Pamoa call not ?so cut and dried?

Opinion

That the six councillors who sought to revoke a decision made in public-excluded to convert most of the council’s biggest forestry asset to natives are all on the finance and audit committee, and included its chairman, is instructive.

So is the result of our webpoll last week, where 72 percent of 336 respondents agreed with the council decision to convert 800 hectares (71 percent of the Pamoa pine forest) to native species.

With community angst peaking over the pressures of a fast-growing forestry industry on inadequate infrastructure, over fatalities, over the increasing presence of log trucks and the number of log truck crashes, over the vast slash damage caused at Tolaga Bay last June, and other issues around a monoculture crop across our hills, the council decision and our webpoll result are not surprising.

There is also strong support in the community for an industry where one in four households has a member whose job is dependent on forestry, an industry that has inherent dangers but has developed a strong safety culture to mitigate them, and an industry that could bring wider economic benefits for the region if efforts to develop more processing here are successful.

It would be a safe bet to say this district’s footprint of pinus radiata will reduce over time, but that as a region with the natural advantage of growing these trees — whose wood is in demand — faster than anywhere else, and that is trying to capture more value from them, the industry will continue to be a mainstay of the economy.

The councillors who sought to overturn the Pamoa decision, because not enough financial information was available to them, had a partial victory in that staff are now seeking more detail on the implications of the switch-out.

Pamoa is a significant council asset and in what could be seen as virtue signalling, the council has opted to slash its value at a time it is trying to work out how to fund projects demanded by its community.

Your editor has been told that retiring just 5 percent of the Pamoa pine forest would be sufficient to protect the city’s water pipeline, and that the opportunity cost of this decision will be in the tens of millions of dollars.