The New Canterbury Tales

That's the title of Councillor and Chch personality Sue Wells' blog, where she has been updating about the recovery process and meetings with CERA from an informed perspective.

http://suewellsnz.wordpress.com/

Some extracts from the latest

My perception is that the final hurdle is getting consistency across the insurers – no easy task.

EQC alone has 40 reinsurers. Each of them has subsequent reinsurers. Cats to be herded. A phenomenal challenge for the world’s largest ever insurance event. (After the May 23rd deadline passed, EQC had received 344,364 claims, with 510,000 individual claims in that. Those numbers are far higher than Hurricane Katrina, higher than lowly insured Japan.)
...
On that scale issue, I have now heard repeated comments that Art Agnos who was mayor of San Francisco during their terrible quake was astonished at the enormity of ours. Theirs was confined to a relatively small area. Ours is huge.
...
It’s likely too that we will be a monitored as a case study of how a community rebuilds after an event which is so big and so transformational. With every week that passes, it is clearer than before that we are not talking about picking ourselves up, dusting ourselves off, being the same and doing the same things. Our community and our city is undergoing a metamorphosis which is physical, human, psychological. None of us individually or as a collective will ever be the same again.
...
We have to completely replace about 300km of our sewer network. We have to repair 600km of roading network and replace more besides. Add into that our water and stormwater damage and with the Crown’s help we will be spending $500million per annum for five years. That is ten times what the CCC normally spends on capital expenditure. It is enormous.
...
We saw charts which indicated the city’s land has moved permanently, both up and down. The Port Hills have gone up, the rest of the city has gone down. It has spun clockwise to varying degrees right across the city. The estuary has moved upwards as much as two metres. It’s shallower. At some point we will have to make a call about how to handle that.

And another quote that struck me from an earlier post

There is no mistaking the importance the internet will play in crafting our next plan – and I am all too conscious that it favours the white, the wealthy, the well educated, the young.

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In other #eqnz news I have a ticket to the first Share an Idea workshop this afternoon (the one closest me is on Queen's Birthday weekend, when I will be otherwise occupied at BoD. That's next weekend actually.
You can see a list of the workshops and register to attend at http://shareanideaworkshops.eventbrite.com/ (attendance is free, but spaces are limited)

Share an Idea workshop report

I attended one this afternoon, it took about 2 1/2 hours, we brainstormed on finer details of and ways to implement some of the themes which have emerged.

There would have been about 40 people there, reasonably representative but again I'd like to encourage all my friends in Christchurch to turn up to one at some stage and make their input. Here's that link again. http://shareanideaworkshops.eventbrite.com/

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After a bit of a pep talk from Mayor Bob (which didn't do much for me) a professional facilitator took over.

There were four broad areas to cover, with between 2 and 4 questions each (which I have paraphrased below), and we each got to focus on two (one at a time of course) of our choice then quickly visit the others to slap up anything we deemed particularly missing.

I don't know if they'll be the same for the workshops, but for us it was (I did the first two listed):

Life:
- how can we make the Central City feel safe,
- how can we make the Central City welcoming to different social/cultural groups
- how can we encourage people to live in the Central City
- how can we encourage/support local artists and entertainers
* we lost far too much time with people ranting about alcohol control in response to the first question. It needed to be one point, move on.
* one very sensible and knowledgeable person (whom I recognised from media appearances over the years but am not going to name because he was there as a private individual) suggested "playgrounds for all ages". He also spoke exactly my thoughts on some other things, which saved time and was personally validating :)

Market:
- what are the key difference between shopping in the city and shopping in the malls
- how can we encourage the tourists to spend more time in the Central City and spend money
* one of the people in my group for this works in the tourist industry and made it quite clear that without the high-capacity hotels that were in the city we're basically screwed for the next 10 years as far as international tourism goes.

Space:
- what would people like to see along the key parts of the Avon
- How to encourage the use of the physical space in the city in the evenings
* one of the suggestions that I saw both groups had highlighted was "Stop calling it the C B D". I noticed in all the materials it's being referenced as the "Central City", so I think the council in already onto this but it's something all of us can do.

Move:
- consider how to move pedestrians around the Central City if there are fewer cars allowed in
- Things you think are good and bad about light rail
- What needs to be done to encourage more cycling around the Central City
* two points that came up in Life that I suggested might be better in Move were "frequent seats spaced a short walk apart" and "the ability/plan to route traffic away from the most dangerous remaining buildings in the case of another earthquake, without having to shut the Central City down entirely.

~~~
There were some people there who obviously had agendas, but fortunately neither of my groups had the friction I witnessed across the room at one point. Although the Market group did have one person I wanted to vigorously debate - she slipped her "we're doing it all wrong - this is how it should be done" in right near the end when there wasn't time and it just had to be written down. My own agenda didn't quite fit into any of the boxes, and I wasn't going to try and force it.

The time constraints on the council are so tight that I feel what is said at these workshops will have -an- influence on the draft and then final plan - and that's about as much influence as any of us who aren't directly involved in the system can constructively hope to have.