First challenge is deciding what is a priority
What a Priority: Incredibly, the Rodney Local Board suggests that advocacy for the planned Pūhoi–Wellsford motorway should be a line item priority. Board members clearly fail to appreciate the imperative for green growth infrastructure. cartoon courtesy of Majorlook Productions
The draft Rodney Local Board Plan submission form begins with:
I agree with the following priorities proposed in the draft local board plan:
The difficulty is that, in the draft plan, seven priorities are listed. The first listed, for example, is:
Priority One: Build and Strengthen Our Economy
Meantime, the four line items in that section are labelled ‘key projects and initiatives’. Further, some projects and initiatives mentioned in the discussion are not always obvious in the subsequent line items.
Local board member Tracey Martin kindly clarified the question:
A priority is whatever you think it is.
Everything inside the document links together to make the overall vision for Rodney. The Priority One, Two and Three etc. are there for reference and not to indicate that One is more highly thought of than Two, and so on.
As this is a template document for throughout Auckland, we were not able to put all our priorities into bullet points. So we made sure that as many as possible were covered in the text. Even one line gives it a place inside our future and therefore inside the long-term plan, which is the next target—to get funding around those projects.
Makes sense. Accordingly, the Mahurangi Magazine’s submission will treat anything mentioned in the draft plan as a priority, not simply the 33 line items. And any priority that is neither a line item nor in the text, will be placed in the section labelled:
Please list any other priorities you think are more important than the ones in the draft local board plan
The most appropriate way for the local board to ‘build and strengthen our economy’, Priority One, is to lead (or advocate for) the building of the infrastructure integral to green growth. Top priority in this category, for the Mahurangi Magazine, will be advocacy for a 10-kilometre Mahurangi coastal trail between Waiwera and Mahurangi West.
Part of the long-envisaged network of Mahurangi trails.