PHOTO: Northern Advocate reports on a new vision for Forum North and the CBD here

https://youtu.be/UpBjuiJ6ico

Northland’s councils own large areas of land – but why should they?

Is it greed, or is it because they don't know the future and are trying to be risk-averse?
Historically, the reason councils owned land was to help smaller businesses to get better established and then to find better locations for them. Today, when a council offers a 25 year lease now on a property, is that good property management, or are councils solely looking at their back pocket?

Small to medium businesses make up 97% of all NZ businesses and employ one in three workers –yet it’s easy to drive past them directly to a megastore when you need cheap clothes or generic motor oil.  After all, megastores have everything under one climate-controlled roof.

It is said that Councils have a responsibility to look after the community and take care of that community’s needs. So does that also mean telling people where they can and cannot drink, smoke or do drugs?

Should we allow our public water supplies to be dosed with fluoride? After 15 years, the debate over this continues.

Personally, I can’t understand why anybody would want their drinking water contaminated with a substance that will not make any health related benefit to them, yet we have the Northland DHB and the central government doing just that.

Sept 9 2015

Development Contributions (DCs) are supposed to be the actual costs of your development on the existing infrastructure of the Council, but they don’t seem to be applied fairly.

We seem to take it for granted that councils have the ability and the right to manage rental properties. Perhaps we shouldn’t.