Letters: The crippling cost of compliance

A reader recounts being 'put through the wringer' by the FNDC.

It is little wonder that the FNDC has an unenviable and unsavoury reputation amongst a large proportion of Far North ratepayers.

One of the outstanding issues that it fails to deal with is that of the thousands of non-compliant dwellings that are so much a part of the Far North landscape.

Although council employees are not reluctant to admit to this, they seem unable to correlate the existence of these structures to the fact that compliance is frighteningly expensive, prone to nitpicking and unnecessary attention to detail.

Also, in many cases it is enforced by unqualified, overpaid, unreasonable civil servants who continually neglect to carry out their role of helping, not persecuting, the people they are employed to serve.

If one is foolish enough to buy into - at great expense - the council-compliant schedule of inspections, fees, laborious forms to complete in triplicate, fees ...., prepare for disillusionment.

Ten years ago, after going down that road, I emerged from four years of battling for my rights with the FNDC.

When raw sewage erupted on my property close to my house, I called in the local building inspector and was told to "throw some soil over it". When I persisted in asking for answers, there ensued years of exhausting effort to make the council take responsibility for the disasters that were my sewerage and drainage systems.

The building inspector continued to deny that he had failed to inspect the contractor's work, and because of this, the "good ole boys" network kicked in.

I was literally put through the wringer. Over this time the council deployed their full arsenal of hypocrisy, denial, procrastination, deceit and delay.

When they had very nearly beaten me into submission with their indifference and corruption, I enlisted the help of my local MP. Within weeks I had a brand spanking new, state of the art drainage/sewerage, system installed at no cost to myself.

All the cover-up and denial of the previous four years dissipated as if it had never occurred. Not surprisingly, neither was there any admission or apology ever given. Is it therefore surprising that many of us have no faith in the worth or integrity of council systems and choose to bypass them and the crippling expense they incur?

The FNDC should either accept responsibility and begin a campaign of stamping out all offenders, or accept the fact that it is a problem too big to handle and leave it alone. If they are going to tackle it, they should abandon their system of following up only on complaints made by disgruntled members of the community.

At the very least they should start to treat all Far North residents fairly and equally, even if this is a concept foreign to their present kaupapa.

MARYELLEN CHANDLER
Ahipara