Bright Wings

Featherston on Facebook

Featherston is really going places these days.  It's a popular place for train commuters, being only an hour from Wellington.  These people are breathing new life into what has been a forgotten, neglected corner of the Wairarapa.

Featherston is on Facebook and the site is bustling with interesting news, activities for residents to join, as well as initiatives which benefit the wider community.  Well done, Featherston.

Here's the link again:  Featherston on Facebook

If you're a Featherston resident reading this and don't understand Facebook email me (email address at the top righthand corner of this page) and I'll find someone local to help you.

Tararua blog

Tararua District Library has an excellent blog, with all sorts of interesting stuff about books, libraries and current events. Excellent reading (the blog, that is).

This week is also Library Week 2009 and libraries all over the country are putting on special events.

The Wairarapa Library Service has a number of Library Week events on its website.  Sorry, I couldn't find any events on the Masterton Library site.

Greytown bookshop needs green light

I hope Richard Griffin is successful in his bid to lease the old Greytown library building to start an upmarket bookshop.

You don't have to look very hard to find bored-looking men in Greytown at the weekend. They stand resigned, staring vacantly into the middle distance, while their partners trawl various clothing and decor shops, looking for A Little Something.

A good bookshop might keep some of these blokes happily engrossed for an hour or two. Particularly if there were some comfy armchairs.

Think of the economic benefits. Women would be free to peruse each and every shop at leisure, secure in the knowledge that their man was happily reading. More discretionary - and indiscretionary - income would flow from Wellington to Greytown bank accounts.

The South Wairarapa needs a bookshop. Greytown people are great users of their library, and library users tend to be book buyers as well. It would be an excellent and appropriate use of the old library building.

Let's hope the South Wairarapa District Council agree at their meeting on Wednesday.

Happy birthday Wairarapa Libraries

It's eight years since the merger of the Carterton, Greytown, Featherston and Martinborough libraries into the Wairarapa Library Service. 

A real success story for Wairarapa local government, it pooled lending and back-office library resources spread over four rural towns. 

The Times-Age reports on eighth birthday celebrations.

Local government needs to improve governance information

The controversy over the Masterton Urban Wastewater Treatment upgrade has highlighted the need for Wairarapa Councils to provide more online information about governance and supporting reasons for decision-making. I noted Jeff Workman's desire to improve Council communication in an earlier post. 

While some Wairarapa councils have council and committee minutes available on their websites, these are simply a record of decisions, and do not provide any background of the discussion that led to a decision, nor the reports submitted by council officers to support the discussion.

I would like to be able to read online the same council officers' reports that councillors read so I can be informed as to the reasons a particular course of action is proposed.

What I'd like to see happen is:

• Agendas for all council meetings and committees posted on councils' websites at least a week ahead of a meeting
• All council officers' reports tabled at those meetings to be uploaded to the website at the same time
• All council and committee minutes uploaded when they are prepared. (These would need to include a note that they have yet to be approved.)  Carterton and South Wairarapa already post their agendas and minutes, but I was unable to find any on the Masterton website. 
• All information about a council committee - membership, agendas, minutes and reports - grouped together on the website.

This would give interested ratepayers - and the media - an opportunity read background information and to highlight more effectively issues that may well be of interest to the wider public. It would also allow searching on a particular topic.

At the moment council agendas and supporting papers are available at public libraries and, daunted by the amount of paper, I suspect few people read them.

There will always be a few "in committee" issues - where councillors need to have a full and frank discussion about an issue of particular sensitivity, or where there is commercially sensitive information - such as contract details between a supplier and a council.  These are the exception - the majority of council governance activities should be open and transparent.

The principle underpinning the Local Government Information Act 1987 is that all local government information is "discoverable" (ie, open to the public) unless there are compelling reasons, which are outlined in the Act, for their remaining secret.