Editorial: Rubbish dumpers are just plain lazy

DUMP: Household rubbish is building up at one house in Bellingham Cres with residents saying it's a health hazard. PHOTO/Ben Fraser

It's definitely not the look our beautiful city is after.

Derelict homes covered in graffiti, with rubbish strewn across a lawn which looks like it has never seen a lawn mower.

This image is a slight on our clean, green, tourism image and what Rotorua is also famous for, manaakitanga (hospitality).

As we all know hospitality starts at home and how can we do that if we can't even look after our own backyard?

In Wednesday's Rotorua Daily Post, we featured three empty residential properties in Bellingham Cres that had been vandalised with graffiti, subjected to an arson attack and had transformed into the local rubbish dump for household waste.

Last year, one home was deemed a fire risk under the Local Government Act, which allowed the council to clean it up. About 36 tonnes of rubbish was removed costing $5000 in landfill fees.

This is not just a Fordlands problem with derelict properties littered across our city, unfortunately for Bellingham Cres, they have three properties which are an eyesore.

It's easy to point the finger and blame property owners who have let these properties get to the state they are in. But it is also a community problem, with some owners boarding up and cleaning their properties only to have a few local residents dumping their waste and vandalising them.

The feedback from our readers has varied from knocking the homes down to taking the properties off the owners.

Each has its merit but is equally hard to achieve with bureaucratic red tape often getting in the way.

While an answer to the problem isn't readily at hand, the easiest thing to change first is peoples' attitude to the situation.

We have to get people to stop thinking it's okay to simply dump their rubbish on an empty property. To put it simply, these people are being lazy.

Maori believe in kaitiakitanga (guardianship) of the land. Something we all should believe in. How are we looking after our land if we allow a few people to dump their rubbish wherever they feel.