Saturday, March 07, 2009

I fear my compulsive obsessive tendencies are showing

I am still working on that ditch at the end of the driveway.

And as I said to the Council and Inroads guys yesterday I am not going to give up on this so they really might as well save themselves the timewasting they will otherwise be involved in and fix it now.

We had a meeting - a remarkably amicable one actually - on the side of the ditch yesterday morning. It was raining which was convenient as it was relatively easy to see that the ditch wasn't actually dealing with the stormwater that well.

Some remarkable utterances were made including:
"we have decided in cases like this in future we should notify affected people before doing the work" Great start - and nice admission that it wasn't a very nice thing to do.
"It may have fixed 10% of your neighbours stormwater problem" this was said in a hopeful tone of voice because really the neighbours stormwater problem is not even slightly improved.
"The original job wasn't very good" Agreed!
"we try not to do work at the ratepayers expense that isn't necessary" (looks like you screwed up in this case)

It also emerged that the soil dumped on the verge and the secondary ditch was only supposed to be done with the permission of the owner of that land. We know that wasn't given.

It strikes me as something Fair Go would love. They came and did some work they shouldn't have done as it wasn't their problem.. They did a terrible job. Then they sent us letters telling us they expected us to pay to fix it and warning that if we didn't get a permit to do it and do it to their specifications we would be in trouble.

Anyway they went off to contemplate solutions. I believe they may have a letter from Rodney Hide about the matter either now or very shortly (as his office wrote to us to say they were looking into it) so that should hopefully keep them focussed on finding an answer.

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