Tomorrow is D-Day . . . or H-Day as the case may be.
Tomorrow the New Zealand Geographic Board meets to consider the issue of whether the name of our city should Wanganui or Whanganui.
Local iwi group Te Runanga o Tupoho this year put forward to the board a proposal to alter the name by inserting the "h".
Tomorrow the board will decide if it will support the proposal. And on Monday that decision will be revealed.
But that may not be the end of what has become a long and involved controversy.
If the board decides to support the proposal, it will call for submissions, with a deadline months away.
Given the sheer amount of interest in the topic, judging by the vast amount of letters to the editor this newspaper received, there are several would-be submitters among our readership.
Yes, you may have had your say in the 2006 referendum on the name change a poll which may or may not be rendered meaningless by the geographic board but if you're confident in your argument, this would now be the forum in which to express it.
New Zealand Geographic Board secretary Wendy Shaw was reported yesterday as saying past board decisions had generally favoured community views.
This quote doesn't bode well for Tupoho, given the 2006 referendum results, which showed 82 per cent of those who voted were against change.
But she also said: "While the board gives considerable weight to [majority] views, it must also weigh those up against its statutory functions regarding spelling and original Maori place names".
The same report had Tupoho's Ken Mair "quietly confident" the name would change.
Whichever way the board decides to go tomorrow, there will be a large, unhappy group of Wanganui people come next week's announcement.
But once a decision is made either way, at least then we can get past this debate, for now anyway, and move forward.
There are other issues, bigger issues even, facing this city whether it has an "h" in its name or not.
EDITORIAL: H Debate may be far from finished
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