Tally Ho chaps!

Just in from Biggles:
The Red Baron has been sighted at six o'clock high and we are ready to engage in the dogfight...

Seems that WAAG has finally got its house in order and is now putting heavy pressure on council candidates for the North Shore, where the flights to the mooted second airport at Whenuapai will cross, making heaps of noise, streaming avgas exhaust fumes 24x7 across their burbs and beaches.

The WAAG Prez suggests

the majority of the people on the North Shore will be affected one way or another

Damn right they will, they are about to become the very noisy and smoggy lower part of the glideslope into Whenuapai in prevailing south-westerlies. Over there, as blogged sometime ago, the evil Red Baron, Mayor Bob has been flying his biplane re Waitakere City taking over Whenuapai as a fully commercial airport, second to the main one in that French suburb of Auckland, Mon-Gere.

This has been going on for months, with claim and counter-claim, at great expense to very concerned ratepayers on all sides. The Red Baron has declared war on on all, being hell bent on getting WCC ratepayers to stump up at great cost. The doddery old fart needs taking out at this election!

WAAG is doing a leaflet drop, aiming to sway voter opinion against commercialisation of the airport when the Air Farce finally vacates some time in the future, although WAAG thinks the future council shoud remain 'inside the tent' on any discussions with the Red Baron.

From Biggles:
Good on WAAG, do your best chaps!
Am off to have a look at the Navy not being able to get spares for some not so useful and extremely expensive helos...

Mayor Bob still pushing for his Epitaph

I've been wondering when the unusally quiet Mayor of the Wild West would shove his head over the parapet re the airport debate.

With all the recent hoo-haa over the looming sale into foreign ownership of Auckland's only airport at the French suburb of Auckland, Mon Gere, I thought he would have been a lot more vocal to date. Yes, I am sure the sale will proceed, the money offered will be too good for councils to keep their sticky fingers out of and they will wantonly apply the proceeds to their local pet social engineering causes, like getting themselves re-elected.

Seems Waitakere is continuing to apply for a change to the district plan, at hideous expense to ratepayers, without support from any quarter as previousy reported. Most submissions were against the plan change, particularly from those under the flightpath, but the council ignored all of these and steamrolls on. Now Mayor Bob is pleading Whenuapai's case to keep the foreighn bastard's at Mon Gere honest. Yeah, Right, what happens down the track when a second airport is snapped up by foreigner's - your argument fails! Typical of Mayor Bob, he desperately wants his name on Auckland's second airport (Bob's Memorial) commissioning plaque at the expense of ratepayers.

The sooner the west is rid of this Labour stalwart, we might actually get rates spent on where they are needed, at core services like roads. Have you looked closely at the state of Waitakere roads recently? Full of deteriorating subsurfaces with patchworked sealings - there has been no real work done on local roads in recent times, it has all been spent on the light rail fiasco and Son of Britomart, a council palace designed to keep this bloated council in power ad infinitum.

Auckland's second airport?

As previously noted, WCC has bought itself a fight re the proposed district plan change.

Submissions closed recently and WCC reports that over 2,650 submissions were made, 82 for and the rest against. It seems more than a few were made using the pro-forma provided the by opposition over at WAAG and Cr. Hulse seems to suggest these submissions are of less stature than those formally written!

Also it seems that many of these pro-forma ones are from out of district submitters from across the water on the North Shore. Funny that - especially when Shore residents will have live with the noise and pollution from aircraft transiting over their lovely houses on the nothern beaches, downwind of the proposed 24x7 airport! I wonder do they really know how much airport noise carries at night?

This exercise must have stiffed ratepayers a bundle so far because every submitter apparently now has been directly notified that they can view all the submissions and can make further submissions to their original one. What a hell of an amount of paper, keeping NZ Post in business, no doubt all of it on non-carbon producing eco-city recycled paper. I sure would love a forest of the trees that produce that paper - I could be a squillionaire!

Cr. Hulse even goes so far to admit it is a bureaucratic procedure which must be endured. I would bet that she has not done one thing during her term of leeching off the ratepayer to reduce said bureaucracy.


UPDATE:

WAAG has posted their reaction 10/5. Notable points 97% against and also that the WCC deliberately did not ask for submissions from the North Shore City residents across the water who lie under the approach paths