at (3:55pm) that day asking for receipt of email and expected turn around. We worked hard on this as we were conscious of the 12th May 2024 deadline for submissions.
9th May
Received an email from CEO of UHCC stating “I don’t have the staff resources nor time to be able to respond to your questions with the immediacy you expect”. Unsure what immediacy he is referring to as my request was around expected turnaround time. The CEO then went on to say that we should focus on suggesting services to cut to save money. This felt very much like he was stonewalling us, maybe due to the questions highlighting further errors which council didn’t not want to admit too or something else.
9th May
As at time of writing this we still do not have answers to the questions, so we do not have the information to make an informed submission.