Letters To Editor: A city eaten by Art Deco mania

When will the madness end?
After reading a news item the other day that said Napier parking wardens are to now be attired, throughout the year, in Art Deco garb in an attempt to "step up the Deco flavour of the city" and "make the wardens more approachable" I have to wonder "who is really in charge in this city?"
The Napier City Council would adopt this and other ideas put forward to it by the Art Deco Trust. Also recommended were holding vintage car displays in the central city (on timed or metered parking spaces I wonder?) and providing live music from the Art Deco era in the city during the day.
Now, I like classic cars and enjoy the different types of music buskers bring to my city, but making them all play nothing but Art Deco era music all the time? Oh, come on! I still vividly remember working in town one Art Deco Weekend and seeing a 21st century mobility scooter-propelled Art Deco supremo shooing a saxophone-playing busker off the street in front of my store. The fedora, shirt, tie and waistcoat clad saxophone (circa 1846) player was very, very good and had been playing jazz music and the like before being ousted - for what? Not being Deco enough?
This sort of obsessive, conformist behaviour really does remind me of the 1930s - just the darker, later stages of the era that modern society is bound never to forget and try never to emulate again, that is.
The item continued that also set to arrive in December, after probably being built in the United States, will be two Art Deco-themed buses. Remember the public (and some councillor) furore over the "toaster" buses? Well, we're getting them (or something like them).
The buses, which could include an "outside" section open to the sun/wind/rain, will provide a transport link between Napier's Marine Parade and Ahuriri and come with a price-tag of somewhere around $1.5 million.
This big spend comes hot on the heels of NCC telling Napier Inner City Marketing it would not fund their request, of a mere $263,000 by comparison, for a "Projection Art" scheme they had planned for central city nights (when town is packed with people to see it?).
I was not a fan of this plan to begin with - NICM has so few events or ideas as it is and I'm informed by someone in the audio-visual industry that the amount requested would buy you a very decent, high-quality, digital-data projector and still leave you with around $250,000 change - so where was the rest going?
These decisions, the item concluded, "had been made after hearings last week on submissions on the council's draft annual plan.
"Many submissions seeking money for projects were declined because they would have forced rates higher than the planned rise of just under 2 per cent." Isn't selective frugality wonderful in driving our city forward? Or is that backwards? Or to Ahuriri?
So who is really in charge of Napier's image? The public, the council, or the Art Deco Trust? Because with decisions like these it doesn't take the intrigue of a James Bond novel to see the future of central Napier and the future of how the city, as a whole, is viewed by the rest of the country and the world is being led by a group of publicly elected officials (elected by a minority too - only 45.35 per cent of Napier's registered potential voters actually cast a vote in the last local body election) who are being led around by an even smaller, publicly unelected, self-interest group who seem to be continually given carte blanche to do whatever they want and are willingly given the electoral public's money to do it.
Please, Napier City Council, come down from your Art Deco-themed ivory towers and join the rest of us here in the city, in the year 2011.
We have fresh ideas, modern music, clothes and vehicles and, come on, Napier citizens: do you want to see your city go kicking and screaming into the future, or are you just going to let it be hushed, sedated and apathetically chained to the past?
Andrew Frame, Napier
Negative slant
We were pretty disappointed to read the headline in the HB Today, June 8, that stated "Setback for Hawke's Bay coastal campaigners".
The headline puts a fairly negative slant on a positive outcome for WOW and the Cape coast residents.
The presentation to HDC, HBRC and WOW of the Merestone "Scoping and Feasibility Study of Coastal protection Works for the Haumoana - Te Awanga Coastline" by Dave Serjeant gave us the hope we were looking for and the certainty our councils were seeking that our coastal protection plan can work and has a good chance of getting a resource consent.
Dave Sergeant states in his report that he considers the WOW groyne field proposal put together by well-respected coastal engineer Steve Moynihan "the most appropriate form of protection for the Haumoana coast is some form of groyne field" and that furthermore the crenulate bay theory can be used to predict shoreline shape between groynes.
He also advises direct referral to the Environment Court and that he considers that the proposal would have a "reasonably good chance of success", particularly if a public body such as HDC were to make the application .
While we acknowledge there is still some fine tuning to do and some relevant studies to undertake, we were very pleased with the outcome of this report that was funded by HDC and HBRC.
The funding issue is a separate one, and while questions are rightly being asked about how this will be done, the modelling of those options is part of a next stage of work WOW is about to engage on with council executives.
WOW has stated clearly from the beginning that any funding plan will be a vast improvement on the one two years ago that would have taxed local residents off their properties.
We are confident that any district rating levy would not exceed our suggestion of a "cup of coffee and a cookie" a year. Given that we are confident that with the support of both councils we might even do considerably better than that.
Concerns about money should not be allowed to undermine the confidence of locals or create fears in the wider community that a velodrome-type cost is hanging over their heads.
Your reporter has merely picked up on the last few comments by Lawrence Yule regarding the funding models and seems to have missed the positive views of the three peer reviewers and the overall positive conclusions for the WOW plan to save the Cape coast.
Ann Redstone,  Chairperson WOW