Dick was also instrumental in selling inner-city council properties to buy another site on which it was hoped a multi-star hotel would be built to compliment the conference centre. This never came to fruition, and the property deals were criticised for making a loss.
Aside from the money spent to build or refurbish them – initially $4m for the conference centre and $8m for the aquarium - operating losses are routine for those facilities.
With council staff still on holiday I was unable to obtain an official sum of accumulated losses, but by culling through annual reports it's clear the "city activities" group of conference centre, aquarium, Kennedy Park camp, I-site and Par 2 mini-golf combined perennially lose money.
I'm no maths whiz but the average operating deficit (made good mostly from rates) is more than $2m a year over the past 5 years; add in capital debt (which the accountants portray as income) and decreased reserve monies and they're costing citizens some $4-5 million per annum.
A conservatively-generous guesstimate suggests $50-60m total over the past 20 years.
Dick was unrepentant for foisting this cost on Napier citizens, but they were sufficiently aggrieved he lost both the mayoralty and the "failsafe option" of a council seat in the 2001 election.
Strangely voters didn't renounce him entirely, for he soon resurfaced on the regional council; he's now completing what he says is his final term – one marked by the failure of another aggressively-backed project, the Ruataniwha dam.
Fast-forward to today with mayor Dalton riding roughshod over community opinion in spending $7m to strengthen and further re-purpose the conference centre as, well, a conference centre – getting rid of the vestigial remains of the war memorial in the process – and proposing around $45m be spent expanding the aquarium.
On top of which, like Dick, Dalton is falling over himself to make council-owned land available for a commercial hotel development.
Why?
See, I don't actually have a problem with a council spending money on attractive doodads for its citizens and visitors (so long as the citizens agree); it would be a dull bleak bit of shingle beach without some pizzazz along Marine Parade.
But accepting they'll lose money is one thing; making them bigger so they lose more money quite another.
And selling off or compromising landholdings to "encourage" a hotel business is ludicrous. Councils are not hoteliers.
The golden tourist rule may be build it and they will come, but there's sufficient already to bring in the crowds; it's then up to accommodation providers to cater for them.
One interesting fact NCC used to include in its annual report was the cost per rateable property of these facilities – it was $118 in 2014 and $122 a year later.
Now? Who knows – but an annual cost of $200 cannot be far away.
*Bruce Bisset is a freelance writer and poet.
*Views expressed here are the writer's opinion and not the newspaper's.
